Actelis Draws High-Profile Investors
[ftth: warning: the following is laced with my sarcasm below. If you want the sarcasm-free version, click here:
lightreading.com]
Actelis Networks last week announced it closed a $45 million third round of venture capital funding. Can the cash infusion help solve the woes in the broadband access space?
Actelis, of Fremont, Calif., says it can deliver 45-Mbit/s symmetrical bandwidth to multitenant office complexes over twisted-pair copper lines with reliability on par with fiber optics
[ftth: bull. It's the existing aged copper. And as you will see later, it takes *24* copper pairs]
but without the hassle of digging trenches and obtaining construction permits. What’s more, the company claims it can overcome the last-mile limitations of DSL technology
[ftth: FALSE. It cannot overcome them]
with the ability to extend its signal a longer distance.
[ftth: let's see...this makes about the 10th company to make such a claim in the past couple years]
Although its products are still in a test mode,
[ftth: so were all the others with the big claims, and none have panned out]
Actelis has impressed some high-profile investors.
[ftth: big deal. Given they are still in test mode, they impressed them with vapor and powerpoint presentations of their unproven claims]
The round that just closed adds $19 million to a $26 million round that the company announced as being closed in May. “We left the door open, and we did not anticipate such a high demand,” says CEO Yuval Baron.
Those chipping in for this presumably final increment were Anschutz Investment Co. (the founder and a major shareholder of Qwest Communications International Corp. (NYSE: Q - message board), Innovacom (France Telecom’s venture capital unit), SSB Capital Partners (Salomon Smith Barney’s merchant banking fund), Draper Fisher Jurvetson‘s MeVC Fund, and Vertex US. Earlier investors in the round were New Enterprise Associates, U.S. Venture Partners, Walden International Investment Group, Global Catalyst Partners, and Vertex Management.
The funding round brings Actelis’s funding total to $74 million. Baron does not anticipate needing any more private funding and expects to have an initial public offering in about two years when the company is profitable.
[ftth: yeah right. vapor forecasts of quick profitability based on nothing. They are waiting 2 years because the retail suckers wouldn't buy their IPO right now]
The technology, dubbed by the company as Spatial Division Multiplexing (SDM),
[ftth: a ten-dollar name for a ten-cent idea. Anyone can replicate this. Anyone.]
requires a box at the local carrier’s central office and one at the customer premises. One drawback of Actelis’s current product is that it requires 24 pairs of copper to deliver 45 Mbit/s bandwidth.
[ftth: ONE drawback???? And that's not even 2 Mb per pair]
Baron says the next generation will cut the number of pairs to 12.
[ftth: it still has the same distance-rate limitations as all existing copper in the ground]
But Actelis officials say that if a customer has fewer lines available, a smaller number of wires can be used to deliver proportionally less bandwidth.
[ftth: duh.]
And aside from the obvious advantages of not having to lay cable, they boast SDM has several pluses compared with running multiple DSL lines from a central office to the customer premises.
“The customer is getting a bigger pipe [ftth: same pipe they'd have with multiple DSL lines] and usually a more cost-effective [ftth: they have no established cost data so this is purely marketing hype] connection that is more reliable [ftth: again, hype],” says JDS Uniphase Inc. (Nasdaq: JDSU - message board; Toronto: JDU) chairman Marty Kaplan, who is also a member of Actelis’s board. [ftth: well isn't THAT special...an optical components supplier hyping copper...what's in it for you Mr Kaplan?] “There are also a whole lot more applications such as using this as a DSLAM back-haul facility or a DS3 pipe.”[ftth: a whole lot more??? I doubt he could name 3]
Baron claims the bit error rate of SDM is “fiber quality,” which is 10,000 times better than the bit error rate of ordinary copper.
[ftth: it's still the same old aged copper. This is such a farce to make these "fiber-like" claims. They must have huge error correcting overhead to meet those claims, which eats into the REAL data thruput. They will never disclose this of course.]
Because of this, he claims, near error-free connections can be made over poor quality copper to older buildings, and SDM can deliver high quality to 18,000 feet [ftth: way to weasel out of an explicit rate claim at 18,000 feet] from the central office vs. 12,000 to 15,000 for existing copper loop infrastructure.
While Baron claims his technology will cost carriers only about a quarter of what they pay for fiber installation
[ftth: again, any cost reduction claims have zero basis in fact. It's still a science project.]
, others question how much of a bargain it will be. “This is not likely to be very cheap,” says Jim Lawrence, program director of convergence strategies and network architectures at Stratecast Partners. “But this is important to have a bit error rate competitive with Sonet.”
North Pittsburgh Telephone Co. just completed a trial of Actelis’s first products, which have yet to be named, and was able to deploy them in six hours. Baron says another carrier is currently in trials under a non-disclosure agreement. He expects to launch the products commercially in the fourth quarter and enter the European market in late 2002 and Asia in 2003. [ftth: better hurry!!! the window where a few gullible people will even listen to copper improvement claims is shrinking!!]
Perhaps Actelis’s biggest bragging point is a claim to be able to increase bandwidth to 155 Mbit/s in another year and 300 Mbit/s in 2004, thanks to the likelihood of improved circuitry and algorithms. [ftth: oh jeez, this is unbelievable! These "high-profile investors" just believe this without justification?? Claude Shannon says no way. Claude has never been wrong. I have a different phrase for it instead of "bragging point."]
If this goal is achievable, it will be the fruit of several years’ effort for Actelis, which was founded by Kamran Elahian in 1998 and has since grown to 100 employees. Elahian also founded Cirrus Logic, Centillium, NeoMagic, and other Silicon Valley companies.
“It took a number of years to create all the algorithms,” says John Metz, executive vice president of Sterling Research. “If it does what they say it will do, Actelis can go to service providers with an alternate solution that will be less costly to them and their customers.” [ftth: oh there's a bold statement: If it does what they say it does, it will be wonderful.]
- Tom Davey, special to Light Reading
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