DSL Prime: Equipment

Sometimes we forget just how impressive the improvements in DSL equipment have been.

by Dave Burstein of DSL Prime and Future of TV [June 29, 2005]

$27 DSLAMS, $20 per router/modem
Alcatel's message "We will not be undersold"
Alcatel won a nearly million unit order from Chunghwa with a bid of $47.19 per port for an advanced ADSL2+ DSLAM and a 4 port modem. The 7302 ISAM is Alcatel's top of the line IP DSLAM for which they claim "wire-speed non-blocking architecture and advanced processing and IP functionalities."

Working with Zyzel and Foxconn/Hon Hai, Alcatel has won back from ECI one of the world's most competitive contracts. Michel Rahier of Alcatel believes their work with Chunghwa for media on demand was crucial, and that the 7302 is one of the best units in the world for delivering video as well as data.

UTStarcom, Ericsson, Lucent, ECI and Nortel (presumably offering ECI) all were competing, although some did not pass the Chunghwa testing for a full video package. The Chunghwa bid is an open tender, and the company prides itself on getting some of the lowest equipment costs because the bidding is public. Alcatel had lost out BT's huge 21CN to Huawei, who can't bid in Taiwan, and perhaps chose to be aggressive to win a tender whose results quickly spread around the world.

A handy Digitimes chart shows how dramatically DSL equipment prices have come down.

March 2000 $239.27 Lucent, Nokia, Zyzel, Askey Computer

March 2001 $179.23 Alcatel, Ambit

Feb 2002 $93.33 Samsung, Comtrend, Tecom

Sept 2003 $65.92 ECI, Tecom

June 2005 $47.19 Alcatel, Foxconn, Zyzel

I arbitrarily divided the $47 into $27 for DSLAM, $20 for router, although the bid was combined. I believe prices in China and India have been this low previously, and have heard rumors DSLAM prices in the twenties in France and England. But none of the companies involved would release details, which is why the Chunghwa tender is watched so closely.

Please note this is a price for a million units with an intense bidding process. Every time I write a story like this, I get e-mail from smaller carriers wondering why they can't get similar prices. Occasionally, a vendor breaking into a new market will price this low in smaller quantities, but that's not typical.

LEA merges with French electronics group HF
Active splitters, leading test lab
Eric Berthaud and team have 11 DSL patents and are a major supplier of DSL splitters across Europe. Total sales, including some power line network gear, were 42 million euro in 2004. Their DSL Forum accredited interoperability test lab maintains DSLAMs from Alcatel, ECI Telecom, Lucent Technologies and Huawei. LEA's most interesting product is the "active splitter," for DSLAMs, chip-based and one-third the size of the usual passive components. Splitters now take substantially more board space than DSL chips, so smaller units can have a major impact on the density of DSLAMs.

10 Mbps does not equal 20 Mbps
Son: 26 Mbps modem yields 10 to 15 Mbps typical
In France, the typical high speed line delivered half the advertised speed, per a report to the British Government. While most of the services advertised as 1 Mbps delivered 80 percent or more of the advertised speed, at 8 Mbps the typical measured speed was about 4 Mbps. At least three quarters of the French DSL lines should support 6 Mbps, based on distance, so this data suggests a continuing problem of over subscription by the carrier. Services advertised at 15 and 20 Mbps deliver more bandwidth, but also typically half of what is promised. The original data were collected by users reporting to the interesting French site, grenouille.com (grenouille means frog in French).

That "up to" speeds are often false has long been an open secret. Masayoshi Son of Yahoo BB held up a 26 Mbps modem he was giving his customers in 2004, laughing at carriers selling 512 Kbps and 1.5 Mbps as "broadband." When asked, he readily agreed that few customers actually got more than 10 to 15 Mbps, despite short distances. Semmoto of eAccess, his competitor, confirmed similar results, even when the "40 Mbps ADSL2++" gear was used. ('jusqu'à means up to in French.) The Analysys report, a strong comparative look at advanced broadband deployment, is here [.pdf].

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

"The power of the printing press belongs solely to those who own the presses"
—A.J. Leibling

The Internet is the cheapest printing press ever invented.