ALL Ericsson to Enter ADSL Market
Friday, April 18, 1997
(Posted 5:00 p.m. ET)
By SAROJA GIRISHANKAR
Small Office/Home Office workers hungry for multimegabit access to the Internet and corporate networks will get a peek at high-speed Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line products from Ericsson Inc. at Supercomm this June.
ADSL modem services are expected to provide as much as 8 Mbps transmission pipes to users who download information from the Internet or corporate LANs over existing single twisted copper line, simultaneously with voice traffic. Commercial ADSL services from carriers, which have to deploy ADSL products at the central office and customer premises, are expected sometime this fall.
Ericsson, a late comer to the DSL market, will unveil several ADSL products, including a multimegabit modem, a Digital Subscriber Line access multiplexer for the central office site and network interface card for personal computers, according to Peter Staxen, Business line manager at Ericsson's Network Systems Division based in Richardson, Texas.
Although Ericsson's Copper Broadband Access (COBRA) ADSL products will become generally available only in the fourth quarter, Staxen added that the company is not too late to enter the pool of ADSL equipment suppliers.
"It's definitely not too late to offer ADSL products because the market is barely evolving; In fact, we want to become one of the largest [ADSL] players in the broadband access market," contended Staxen. Industry experts tracking the ADSL market agree.
" Ericsson is not late because the ADSL market is still embryonic and it has room for a supplier with experience," said Kieran Taylor, Broadband consultant at TeleChoice Inc., a Vernon, N.J. consultancy. "Similar to Alcatel, Ericsson is well positioned in the carrier core with its central office switches and can take advantage of it to offer ADSL products."
The COBRA line includes an ADSL modem that handles up to 8 Mbps downstream transmission from the Internet or corporate network and a maximum of 1 Mbps upstream pipe over a distance of 15,000 feet. The DSLAM, dubbed the COBRA AT8, is modular and each segment can handle up to 30 ADSL line terminations and pipe the traffic to ATM networks over DS-3 and OC-3 interfaces. A single OC-3 can handle traffic coming over 450 ADSL lines. Ericsson will eventually plan to add frame relay interface to the DSLAM.
TeleChoice's Taylor pointed out that it is critical for Ericsson to quickly add the frame relay and IP interfaces to its DSLAM because much of traffic to the Internet is packet-based and many of the Internet service providers have largely IP-based router networks.
Pricing for the ADSL modem and DSLAM was not available.
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