Lots of talk in the press recently on EFM (Ethernet First Mile) and thought it was worth a comment. What gets me is the fact that so many businesses in our industry see it as a new wonder product that will solve customers’ problems and deliver super fast connectivity over the existing copper infrastructure. From my perspective however it doesn’t seem to stretch the technology far enough to make the investment and move to it worthwhile.
Although the premise behind EFM is to bring ethernet protocols down to each site, the actual delivery in copper form, is still SDSL (albeit the .bis variant) and VDSL technologies. Therefore the product is still reliant on multiple copper pairs and very much subject to line length from the exchange or street cabinet. So from a technical perspective clients can get very much the same solution already using the PureFluid platform. The system is like EFM in that it bonds multiple copper pairs but differently it offers true carrier resilience as each copper pair can be provided by a different carrier. And where EFM will be built on one type of technology such as VDSL, PureFluid can bond different types of lines together such as ADSL2+ and SDSL delivering unique benefits.
However the biggest benefit is the technology is tried and tested and available nationally. With this, service can be achieved at 60 Mb/s making all but the very fastest EFM products redundant.
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