Aktino announced this week that Matanuska Telephone Association, a 60,000-access line Alaskan telco, has deployed its AK3000 platform as part of an effort to increase capacity to various wireless tower sites.

The deployment allows MTA to more than double the amount of traffic it can handle without buying new copper or fiber. With it fully deployed, the carrier now can deliver full and fractional DS-3 to a majority of the cell sites in its footprint and to its business customers served by copper.

“MTS typically has 12 pairs running to their cell sites, which gives you enough to have six T-1s,” said Hamid Lalani, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Aktino. “We can make that into 28 T-1s.”

In the case of MTA, the company is using the Aktino gear to deliver a full DS-3 plus an additional 14 HDSL2 distributors.

The contract also is indicative of the increased interest wireless carriers--and the wireline carriers that serve them--have in increasing capacity to cell sites, Lalani said. Originally, the vendor thought its greatest application would be with large carriers wanting to extend Ethernet services to areas with out fiber. However, with the addition of new wireless data services, the traffic volumes coming from cell sites have greatly increased.

“This has become by far our biggest application,” Lalani said. “The RBOCs are still not fully ready to embrace Ethernet over copper for a number of reasons. But if you can give them a cheaper way of doing something, that becomes a very attractive offer.”