Cisco Systems has announced a new technology - Long Range Ethernet (LRE) - designed to utilise existing telephone lines to offer broadband networking capabilities in buildings without existing networking infrastructure.
Cisco has released a host of products to support LRE, including the Cisco Catalyst LRE switches, which deliver between 5Mbps and 15Mbps. The Cisco LRE Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) device and the LRE POTS (plain old telephone service) splitter enables the co-existence of voice and data on the same line.
"The potential opportunities locked within existing multi-unit buildings has always been just out of reach," comments Jonas Bogoshi, SME sales manager at Cisco Systems Southern Africa.
"While there are thousands of potential dwellers, guests and mobile workers eager for high bandwidth Internet and multimedia services in their office complexes, apartments and hotels, delivering these services has been a costly and sometimes impossible proposition."
Cisco says LRE is relatively inexpensive when compared to other broadband options like xDSL and cable. The company says that LRE will co-exist with POTS, ISDN or advanced PABX services over the same pair of copper lines, by employing a system called frequency division duplexing (FDD) to separate the up- and down-stream channel from other signal services on the wire.
Category 1, 2, or 3 wires can be used, and LRE can reach distances of up to 5 000 feet. LRE provides an extension to the IEEE 802.3-compliant Ethernet standard network, although LRE is not a standard yet.
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