DSL Prime News Briefs

Bonded modems, the death of SUPERCOMM and the troubling role of the USTA, the Enron Broadband trial, and much more DSL news.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [April 19, 2005]

Bonded ADSL2+ Modems
Comtrend/ADI first announced modem
Bill Smith at SUPERCOMM 2004 mentioned BellSouth intended to bond two lines for higher speeds for FTTN/DSL, looking for more than the 20-25 meg down that a single pair VDSL2 expects at 3,000 to 5,000 feet. Since then, I've heard from another Bell they have similar plans (perhaps 30 percent of customers), as well as many of the independent telcos. With the extra DSL chip only costing $6 or so in OEM quantities, even after adding the second port and necessary processing power, the price of the modem should be very reasonable.

Andrew Morton of Comtrend tells me he's happy with the tests of a major DSLAM, but didn't share names or detailed results. He expects first field installations in the next month. Broadcom is the only chip vendor who's publicly said they are sampling bonded ADSL on the CO side, which presumably will go on the new Alcatel linecard. Adtran and Aware have been leaders developing the bonding standard. It was good to hear of a major ADI chip design win—they've been quiet in DSL for some time.

SUPERCOMM is dead. Long Live GLOBALCOMM.
TIA continues after USTA pulls out of 2006
"Everyone" goes to SUPERCOMM madness in Chicago in June, including many from beyond North America. A major Chinese delegation came last year, and I remember getting a news story from Matt Bross of BT. The IEC runs a particularly strong speaker program. The USTA hasn't responded to my request for comment on why they withdrew, and whether the split was primarily a financial dispute.

Matt Flanigan of TIA is optimistic about the renamed GLOBALCOMM. "It will be run by the same people who have organized SUPERCOMM, and be a great conference. One reason we get great speakers is we invite the experts, whether or not they buy sponsorships."

USTA goes to spring, calls it TelecomNEXT
Walt McCormack is bringing all the U.S. telco execs and their suppliers to Las Vegas March 19 to 23, 2006, rather than the traditional fall date. That surprising change is not merely a challenge to the re-organized SUPERCOMM, but right on the heels of Spring VON San Jose March 13-16. VON, including the Fast Net Futures I've organized the last three years, has become the most interesting conference in North America except SUPERCOMM, featuring intense, high level discussions. Trade shows are a major part of the business, so I'll be reporting more and want to make clear my personal interest.

Briefs

• Pannaway brings an important principle to the IP oriented triple play—VOIP shouldn't mean losing your 911 service in an emergency. Mike Skubisz, CTO, explained to me the system is designed to automatically fallover to a conventional POTS line (with power) when problems occur. The home gateway passes the connection, including the power, directly through and the phone continues to be available for emergency calls. Pannaway has roots in Cabletron and Enterasys, and has been winning contracts in the U.S. independent market. They must be doing something right—persuaded Mark Carpenter to come over from Tut, which is also doing well. They are confident they will soon close a $10 million funding round.
  
  
• Five officers of Enron Broadband begin their trial for fraud, although their telco partners have not been implicated. When Verizon joined with Enron and Blockbuster for a "20 year deal," Fred D'Alessio stood firmly in the spotlight. D'Alessio later quietly resigned as Group President at Verizon. SBC, Qwest, Covad, and Telus also played active roles.
  
  
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Press

• ZTE and Huawei, with over $10 billion of Chinese bank export money committed, look to be renewing the vendor financing practices of five years ago, which almost bankrupted Lucent and Nortel. The latest deal, with billions of dollars provided to Indian IPTV and wireless operator Atlas, looks totally dubious. Ray LeMaistre of Light Reading does the story well at http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?site=lightreading&doc_id=71912. He has Orca denying they were doing a financing deal their customer claimed they did; now, Orca and BitBand will need to explain to customers around the world why they don't get similar terms.
  
  
• The Linley Wire notes that Agere's new network processor and DSLAM controller is "evidence of increased competition in the access market. Wintegra set the bar for access NPUs with its scalable, low-powered WinPath family and application-targeted production firmware suites; Intel jumped into the fray with its IXP2350 (Westport), which leverages both the XScale control-plane processor and packet engines derived from its high-end NPUs; and Freescale announced a turbocharged Quicc Engine to elevate the throughput of its PowerQuicc processors to a multigigabit level." Linley Gwinnapp, a respected chip analyst, also reports a new Israeli company, Ethernity has a design "rated at 5Gbps and priced below $100," with four gig-E uplinks. At Fast Net, all the DSLAM vendors claimed they were completely non-blocking, a level of performance these new chips make practical.

Wall Street

• Nikos Theodosopoulos at UBS in February reported the Verizon GPON RFP that I wrote up last issue. I reported Broadlight as the logical chip supplier, but I'm also researching possible GPON chips to come from Freescale, Centillium, and possible Passave.

Copyright 2005 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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