Turnstone’s Smart Splitter SX500 Is Two Boxes in One
By Paula Bernier
Posted on: 10/30/2000
Turnstone Systems Inc. (www.turnstone.com) today unveils the Smart Splitter SX500, which was designed to help reduce the cost of deploying loop management for residential DSL services.
Splitters at central offices can cause problems for carriers attempting to test and qualify lines for DSL, says Eric Andrews, vice president marketing. “Equipment on the DSLAM side of splitter is also problem. There’s certain blocking that way,” he says.
The Smart Splitter SX500, which is currently in trials and will be available in volume in December, has both splitter functionality and metallic access functionality.
Combining splitters – which function to send data traffic to DSLAMs and voice traffic to CLASS 5 switches at the central office – with the test product means fewer boxes to manage and less interconnections to make at the central office, resulting in reduced complexity and less manual setup, says Andrews. “Instead of needing two boxes or systems for every port, you now only need one so it reduces the boxes in network, reducing overall cost per port,” says Andrews, noting that carriers can realize a capital cost savings of approximately $35 per port as a result. “You also save on a lot of the cabling cost and complexity,” he adds. “Most of the errors that occur are human errors in cabling -- like connecting a cable to wrong punch down box or distribution frame.”
The metallic access functionality of the Smart Splitter SX500, meanwhile, allowing carriers to connect test heads at the appropriate point in the network to do remote loop qualification and remote testing for DSL. With a metallic access interface to the loop, a carrier with 500 DSL lines, for example, can access any line in that DSL bundle. “The ILECs have certainly deployed lots of consumer DSL and have struggled with provisioning and doing remote test and qualification,” says Andrews. “To date they have done a lot of that manually. So SBC, Verizon and others are starting to put metallic access units on the customer side of the splitter.”
This box enables carriers to remotely test all loops without having to send humans out to test those lines or to do maintenance on the lines or equipment, says Andrews.
“We hear that DSL service providers wind up with a number of lines they can tell can or cannot work, but there are about a third that are in the middle, so they have to send human technicians out there. So we can reduce that number to about 5 percent,” he says, adding the cost per truck roll typically runs from $100 to $300. |
