Israeli company PowerDsine, which develops telecommunications products for the transmission of voice, data, and power over communications networks, announced yesterday that its Power over LAN technology had been recognized as an international standard. The Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) approved the standard, 802.3af-2003, which defines the specifications for delivering power over standard Ethernet cables.
PowerDsine has been a major contributor to the 802.3af Task Force, and participated in the Call for Interest in the 802.3 Working Group in 1999.
The company has been offering products complying with the draft standard for three years, and acts as an approving authority for communications network terminal equipment makers that seek to ensure that their products conform to the proposed standard. The company says that, to date, it has compliance tested over one hundred terminal devices, including most of the leading Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phones, wireless LAN access points, and security cameras, produced by companies such as Samsung, Nokia, Siemens, Alcatel, Nortel, 3Com, Ericsson, LG, and others.
"The standard ratification will add extra impetus to the current trend amongst silicon vendors to design chipsets for laptops and portables that require low power consumption below the 12.95W prescribed in the Power over Ethernet standard," said Amir Lehr, vice president, business development and strategic planning at PowerDsine. "As these devices become less power-hungry and Power over Ethernet becomes the standard in most corporate IT environments, there will no longer be a need for business people to carry a variety of different plugs when traveling. Instead the RJ45 jack will become the universal power jack. I confidently predict that in the next five years more than 75% of enterprise network devices will be able to be powered by Ethernet."
PowerDsine began the standard setting process in collaboration with Nortel. It realized that its chances of obtaining decisions independently were very low, and therefore decided to ally itself with a large company that would vote with it on technical matters. PowerDsine later found out that Nortel intended to develop a competing solution which was liable to minimize the share of the technology it had developed in the standard and damage its marketing advantage, and so it began to work with Lucent.
PowerDsine was founded in 1994. Its headquarters and R&D facilities are in Hod Hasharon, Israel. Its US subsidiary, PowerDsine, Inc., with an additional R&D center, is located in Farmingdale, New York. The company has so far raised $70 million. In its first financing round, which closed in 2001, it raised $30 million at a company value of $105 million. Investors in the company include Deutsche Bank, Clal Industries, Dain Rauscher, Robertson Stephens, Jerusalem Venture Partners, Polar, Ampal, Poalim Capital Markets, Vertex, and The Challenge Fund-Etgar.
Published by Globes [online] - www.globes.co.il - on June 25, 2003