Actelis Networks is charting a path of steady growth in the Carrier Ethernet space, announcing today that it is introducing a new switch, has signed a new customer and is bringing an industry veteran on board to expand operations.

The Actelis ML 640 creates an intelligent, standards-based Ethernet device at the access edge, enabling more flexible provisioning of Ethernet services, better traffic management and improved operations efficiency, said Mehmet Balos, chief marketing officer and president of the Americas for Actelis.

The company, which announced a $22 million funding round in January, also is bringing industry veteran Dennis Young on board as chief operations officer to expand its operating capacity.

“Since Carrier Ethernet over copper is growing exponentially, our momentum is continuing,” Balos said. “We are bringing Dennis on board to support global expansion from not only from sales and marketing standpoint but from an operations standpoint as well, so we can deliver product on time, in quantity.”

Young previously worked at PairGain, and at ADC Telecommunications following its acquisition of PairGain, and most recently at Entrisphere.

As part of its growth, Actelis also is announcing this week that InfoHighway, a New York-based CLEC, will use Actelis gear to power its Zoom Ethernet service.

“They have been offering the service at up to 100 Megabits with fiber and now with copper, they are going up to 20 Meg,” said Craig Easley, vice president of marketing at Actelis. “InfoHighway has about 230 [collocation spots] in the Northeast corridor. Their major market is New York-Manhattan and vicinity.”

With its ML 640, Actelis is pioneering use of Ethernet switching at the customer premises using copper access, Balos said, and building on Metro Ethernet Forum standards to do so.

“As service providers are turning up more subscribers and wanting to attach more than one customer to their CPE, they demanded more intelligence at the edge so they could guarantee SLAs [service level agreements] for each customer,” he said. “What we have done with the ML640 is added an extra layer of Ethernet switching intelligence. That gives a service provider more control and flexibility, using Ethernet virtual circuits (EVC), over how traffic is controlled and provides intelligent traffic management. You can get very granular in terms of using one port and carving up bandwidth per customer and within that customer’s profile, per service.”

Each customer is represented by an EVC and each service within that EVC has a designated Class of Service for prioritizing traffic. Unused bandwidth can be shared not only between services of one customer but also between customers on a single port, enabling more efficient use of all available bandwidth. The ML 640 supports both a guaranteed Committed Information Rate per service and the creation of an Excess Information Rate or EIR, Easley said, and it supports standard operations and maintenance capabilities at the edge as well. Service providers can overprovision EIR services and create CIR services that sell at a premium.

“This creates an intelligent Ethernet access edge, so you can make decisions before the traffic goes onto the skinny link up to the CO,” he said. “You don’t just forward everything to the CEO and sort it out there. This starts to look less like a DSL modem and more like an Ethernet switch.”

Actelis is using MEF standards, but “we’re on the cutting edge of doing that,” Easley said, and so is offering service provisioning wizards and service templates to enable faster service creation.