Vendors pitch plans for MTU buildouts

by David Rohde

March 7, 2001 —

Two vendors are trying to add juice to the broadband multitenant unit market -- one with a break from a past pure optical play; the other with a combo offer of gear for common wiring closets and tenant office suites.

Passive optical network (PON) vendor Quantum Bridge is planning an intermediate switch platform for MTU sites called QB3000 Optical Access Switch.

The compact, seven-slot device is meant to fit between Quantum Bridge's flagship QB5000 for carrier locations and Intelligent Optical Terminal (IOT) for customer sites, which trade optical streams in a fiber-to-the-curb or "passive optical" setup.

The QB3000 supports the same OC-3 and OC-12 service modules as the larger chassis -- with the cards turned on their sides -- but adds generic Ethernet and T-1 interfaces. The idea is to provide local or metro Ethernet connections for data and T-1s for PBXs, says Jay Dix, Quantum Bridge's director of product marketing.

The QB3000 can also substitute for the QB5000 in smaller carrier points of presence (POP) or collocation sites. Alternatively, even while sitting in an MTU common wiring closet, the QB3000 can serve as a "virtual POP" extending the PON to nearby buildings outfitted with the IOT.

Quantum Bridge has been selling to telecom and cable carriers going after office parks as well as the multitenant residential market, but the vendor's pure PON platform limited its appeal, says Aberdeen Group analyst Andy McCormick. "In the business market, they like dedicated circuits," he says.

A newer start-up, Connecticut firm Kenetec, has its own take on the MTU market, noting that most vendors for MTU common wiring closets aren't the same ones supplying tenants with integrated access devices. So Kenetec has introduced a coordinated family of switching equipment that creates what it dubs a "Services-oriented Building Area Network," or SBAN.

Kenetec's family begins with the Edge Xpress 1000 Service Access Unit, which provides a combination of plain old telephone service telephony, voice over IP or voice over ATM, plus 100M bit/data access. That connects with the EdgeXpress 5000 Series Service Exchange Platform -- a family of four-, eight- and 17-slot access aggregators with a range of NxT-1, T-3, OC-3 and wireless WAN interfaces. The two boxes together coordinate IP and ATM class-of-service tagging.

The EdgeXpress 1000 starts at $2,395 and the EdgeXpress 5000 at $28,995. Kenetec also offers the EdgeManager Service Provisioning System at $9,995.

Network World