On Tue, October 23, 2007 2:55 am, Leo Bicknell wrote:

3) Is there any chance US providers could offer similar technologies at similar prices, or are there significant differences (regulation, distance etc) that prevent it from being viable?

For the UK (and NL), on the tech side we're seeing some success with EFM on copper, in this particular case on an Actelis platform. It's a new unit in the CO, from 1-8 pairs from the CO to the customer premises, up to a total bandwidth across all pairs of 40Mb/s in each direction. (Admittedly 40Mb/s is 8 pairs at something like 1km from the exchange, but I'm seeing some useful 6-10M symmetric services on 4 or so pairs). Upstream from the CO box is FE or GE, either a VLAN or multiple double-tagged VLANs per customer, so if you want to offer uncontended, you just have to get enough backhaul from the CO to cope with all your customers. This is still running in the tromboning, everything-is-backhauled model, but there's no technical reason why you couldn't put a switch or router in the CO to keep local traffic local. (I'm mostly using this for VPN access circuits, so there's rarely traffic between sites on the same CO, but if you were rolling it out large-scale for Internet, it might make sense). It *is* nice though in that Ethernet frames go in, Ethernet frames come out - no need for fancy router interfaces, nasty PPPoSomething nonsense, or anything similar - it looks to the networking equipment on both ends like a long piece of Cat5. How you market "less downstream, more upstream" to customers (assuming you're getting more like the 10M symmetric, not 40M), and how you make all this happen for $40, I'm not so sure... Regards, Tim.