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The Innovation of Long-Reach Ethernet

Hugh Barrass Discusses How Cisco Is Enabling High-Speed Performance Over Existing Wiring
December 27, 2001

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Charlie Giancarlo Demonstrates LRE Technology

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Thanks to a new innovation by Cisco Systems, things like high-speed Internet access, video streaming and IP Telephony are going places they previously couldn't. Hugh Barrass, Technical Leader, and his team of engineers at Cisco created the Cisco Long-Reach Ethernet (LRE) broadband networking solution—the industry's first end-to-end product line for delivering 5-15 Mbps performance over existing Category 1/2/3 wiring. With Ethernet-like performance that reaches up to 5,000 feet, LRE enables simultaneous voice, video and data applications without the need to rewire.

"If you consider the fact that most buildings are wired for voice not data, the market opportunity for LRE is quite vast" said Barrass. "By offering Ethernet-like speeds over regular phone wire, at reaches up to 5,000 feet, and co-existing with phone traffic, LRE brings rich, advanced services such as next generation video-on-demand to places it has not gone before."

For older buildings that are not wired for Ethernet, LRE presents enormous opportunity. Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users. "This means much faster Internet access for users who still access the Internet at painfully slow dial-up speeds, which is highly frustrating and unproductive, since important email attachments often can take more than half an hour to download," said Barrass. "Not only will these applications make subscriber buildings more attractive to their respective guests, they also represent a potentially new source of revenue to both the service provider and the building owner."

Now is the time to deploy LRE so that as business travel increases, hotels are well poised to provide business travelers with high-speed Internet access. Professionals want to be as productive on the road as they are in the office. In the near future, broadband access will cease being a perk and become a requirement for business travelers, office tenants and apartment residents alike. Cisco LRE gives customers a jump-start.

Cisco's new technology offers a number of advantages. First, LRE is easy to deploy and manage. Second, LRE is inexpensive. Third, it offers enough bandwidth for service providers to offer value-added services such as video-on-demand and VoIP. Cisco LRE opens the door for service providers to address a largely untapped, captive audience of millions of potential customers, making its invention equally beneficial to Cisco and its customers.

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