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Like forgotten middle children, millions of distributed enterprise branch office sites, as well as small businesses, languish invisibly between the two beloved objects of emerging fiber access ardor: the large enterprise and the triple-play broadband residence.

Geographically disparate enterprise and government offices, as well as many in the small and medium business (SMB) space urgently want to participate in the rapid evolution of large enterprise IT practices and applications. Demand for greater WAN bandwidth is no longer the province of the Fortune 500 headquarters site, as data backup, distributed enterprise file sharing, VoIP and even IP video conferencing become productivity enhancing musts. Sadly, supply of such bandwidth has remained out of reach for the lowly remote office.

Local communications service providers certainly have sought to better serve the substantial and sophisticated branch office and SMB markets, primarily via bandwidth-limited T1 (1.5 Mb/s) and distance-limited DSL access services.

In the optical realm, however, businesses continue to find that even the cost and productivity advantages of emerging wide-area Ethernet services cannot justify fiber connections for branch offices and other remote sites. Nor are accelerated deployments of fiber to the premises (FTTP) and fiber to the curb (FTTC) access infrastructures aimed at business, but rather almost purely at residential triple-play customers and a slim segment of small office/home office subscribers.

In short, although the business market is clearly sold on the benefits of greater bandwidth and service convergence, neither FTTx or Ethernet deployments will bring these underserved markets inside the warm glow of broadband access any time soon. Only a minority of businesses can afford a sudden leap to either optical access or to Ethernet-only access that requires forklift changes in equipment and training.

Happily, solutions to both problems--bandwidth expansion and a path to converged services on the customer’s own timetable--are available, standards-based, affordable and adapt existing network infrastructure to do far more.

Traditional copper access provides insufficient bandwidth for current business needs, yet optical access deployment costs are prohibitive. However, there is a middle path between fiber and T1 that can multiply traditional copper access capacity and greatly enlarge the local carriers’ addressable business market.

Circuit bonding provides an immediate bandwidth boost from T1 to the 3- to 5-Mb/s range. The International Telecommunications Union recognized the market void begging for such a solution when it ratified the G.7043/Y.1343 Virtual Concatenation of PDH Signals standard in 2004. Also known as circuit bonding, this standard allows the creation of a single high-bandwidth virtual pipe from individual, lower-speed circuits bonded together.

Circuit bonding boasts several substantive advantages. It leverages copper access infrastructure that is virtually ubiquitous. It also leverages the fact that the T1 remains the workhorse of business WAN access. Even where fiber is available, many customers don’t need 100 Mb/s bandwidth, and today most fiber-connected enterprises still operate frame relay and fractional frame services.

Unlike DSL or DSL bonding, circuit bonding also faces no distance limits--whether 1000 feet or 100 miles--nor does it rely on the uncertain availability of DSL access multiplexing (DSLAM) equipment. Further, it leverages existing technical staff know-how and training, as all the telecommunications carriers are experts at deploying and managing copper TDM circuits.

Circuit bonding builds on these strengths to create additional value from the access network already in the ground when trying to serve growing capacity demands.

The carrier that requires a new fiber deployment to provide 3 Mb/s to 5 Mb/s access to remote enterprise or SMB locations will find it impossible to make either the investment or the pricing work. Factoring in the painful costs of trenching and pulling fiber, as well as the high cost of optical access equipment will break the business model before the ink is dry.

By contrast, the carrier employing circuit bonding can offer a turbo-charged T1 service at as little as one-tenth the cost of fiber solutions, with bandwidth sized exactly to the requirements of the location. Such a service will stand out in the crowd to these bandwidth-hungry but budget-constrained customers.

Ethernet WAN services are rightly all the rage for their power to converge services over a unified network. However, Ethernet-only WAN services force customers to throw out functioning legacy equipment and services such as Frame Relay, TDM voice or Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM). From the service provider’s point of view, it can be bad business to impose such revolutionary timetables on customers. Instead they should allow their customers to migrate at a speed that matches both their schedules.

To solve this dilemma, service providers can offer Ethernet services while supporting legacy TDM, frame and ATM simultaneously over a full range of copper and fiber connections, from 1.5 Mb/s to 1 Gb/s.

Circuit bonding access transport solutions can accomplish this. As service provider edge devices, they aggregate any and all enterprise services for transport over the core network. This any-to-any architecture affords the customer discretion over how and when to retire legacy services and migrate to advanced services like Ethernet.

The carrier employing circuit bonding can use any combination of existing copper, existing fiber and future fiber to capture enterprises of every size with a full suite of TDM, frame relay and ATM, as well as Ethernet- and IP-based Internet access, data backup, or VoIP services--today and into the all-optical future.

For the service provider, the circuit bonding and universal service transport lowers infrastructure costs while generating immediate revenue, thereby breaking down the barriers to entry into the broadband and converged services realms. The carrier that captures underserved business customers today with solutions they can use, and afford, will gain pole position for the long run.

Jim Tindall is Vice President of Product Marketing at Ceterus Networks.

Visit Ceterus Networks online.