Posted: 31st Aug, 2011 By: MarkJ

Business internet provider Timico UK has claimed that sales of traditional ADSL based broadband services are rapidly being outstripped by the
53% growth rate of
Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) products. EFM is a copper-line based
Ethernet service that delivers symmetric connection speeds of up to 10Mbps (at less than 3km from your local BT telephone exchange).
According to Timico's CTO,
Trefor Davies, business adoption of EFM is taking off because it's regarded as being
more reliable than ADSL and offers
symmetric speeds (uploads run just as fast as downloads); this makes it especially useful for businesses and
Cloud based applications.
Timico's CTO, Trefor Davies, said:
"With cloud services the upload speed, long ignored as secondary by the ISP community, is becoming a critical factor. At Timico our ADSL sales into the business sector are still increasing but at nowhere near the rate of Ethernet. Although an Ethernet circuit is of much higher value than an ADSL (or FTTC) line the number of lines is growing nicely. The first 8 months of this year have seen an increase in Ethernet in the First Mile (EFM) activity levels of 53% over the same period in 2010.
This is happening for a number of reasons. Firstly EFM is more reliable than ADSL and carries a Service Level Agreement. Secondly is the symmetrical performance – EFM can have up to 10Mbps upload as well as download. This combination is important because companies are increasingly using resources in the cloud as part of the day to day running of their business and many of these online resources, such as VoIP, are mission critical.
Large businesses have been using Ethernet for years – they were traditionally the only ones that could afford the cost. They also have the distributed systems and resources that requires the reliability and speed. Now SMBs are moving into the cloud – 48% of those in the UK according to VMware."
EFM typically bundles
multiple copper pairs from the exchange, which is what helps it to attain the stated bandwidth throughput. Better yet the service will rate adjust to a lower speed if one of those pairs fails, which is much more reliable than a complete loss of connectivity. Timico's own EFM solution first launched in July 2009.
Admittedly EFM's shelf life could eventually be overtaken by the growing coverage of superfast broadband technologies, such as FTTC from BT, although for the time being their coverage and thus availability is a significant limitation. By contrast EFM can already "
cover a fairly high proportion of UK businesses" (around 80% of the country, depending upon the operator).