Multi-Tenant Units (MTUs) Present New Opportunities for Service Providers

RAD Offers MTU Solutions for a Wide Range of Building Infrastructures and Service Models

An emerging market for bundled services is multi-tenant building units (MTUs). In the U.S., a new breed of service provider (building local exchange carrier, or BLEC) has emerged in the last few years to serve this client base of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that reside in office buildings. This market niche offers a good business opportunity in Europe and Asia as well, where the concept is starting to take hold.

In the MTU model, the service provider runs only one line between the building and the central office. This is an example of a building with DSL services.

Multi-tenant buildings are wired by the landlord or service provider to offer broadband services to each suite over fiber or copper lines. All transmissions are concentrated in one aggregating device, usually placed in the basement or on the roof, which sends voice and data traffic to the service provider’s central office over a single, large, fast pipe. This is much more cost-effective than running a separate line for each customer. The MTU presents the service provider with a large customer base that requires very little overhead, since all customers are located at the same site. The MTU model enables the service provider to add new customers and introduce new service offerings very quickly.

SMEs benefit from the arrangement by receiving bundled services, including, for example, always-on Internet access and low cost voice services. They receive additional value-added services that they require, including Web hosting, application hosting, e-commerce, intranet, extranet and video services. One-stop shopping and unified billing also appeal to business customers.

There are several service models tailored to MTUs. One model is to bundle traffic at the customer premises. In this case, the customer’s ISDN or POTS lines, along with the corporate LAN, are connected to an integrated access device (IAD), which transports the combined traffic to service provider aggregating equipment. In another model, voice and data traffic run separately to a multiservice access concentrator, also located in the basement or on the roof.

RAD offers specially engineered access devices for MTU service providers. These devices range from IADs supporting voice and data over DSL technologies, multiservice concentrators over ATM, multiservice concentrators over SDH and voice and data access over IP/Ethernet using new TDM over IP (TDMoIP) technology.