NOWADAYS, EVERYONE from business users to home users to students wants a high-speed Internet connection. Unfortunately, many buildings cannot receive fat pipes. Some are too old, too large, or too full of impenetrable concrete and dangerous asbestos for property owners to consider pulling wires through the walls.

Granted, most commercial buildings are already wired for broadband access. But service providers have historically bypassed hotels, hospitals, and large structures such as factories and college campuses, all due to a perceived lack of revenue. With the broadband revolution now in full swing, those building managers face sky-high cost barriers to providing fast Internet access.

Enter in-building Ethernet technology, which promises to bring broadband to places it could never go before. By sending data via existing voice-grade lines, in-building Ethernet obviates the need for rewiring. The technology can reach far enough to service widely dispersed buildings, such as factory sites.

"This technology lets us buy an infrastructure, rather than build our own," notes Jim Thompson, CTO of Wayport, an ISP that services hotels, airports, and conference centers. "Now we can supply a true LAN-speed connection to any room in the world."

For Wayport's clients, rewiring buildings is often a painful option. Installing a data line in a hotel usually means shutting down entire floors, which obviously means lost revenue, and the cost hovers at approximately $350 per room, mostly for labor. By comparison, in-building Ethernet "is a good economic transaction," according to Thompson. "It lets us march on with more services."

Wayport is currently testing Cisco Systems' new LRE (Long-Reach Ethernet) technology. The LRE system consists of a set of devices: a switch, CPE (customer premises equipment) device, and POTS (plain old telephone service) splitter. LRE promises to deliver high-speed connectivity to multiunit buildings using existing voice-grade lines, all for a mere $400 per port.

When LRE becomes available in April, customers can purchase speeds of either 5-, 10-, or 15Mbps using any grade of wire, regardless of whether it is structured or unstructured, dedicated to data or responsible for carrying voice traffic. Similarly, Telco Systems' EdgeLink V24S switch provides a 10Mbps connection. Extreme Networks' VDSL (very high bit-rate DSL) and T1 technologies offer features that allow providers to incrementally distribute bandwidth where needed.

The result: more broadband in more places. "Building managers want to use the same infrastructure they already have, and 90 percent of the world is wired for voice, not data. We're trying to take a 20th-century infrastructure and provision 21st-century services," says Shah Talukder, marketing director for Cisco's burgeoning in-building broadband group.

Furthermore, the new breed of in-building Ethernet solutions can cover plenty of ground. Cisco claims that its technology can send data as far as 5,000 feet, an attractive option for large buildings and dispersed environments where digging trenches to lay fiber cable is not financially feasible.

The same cost savings will be extended to ISPs, which under normal circumstances must worry about the costs of deployment, installation, and site service provisioning.

Where will in-building Ethernet be deployed? One obvvious market is the hospitality industry. "Two-thirds of the hotels in America don't have rated network cable in the walls," Wayport's Thompson says. "Some were built before the advent of 10Base-T networking. Some were built afterward, but nobody was thinking that someday they were going to have to put the Internet in all of those rooms."

To that end, Cisco will also be rolling out its optional BBSM (Building Broadband Service Manager) management software, which the company hopes will "let service providers make a business out of LRE," according to Ben Gibson, LRE senior product manager. BBSM will be targeted mainly at the hospitality industry. The package allows network managers to customize the services they provide to each guest, to establish portals for local content, and to integrate each guest's Web charges with standard hotel billing systems.

Many analysts agree that the MTU (multiple tenant unit) broadband market is ready to explode. A recent Cahners In-Stat report suggests that sales of broadband equipment and services to MTUs will rise from $370 million in 2000 to $4.8 billion by 2004.

Ron Westfall, an analyst at research firm Current Analysis, says in-building broadband is likely to benefit smaller buildings, which make up the great majority of structures. "The real growth in this market isn't the tall, shiny buildings in Manhattan, but the two-story buildings in Omaha," Westfall predicts.

» posted by ITworld staff

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