The telecom industry’s annual foundational event, Mobile World Congress, took place in Barcelona this week. Ethernity was there, as we are every year, promoting our products and solutions to OEMs, system integrators, and operators, and taking meetings with various potential partners and customers.
The following is a summary of this year’s experience, with some notes on the feedback we received from the industry moguls.
Wireless Bonding
There was a lot of excitement regarding Ethernity’s unique link bonding technology from the people we spoke to, especially among companies that are featuring dual-band (both e-band and microwave) on their radio towers. In fact, one potential customer went so far as to call Ethernity’s technology “a no-brainer” in such circumstances, since LAG cannot provide a comparable solution.
PON
Fiber is really a hot topic in the industry right now, with companies all searching for ways to make these deployments more efficient. As such, Ethernity was conducting meetings from many different angles throughout the show. One company was interested in using our new UEP3808 OLT to provide both XGS-PON and CPON from a single appliance. Another especially large company was excited to hear about all our PON devices and eager to see how we can enhance their existing product line by incorporating our technology with their own.
Perhaps most encouraging was the reaction to the previews we provided to our forthcoming new PON solution. One potential customer saw an immediate opportunity for the solutions for implementation in dense population areas and could anticipate a large market for it in his home country in Asia.
5G User Plane Offload
While Ethernity is concentrating on maximizing its short- and medium-term revenues via the Bonding and PON lines of business, we are still in discussions with companies that are seeking a 5G UPF offload or RU aggregation with vRouter and CU offload solution.
Overall, MWC was really a confirmation that our bonding technology and PON products are truly something special that should have some serious uptake with potential customers over the near and mid-term future.
This week, Ethernity announced the newest of its PON devices, leveraging the power and flexibility of FPGAs for use in PON networks.
The UEP3808 Combo PON OLT appliance has an integrated switch and can be used as a complete PON OLT, offering open interfaces for all control and management functions. By incorporating up to 4 FPGAs within a single box, it provides incredible agility of interfaces, enabling the use of XGS-PON, CPON, and GPON from a single unit. Incredibly, this is all accomplished from the same hardware design, just using pin-compatible FPGAs of various sizes and capabilities. And as with all Ethernity products, the UEP3808 also provides hardware acceleration of the data plane with advanced traffic management and high quality of service, creating a lower cost option compared to products based on merchant silicon.
Accompanying this announcement, you can now find a product page on our website for all of Ethernity’s current PON Devices. This new section features both appliances and Systems-on-Chip (SoCs) that integrate PON functionality onto an FPGA, providing high performance and the programmability to address the ever-changing demands of an evolving market.
One of the key added values of our PON devices is disaggregation. A vendor-agnostic, disaggregated solution means that PON providers can avoid vendor lock-in, which could restrict their ability to develop and integrate software at will. This approach allows telecom service providers to pace their own developments and extend them to their access networks without waiting for lengthy standardizations by international entities or for the vendor to fit new customized or proprietary feature requests into tight software roadmaps.
As always, Ethernity Networks is staying ahead of the curve when it comes to offering valuable FPGA-based products for our customers.
