DSL Prime News: The Inside Source

Over the last four years, U.S. telco execs have earned $1 billion as U.S. DSL fell farther and farther behind the rest of the world. On the technology front, there's new hope for ADSL+ and ADSL2.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [November 7, 2002]

$1,000,000,000 in the U.S. paid to 25 U.S. telco execs over the last four years, as their companies fall behind.
—New Networks/SEC data

• 10 million Korean broadband connections, in a country of 13 million homes. The official announcement is about to make news around the world.
• 3 million T-DSL subscribers in Germany the end of 2002.
• 2 million lines of DSL in China; 800,000 more by the end of the year
• 1 million lines in Italy, with remarkable new pricing designed to convert 85 percent of Internet users to DSL by 2005.

Dateline Berlin: Wonderful rational exuberance at the IEC conference. Monday, Zhegiang He of China Telecom announced the 2 million lines milestone, and that the growth will accelerate rapidly.

Gerd Tenzer of Deutsche Telekom, Jean-Yves Goulfes of France Telecom, Stefano Pileri of Telecom Italia, Wim Steenhut of Belgacom, and John Davies of BT followed with good news from their countries.

Broadcom, Globespan, and Infineon put out the first press releases of chips for ADSL2 and ADSL+, which will drive speeds from 12 mbps to 20-24 mbps over the next two years.

Have modem, will travel. Visiting Infineon and Siemens in Munich on our way to Networld, Cirpack and FT in Paris. Then Fasstweb (delivering 10 mbps and more) in Milan.

Sad to report that Pat Russo of Lucent officially confirmed our story of two months ago that Stinger is in maintenance mode. A $100 million order from France Telecom is now up in the air, although a new contract won in Brazil is encouraging them. Textronix is selling Videotele and their state-of-the-art video servers for a pittance to Tut, whom I hope will find success combining the server with new video switch. ITeX is finishing the last steps of liquidation.

Headline news, more to come if I ever catch up:

• Ikanos officially announced a chip that can do both ADSL and VDSL. The new Alcatel VDSL card uses similar DMT technology, and presumably is using a new ST Micro DMT chipset. They discreetly didn't bring the actual board to the announcement, to keep people guessing. Congratulations to Alcatel on the 20 million ports shipped.
• Globespan and ST are both promising DMT VDSL to their customers. Planned improvements to competing single carrier QAM VDSL chips will keep this battle flaming.
• Telkom South Africa is deploying as many as 300 thousand ports, although the price they're charging will probably hold back growth. Marconi won the contract from Alcatel by including a 25 percent local partner with good political connections.
• Broadcom announced their first DSL customer, Alcatel. DSLAM vendors have good first impressions of the Broadcom chips.
• RAD's selling Voice over DSL IADs in Italy, Broadview's deploying VoDSL in New York, and every CLEC in the world is looking at SIP, VoDSL, and other methods of grabbing voice revenue over broadband. I connected my SIP phone in the Cisco booth in Berlin, and made all my phone calls with a New York city number and price. Worked remarkably well.

ADSL2 and ADSL+: 12 mbps for sure, faster coming
First chips deliver part of the potential
The new generation is here, which will deliver speeds 12 Mbps and over 4-8,000 feet. Speeds up to 24 Mbps are theoretically possible over shorter distances; the reality of the new chips is 12 Mbps and perhaps 16 Mbps, with upgrades promised. Reach will also be further, although probably not the 30 percent some claim. I already have a report from one user, Hong Lu of UTStarcom, that the results in the field are excellent on the Globespan chip.

ADSL2 is the new approved standard, originally called G.dmt.bis. The next step, anticipated by the new chips, is to double the frequency range for DSL. That's called ADSL+, which should be approved in a few months after the last few details are decided. Every chipmaker is claiming they've mastered both, as well as a slew of other improvements to design; no one has delivered it all, much less proven that fact with rigorous independent testing. 12 mbps at 5,000 feet is now commercial in Japan: the progress is clearly substantial. Aware has an excellent white paper at on the new standards here [.pdf].

Of course, no chip is truly ADSL+ until the standard is approved. I hope the chipmakers using ADSL+ style wider frequencies to get more than 12 Mbps have tracked the emerging standard well enough to avoid future interoperability problems. Some have tested their own chips at 16 Mbps and claimed they will upgrade that to 20 and 24 mbps one day to compete with VDSL.

These speeds are fantasies for users in Europe and North America, because the telcos have no vision. But Korea and Japan are racing to deliver the highest speeds—or at least ad claims of same.

Copyright 2002 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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