DSL

DSL Prime: Voice and Video Over DSL

Surely voice over DSL (VoDSL) and Very High Speed DSL (VDL) will drive demand to the point where the telcos will improve the lines to video-ready quality? The business case is obvious but the future is murky.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [March 29, 2002]

Alcatel's VDSL here at last
Silicon works, board due Q3
After three years, Alcatel now has silicon for their DMT VDSL chips. With speeds up to 52 meg, this is a natural upgrade for telcos planning video deployments. Broadcom and Infineon have been shipping CAP/QAM VDSL chips for two years, building an early lead that Alcatel (with Globespan, Zarlink, Ikanos, and ST) will now try to overcome. More than half the DSLAMs in the western world are Alcatel, easily upgradable to offer VDSL later this year.

Michel Rahier of Alcatel speaks eloquently of the possibilities of video over DSL, looking to the 2002 World Cup matches to ignite the first wave of video on demand in Europe. 40 to 50 percent of Western European customers are within 1.2 kilometers of the local exchanges, and can receive 20 meg or better VDSL service. The 7300 DSLAM is designed to support video service.

Although firm VDSL deployment plans are few, VDSL upgradeability is a necessary checklist item in most recent bids. Lucent (using Metalink chips for their board) has had a major advantage against Alcatel the last few months, so Alcatel has begun briefing select clients on the new capability.

Technet, with strong backing from Cisco, Intel, Microsoft, and Dell, has called for an almost immediate transition to 100 meg service, looking for telcos to start spending $10B per year on fiber (and possibly VDSL) starting in 18 to 24 months. That's absolutely the right move for the American economy and the tech sector in particular, but assumed to be enormously unlikely by everyone else.

The ADSL/cable modem first generation is now at 60 percent or over in most developed countries, and will go to 80 to 90 percent in the next two years. (That's two years behind schedule at Verizon and SBC) With no competition or government push, telcos will sell that same service for a decade. When they upgrade, some will run fiber all the way to the home.

Ross Ireland of SBC told me he prefers passive optics to save on field maintence expense. John Cioffi and others in the EFM committee believe it will be cheaper to use VDSL (which Cioffi can push over 100 meg in the lab) for the last thousand feet. I welcome comments and articles about the tradeoffs of the two approaches.

Sprint: Voice over DSL/IP works fine
Esrey says the problem was market timing
Esrey was clear: "We solved all the technical questions with ION. We also believed it would be a smart move in the long run. Unfortunately, today's financial markets forced us to cancel the project." A cloud has been hanging over VoDSL and especially Telcordia's softswitch because of technical problems in the early deployment, and then cancellation of the entire project. Esrey's comment is therefore very welcome. Sprint's ION was the largest DSL deployment in the U.S. (2,000 COs) as well as the most aggressive push for next generation voice in the world.

Voice over packet progressing
The Yahoo Japan 2 cent a minute international calls are the dramatic face of the IP possibilities. Plug a phone into a jack on the DSL modem, and have your calls automatically routed over an international IP network. Microsoft embedded SIP into Windows XP, and there's a U.S. consumer announcement due this week. ITXC, Net2phone, and others provide a production quality infrastructure for providers willing to offer service.

Most of the real progress is in the commercial market, where CLECs from Network Plus in Florida to Streamgate in Germany are signing customers. Brendon Mills at General Bandwidth is shipping production units to several companies, some attaching through DSL and others through T-1 lines that have come down in price. Genband has an SBC investment and initially targeted telco customers, a market that isn't developing. But funding that carries them through 2004 gives them flexibility.

Softswitches are already dominating telco planning. Frank Dunn of Nortel confirmed our TI story of the death of the traditional switch, telling me sales the last two quarters have been "maintenance only." Seidenberg's diagram of his future network has a softswitch in the middle of it, with similar plans at SBC. None of them are buying many, because the linecount drop means they don't need the capacity. Instead, they are using them to offload data traffic, confident their voice switching will work fine where they develop needs. Meanwhile, Verizon and SBC have essentially killed the VoDSL projects; cable competition has developed so slowly they expect VOIP to be cheap and production ready by the time they need it. General Bandwidth sees a niche market providing them a front end.

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

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