By Craig Clausen and Ed Gubbins

With Verizon rolling out 150 megabit-per-second broadband service and 4G wireless service on the march, the notion of broadband over copper wires might seem dated or lackluster. But for telecom service providers targeting small businesses, copper – and in particular, copper-based mid-band Ethernet services – continues to shape up as a sustained opportunity.

Yes, fiber is faster, and therefore perhaps sexier, than copper. But fiber is available to less than 20% of today’s small businesses, and deploying it isn’t cheap – a consideration that can’t be taken lightly in an anemic economy or amid a customer base notorious for pinching pennies. But set that point aside.

Large enterprises require high- bandwidth services at the Fast

Chart 1: Percentage of Commercial Buildings Served By Access Medium

Ethernet (100 Mbps) level and above to create wide area networks for file sharing and application access, as well as to carry voice (as VoIP) and web conferencing traffic. Their complex systems also make extensive use of remote storage and mirrored backup for data recovery purposes, which necessitates the use of enormous point-to-point pipes. In contrast, small business users are mostly interested in plain-vanilla always-on Internet access —it’s just that, more and more frequently, they need more bandwidth but do not want to pay the incremental cost for a second (or perhaps more) T1. And in this arena, Ethernet over

With T1 access over copper, throughput is a standard 1.5 Mbps per T1, whereas EoCu bandwidth using the same physical medium can deliver upwards of 40 Mbps—simply by means of a different access technology. While this is far less than the Gbps-range capability of a fiber strand, copper facilities are also ubiquitously available. EoCu allows SMBs that are “off-net” to tap into bandwidth speeds of up to 45 Mbps. And carriers are increasingly willing to deploy direct access EoCu solutions to SMB sites as a bridge to a time when more fiber might be available.