With network upgrades accelerating in the rural telecom market, being on the list of approved vendors by the Rural Utilities Service has never been more important. This week, Hatteras Networks announced that its Mid-Band Ethernet products have made the list thanks to deployments at Farmers Telephone Cooperative, Atlantic Telephone Membership Cooperative and Home Telephone Co.

This means Hatteras’ HN4000 and HN400 Ethernet-over-copper service solutions, have earned technical acceptance from the USDA’s RUS division and will be included on its list of materials available to telcos seeking RUS financing. RUS provides technical guidance and financial assistance to utilities, including telcos, looking for help in construction, procurement of equipment, and enhancements to their networks.

Mid-Band Ethernet solutions are designed to help service providers bring Ethernet bandwidth and services using existing copper facilities to communities and businesses. By combining existing copper pairs, Hatteras enables 1.5 Mb/s to 45 Mb/s bandwidth that can be used for Ethernet private line, transparent LAN services, voice over IP, direct Internet access and virtual private networks.

Gary Bolton, vice president of marketing and product management for Hatteras, said that in the U.S., about 1 million businesses will migrate to mid-band (or metro) Ethernet over next five years, which makes this a pretty significant market.

Hatteras’ mission, Bolton said, is to push the metro Ethernet cloud closer to businesses and enable Ethernet services for businesses not served by fiber. He puts those businesses at about 88%.

In addition to Farmers Telephone Cooperative in Kingstree, S.C., and Home Telephone Co. in Moncks Corner, S.C., which were announced today, Hatteras also has an implementation at BellSouth and what it says is a nationwide rollout with XO Communications and others in Europe.

Bolton said the growing list of RUS approved vendors is good for rural telcos. “It’s a huge benefit because they qualify for RUS financing for equipment they want to buy rather than something they are forced to buy just because they can get financing for it,” he said.

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