PacketFront's ADSL solution - the only one that provides true freedom of choice

Broadband has made considerable inroads in Växjö - these days one of Sweden's most attractive IT towns. But as they say, appetite grows by what it feeds on, and the council has now decided to take its IT position one step further.

"We've decided to base the coming expansion phase on PacketFront's ADSL solution," says Eric Åkerlund, divisional manager at VEAB, Växjö's municipal power company. "You see, we know from before that their products deliver what they promise."

Växjö is a communication center in the south of Sweden where 1.2 million people can be reached within a radius of 100 km. The business climate in the region is very favorable, the university is growing, and the mix of companies in the staple industries and those with a high-tech profile makes an exciting platform for further growth and economic optimism.

In recent years, Växjö has made its name as one of Sweden's most attractive IT towns with a highly developed, fiber-optic broadband network - WexNet - operated by the municipal power company, VEAB. Following a council resolution, WexNet is now to be expanded to incorporate many more households, companies, etc. than it currently has. The network enables extremely high-level data and telecommunication, and encompasses not only Växjö but also nearby Alvesta. A large number of towns are waiting in line to be hooked up.

From a techncal point of view, the Växjö urban network has so far been built as a "traditional" urban network. VEAB has leased black fiber, run cables linking apartment blocks to the LAN, hooked up housing estates with fiber connections, etc. What's new is that the ones that cannot be reached with these technologies can now be offered ADSL - which works, as we know, in sparsely populated areas as well.

"We were commissioned by the council last summer to add ADSL to WexNet to give a full 85% of the local residents broadband within three years," says Åkerlund. "So far only 30 per cent have had access to broadband, so we're talking a major extension."

	Eric Åkerlund Divisional Manager

The ADSL project has prompted Åkerlund and his team to hunt out technical solutions that provide a more open network than has previously been available. Operator neutrality might well be a buzzword in the urban network world these days, but everyone interprets it from their own perspective.
"For us, operator neutrality means that the end customer has genuine freedom of choice in terms of both operator and service. And currently PacketFront is the only company that can deliver such freedom. That's why they're our natural choice of supplier."

WexNet has already been piloting PacketFront's BECS™ control and provisioning system and its SPECS control system for service providers, and know that the company's products deliver what they promise.

"We've got practical experience of their solutions," says Åkerlund. "We know that PacketFront thinks exactly along the right lines when developing new products, and that goes for ADSL too. This is why its ADSL solution is also the natural choice for us now that we need to strengthen our network."

PacketFront's ADSL solution has the same functions as all the company's other solutions, and so differs radically from traditional ADSL. The BECS™ system enables the operators to build and run a fully automated ADSL network with auto-provisioning, auto-registration, etc.

"And exactly like with all our products, end-users can choose their own operators and service providers," says PacketFront's Peter Löfling.