As requested.
Looking over the Lucent Stinger? as in: lucent.com
It seems as though they are offering the Central Office side of an ADSL line which includes an ATM layer to give them enough QoS to handle up to 16 phone conversations on a single copper wire pair. The Central Office box has support for up to 672 ports per chassis and 2016 ports per rack. It is unclear whether a port is a multifunction ADSL line, or one of the functions on a line. If you guess that a port is the customer line which might have slightly less than 1 megabit of bandwidth (see below), then you are talking about 622 mbits/sec bandwidth which is consistent with the OC12 capability mentioned in the article.
One of the goals of xDSL is to provide interoperability between Company X's Central Office equipment and Company Y's home interface box. The length and condition of the copper loop between these two points is a considerable problem though. Ideally, with sharp standards and flexible equipment, it may be possible for a service provider to purchase any of several different mfg Central Office boxes and successfully operate with a high percentage of their customers who live around the Central Office. Each customer could go to their local Radio Shack, Best Buy, or equivalent, and purchase a home interface box and install it themselves. The bandwidth would be around 1 megabit, which would probably be set during the installation process by a handshaking protocol between home box and Central Office box. If the customer is further away than about 10,000 ft, the delivered bandwidth would be less. Some customers (perhaps 15%) might not get a good signal at all. These are the current xDSL tradeoffs. The customer yield may be improved if the local phone company upgrades the quality of their connections and the home boxes go through a certification process, but the gains might be a few percent more customers and/or a few 10s of kilobits bandwidth for the average customer. 1 megabit of bandwidth is enough for up to 16 phone conversations and nice Internet surfing conditions, but it is not enough for a normal TV channel or a compressed HDTV channel.
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The Newbridge Networks offering (see reply #13231 on this list) is more ambitious. This note talks about TV over copper using IP, ATM, QoS, ADSL, etc., etc. This is definitely not using the phone company local loop, even though copper is mentioned in the note. The note mentions that it is for installation on a high-rise roof top attached to an antenna, or within a building attached to a fiber optic cable (to form a local node of a cable TV distribution system?). There could be copper distribution cables from the box to individual apartments or businesses within the building. High end cable TV systems can provide 550-600 megabits of bandwidth to the settop box. Reverse bandwidth is another issue though.
Figure on around 6 megabits/sec to deliver one good quality TV channel. If the customer channel selection is done at the settop box, then for 100 channels, you need to deliver 600 megabits/sec. If the channel selection is done further upstream via commands from the settop box, then a lower bandwidth would suffice, but it would have to be a minimum of 6 megabits/sec to get a good picture. The note talks about using IP multicast protocols, perhaps to implement the upstream channel selection, or perhaps just to deliver the same set of signals to every customer. For guaranteed QoS, look for a layer of ATM in the delivery scheme.
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It looks like the Lucent offering and the Newbridge offering are apples and oranges - sold to two different (but possibly overlapping) groups of service providers. The Lucent boxes would be sold to CLECs and would be installed in TelCo Central Offices and the Newbridge boxes would be sold to incumbent cable TV companies or new competitors.
Both offerings use ATM protocols. A CLEC might purchase the Lucent boxes, but then connect them into a backbone of NN 36170's. The issue might be whether the NN 46020 Network Manager could see into the Lucent boxes so they could be easily managed. In a standards conforming world, this would not be a problem.
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In Chicago, an internet service provider, interaccess.com might use Lucent's boxes to deliver telephone and Internet over a customer's phone lines, whereas 21st Century Communications Group 21stcentury.com might be installing Newbridge equipment in lakeshore highrises in competition with TCI's oneway coaxial cables. All of the streets were dug up a year ago to accomodate twin 6 inch PVC pipes with orange multifiber cables pulled through (but now just being connected - more on that when I meet with our local installer). |
