Spectrotel Inc., a New Jersey-based CLEC with a nationwide footprint, has launched a new business connectivity offering available through channel partners: Ethernet over Fiber (EoF).
Building upon the fiber Ethernet private line (EPL) and transparent LAN services that it introduced in February, Spectrotel is adding EoF to meet the growing demand for Ethernet services.
When it comes to business connectivity, Ethernet’s central driver continues to be its ability to meet growing bandwidth demands at lower cost and with greater flexibility than competing legacy services like T1s. Applications vary from wireless backhaul and basic Internet connections to delivering enterprise applications and providing access to cloud infrastructure.
That translates into a big revenue opportunity for communications service providers (CSPs) and their channel partners. U.S. enterprises and small- and medium-sized businesses are expected to spend more than $47 billion over the next five years on Ethernet services provided by carriers, according to data from Insight Research. With metro-area and wide-area Ethernet services readily available from virtually all major data service providers, industry revenue is expected to grow from nearly $5 billion in 2012 to just over $11 billion by 2017. Insight projects a compounded annual revenue growth rate of 17 percent over the next five years, with growth slowing slightly by 2016 to be more in the range of 12 to 15 percent as TDM-to-Ethernet conversions are finalized within enterprises.
Spectrotel’s underlying metro area Ethernet providers collectively have more than 25,000 lit buildings globally. For businesses located within that footprint, Spectrotel can provide EoF at standard service speeds of 5 Mbps to 1 Gbps. For businesses not located in a lit building, Spectrotel can provide EoF service over the Access Fiber Network (AFN), which utilizes the LEC’s fiber-optic infrastructure to provide standard service speeds of 10, 50 and 100 Mbps and higher on an individual case basis. Spectrotel’s AFN is currently available in 13 LATAs on the U.S. East Coast.
“We continue to focus on broadening our product portfolio to include leading-edge IP solutions to meet our customers’ increasing demand for high-quality, high-bandwidth IP solutions today, and to provide the foundation for more sophisticated IP communications solutions of tomorrow,” said Ross Artale, COO at Spectrotel. “Ethernet over Fiber offers the ideal technology for building resilient enterprise networks due to its standardization and flexibility.”
