Mid-Band Ethernet

That's a great question! It's important to know the difference between Mid-Band Ethernet and these more traditional services, so that the benefits of this newer technology can be truly understood.

We'll first look at the comparison between Mid-Band Ethernet and ADSL. ADSL is a wonderful and incredibly popular residential service - it provides a great way to serve the needs of the residential user by maximizing downstream performance and limiting upstream performance. It's perfect for surfing the web and downloading music or games.

Unfortunately, that's not what most businesses need. I don't know about you, but in my business, our job is to create information - perform sales contacts, send presentations, emails, create white papers, transfer brochures, etc. Business need to be producers of data, not consumers of data. This means that the minimal upstream capacity of ADSL is generally insufficient for business applications. Mid-Band Ethernet is a symmetric technology, providing equal bandwidth in both the upstream and downstream directions, and is much more suited to the business environment.

When comparing to traditional T1/E1 services, the most important differentiators are bandwidth and cost. Mid-Band Ethernet can deliver over 7 times the bandwidth of a T1 over the same infrastructure. T1s come in a rigid 1.5 Mbps scale, while Mid-Band Ethernet can offer a variety of flexible bandwidths. Some carriers are offering Mid-Band Ethernet services beyond 40 Mbps, and in flexible increments from 2 Mbps and beyond! It is clear that existing T1 & E1 technologies cannot meet these flexible and growing bandwidth demands.

Another big difference is reliability. Mid-Band Ethernet, as described in an early Q&A here on "Ask the Expert", is much more reliable than traditional services such as ADSL. Reliability is another cornerstone of the business application, and another key differentiator from both ADSL and T1/E1 services.

One final key thing to remember is that Mid-Band Ethernet is Ethernet - it offers the efficiency, simplicity, and flexibility of Ethernet services. Mid-Band Ethernet is based on 2BASE-TL, an IEEE 802.3 Ethernet standard. Although one may be able to layer Ethernet on top of these other technologies, they are not offer native Ethernet services, and instead offer greater inefficiency and complexity by layering Ethernet on top of some other layer.

Mid-Band Ethernet solves the reliability issues that have plagued the deployment of traditional DSL and T1/E1 services. The access network has historically been the weakest link in the delivery of services - with 80-90% of service outages being directly related to problems in the access network.

Mid-Band Ethernet delivers a resilient business-class service by aggregating multiple copper lines into a single Ethernet interface. If there is a problem on one access line, the other lines will remain operational and continue to deliver service. The service reliability increases with each aggregated line. With many carriers bonding as many as eight pair to deliver a service, the reliability of Mid-Band Ethernet compared to traditional technologies can be increased by orders of magnitude.

You can compare the Mid-Band Ethernet approach with traditional DSL and T1/E1 pretty easily. In most cases, T1/E1 is delivered over two access lines, and if either line has a problem, the entire service is down.

Mid-Band Ethernet uses multiple access lines to increase reliability, not decrease reliability as in a T1/E1. With DSL, there is generally no resiliency - one line, one single point of failure. And when using technologies that are easily susceptible to variable noise like radios or electromagnetic interference, the situation can be very unstable.
Mid-Band Ethernet is more resilient to such outside plant noise.

And finally, Mid-Band Ethernet can be delivered with carrier grade equipment that focuses on SLAs for a quality experience for the enterprise customer. Mid-Band Ethernet is not residential DSL out of your every day Internet DSLAM. Mid-Band Ethernet needs to be delivered from carrier Ethernet equipment that is focused on QoS, reliability, services, and Ethernet service flexibility, so that the business customer receives the value and benefit of metro Ethernet - all without the expense of fiber deployment.

The simple answer is that Mid-Band Ethernet services are spectrally compatible with all other access technologies, in North America and internationally.

But spectral compatibility is a difficult subject; every region has its own spectral compatibility guidelines that must be followed. This means that the speed and performance of Mid-Band Ethernet, or any copper based technology, is geographically dependent.

In North America, for example, spectral compatibility is governed by T1.417. Mid-Band Ethernet has been shown to be spectrally compatible with T1.417 with rates as high as 5.7 Mbps per pair. But of course that 5.7 Mbps rate, and every rate, has a distance limitation dictated by T1.417. This produces a rate/reach curve that governs how fast Mid-Band Ethernet can run at each distance while remaining under the T1.417 guidelines.

The situation is similar in other countries, each with its own twist.
But Mid-Band Ethernet can be utilized in any geography as long as it is configured to use those local spectral guidelines.

Mid-Band Ethernet is in many cases the most spectrally friendly symmetric technology available. For example, it has been shown that in many cases Mid-Band Ethernet is more spectrally compatible with ADSL than ADSL2 or VDSL2.

But with spectral compatibility there are many cases to be examined, and many technologies to be compared and evaluated - far more than can be addressed in this limited response. I encourage any interested parties to download the "Mid-Band Ethernet Spectral Compatibility Handbook" from our website (http://www.hatterasnetworks.com/whitepapers.aspx) to read a more thorough discussion of the issue.