Amedia and Calix both announced today that they are expanding access platforms to include VDSL and fiber to the premises options, respectively.

By integrating new line cards into their existing DSLAM equivalents, both vendors are counting on the increased pressure for telcos to get into the video services market. Both vendors also have developed architectures that allow carriers to mix and match line cards, growing ultra high-speed services in very targeted areas.

For Amedia, which is integrating a VDSL card in its QoStream AS5000 aggregation switch, the move is aimed at largely the multi-dwelling unit market.

“We can run a fully symmetric 100 Mb/s up to 500 feet, which gets you up to about 30 floors in an MDU,” said Frank Galuppo, president and CEO or Amedia. “The people in the MDU will see no difference than someone would see at the end of a fiber. We’re pretty confident that this will give us a competitive differentiator to IP DSLAMs.”

The company also will offer up a VDSL2 solution after the standard is developed and approved by standards bodies, Galuppo said. Currently most VDSL-based networks are deployed by Asian carrier and a handful of independent telcos. However, the market opportunity is changing as more U.S. carriers look at fiber to the neighborhood architectures.

“Right now the market in the U.S. is becoming very interesting for VDSL,” said John Colton, vice president of Engineering for Amedia, noting that the technology’s upstream bandwidth versus ADSL2+ is becoming more attractive.

For Calix, the FTTP option comes in the form of a broadband passive optical network (BPON) optical line terminal line cards for its C7 platform.

“What is significant about this is that for a lot of service providers, historically the concept of building FTTP infrastructure is a major decision point,” said Kevin Walsh, vice president of marketing for Calix. “This removes a lot of risk. It’s not a whole new network.”

At its maximum capacity, the C7 can support 20 dual-port cards for a total of 40 BPON OLT ports driving 1280 ONTs in an 8-RU device. Additionally, up to five C7s can be housed in a single seven-foot equipment rack, yielding 200 OLT ports and 6000 ONTs per rack.

The company likely will begin offering a GPON version of the line card later this year, Walsh said, noting that C7’s backplane has a capacity of 200 Gb/s.

“We can support line cards up to 10 Gigabits per slot,” Walsh said. “You could see it for trunking first and even maybe for some business applications.”