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DSL Prime News Briefs: Technology

DSL Prime covers the latest DSL technology news and industry research. Many reports overstate the number of homes that can purchase DSL because those reports fail to consider that poor line quality can prohibit DSL delivery. The technology news is all good news.

by Dave Burstein DSL Prime [August 30, 2001]

E-mail

• An investment banker asked where to find international projections, and we suggested they try point-topic.com, an excellent UK source, and the UBS Warburg model. Any other analysts with reports and projections, please send us a review copy. I have several items in the works summarizing different country results, and am looking for everyone's projections.
  
  
• Our item last issue about telco numbers confused several readers. The point we were making was that the number commonly offered, "lines servable" is probably higher than the number that counts, " percent of homes/offices servable." I make that guess based on two assumptions, the first of which is that businesses, on average, have considerably more lines than residences. Assuming more businesses are in city cores, and hence closer to COs and more likely to be servable, they yield proportionately more servable lines. If so, the number that's important, the percentage covered is lower, perhaps by 3 to 8 percent.

Briefs

• G.SHDSL is delayed in field deployments, with everyone disappointed that the expected volume rollouts still will take another six months. There's a huge market waiting for G., both in European competitors (desperate for a standard product that can support VoDSL) and ultimately in telcos, who need to offer a symmetric product with reach. Scott Valcourt and team at the University of New Hampshire are among the heroes in this industry, offering truly neutral ground for compatibility testing. Walter Juras of Infineon credited their work for moving G.SHDSL from standards discussion to real product in less than a year.
  
  
• Apologies to Ofer Doitel of AccessLan, whose name we misspelled.
  
  
• TdSoft expects a breakthrough customer, a European CLEC. CTO Eytan Radian believes customers will choose their implementation of the standard Emulation Loop Control Protocol, which efficiently handles both ISDN and POTS. The new Version 3 software, designed for redundancy, allows him to pull the CPU board and show the customer the system continues to function.
  
  
• NAS reported 15K customers, some of which are resale, and negative current assets. $40M of Lucent leases, in default, are now current liabilities.

International

• British Telecom dropped wholesale DSL rates about 7 percent, and the $8.64 line charge to competitors is likely to be revised downward, per Dawn Hayes of the451.com, as the EC is rumbling about enforcing regulations for local competition. But their claimed high-quality network went down for 9 hours, refusing all log-ins. The apparent cause was a RADIUS server outage. Chris Nuttall of FT Mmarketwatch reports OFTEL will be backing new regulations with significant fines.
  
  
• Taiwan mid-year reached 471,000 DSL subscribers, and should pass one million in Q1 2002.
  
  
• German CLEC QSC is over 15,000 subscribers, and expects to triple that base by the end of the year.

Chip

• Tioga's Doug Goodyear reported they had successfully tested interoperablity of their ADSL chips with Annex C chips from both Centillium and Globespan. Their latest software version allows any port in a DSLAM to run either Annex C or Annex A, which Softbank/Yahoo intends to introduce in Japan.
  
  
• Infineon is sampling the SOCRATES U G.SHDSL single chip with an on-chip Utopia interface. Volume is expected Q3, with a list price of $20. Chips coming to market will over the next year reduce symmetric equipment costs to about the same as ADSL. Equipment prices have continued down, with large contracts going for $100-150 per port for ADSL (small buyers pay much more).
  
  
• Metalink VDSL chips compliant with the ITU 998 are in the hands of several OEMs, who will be releasing a new generation of VDSL systems shortly. Broadcom is racing to catch up, especially for Next Level/Qwest equipment. Don't expect any word from Qwest on VDSL till they get the equipment to test late this year.
  
  
• Virata's 10Q revealed Ambit and Siemens accounted for 50.0 percent and 19.9 percent of sales. Analysts will assume this is good news, because Ambit (supplying Chunghwa and Yahoo Japan) and Siemens (supplying Deutsche Telekom) are growth leaders. Westell, 34 percent of sales the prior year period, did not appear—possibly because Virata sued them for canceling purchase orders. Only 7 percent of sales were in North America, down from over 70 percent last year, again illustrating the shift in the world industry.
  
  
• Analog Devices, the #2 or #3 DSL chip provider (after Alcatel and possibly Globespan), will be cutting heads this quarter after a 20 percent sales drop. Communications chips were particularly hard hit, but CEO Fishman is optimistic "We have the industry's best and largest analog design team. " He sees a key advantage in "combining high-performance analog and DSP to offer complete signal processing solutions on a single chip." Their under-utilized fabs give them incentive to price to win more contracts as well.

We are journalists, not investment advisers; invest at your own risk and do further research.

Copyright 2001 Dave Burstein.
The DSL Prime Newsletter is reprinted with permission.

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