[Asian players to make strong ADSL showing]
From the August Asian Sources Multi-media catalog I've scanned excerpts from a Data Transfer article. Some new names are mentioned here as well as Amati.
ADSL has already started to spread. Australia plans to use ADSL for interactive and broadcast video this year, and there is at least one publicly available service in the U.S. and one in Canada. And now, many Asian equipment makers and service providers are planning ADSL rollouts, which could serve to bring prices down and accelerate acceptance.
In Singapore, ADSL is getting a boost from the government's Singapore One project, which aims to put ADSL and cable
modems in every home in the island republic What is holding ADSL back is simply infrastructure issues, said Aztech's Gob. So it is possible that these technologies will pick up more in Singapore than elsewhere because Singapore is a small country with a very advanced infrastructure."
Singapore companies expect the Singapore One project to give them a lead in developing high-tech, high-speed products. "Singapore One is helping a lot because it consolidates everything into a consortium, so every-body works on one thing," said WPI's Goh, "You share your data and your experiences and I think it helps the whole industry to move forward faster.
Lim expects ADSL to come into the picture toward the end of the year. "1 don't think we will have products this year," he said. "We will most likely announce them next year because the de-mand won't be there yet. The backbone is there, but how fast the digital products take off de-pends on government policies, as well as on what the telecommuncation companies do."
**Almost all of Taiwan's fax-modem manufacturers have plans to develop ADSL modems, and most launches will be late this year or early next year.**
Askey planned to launch evaluation samples of user-site ADSL modems in June or July. These ADSL modems, which can support top communication speeds of about 4.5Mbps will be provided for field trials to Askey's customers all over the world.
"Customers send us feedback for modifications, driver updates or re-designs," Wu said. "We esti-mate that this process will take six to 12 months, and hopefully we can ship finished products in the first or second quarter of 1998."
Taiwan's S-Tech Inc. has been developing ADSL modems and plans to launch prototypes in No-vember or December. These mo-derns can run at either lOMbps or 22Mbps. "They are not going to replace existing fax-modems because ADSL modems are mainly for wired users of cable TV services," said marketing manager Daniel Chen. "We are also developing cable moderns to complement our ADSL moderns."
GXTC is in no hurry to develop ADSL products, however. "We have been watching the market closely. The technology has been around for years. But the few current providers still use propri-etary ASICs and hardware to de-velop products that are costly for users," Chang said.
Thus, the company will wait until standard chip solutions are available from major vendors.
**"If we allocated many engineers for more than a year to develop key chips for an ADSL modem, the investment would be heavy," Chang said**.
"But big chip ven-dors like Rockwell and Lucent can easily form a team and engineer standard chips in a much shorter time frame. These chips will also be much cheaper than developing ASICs."
Taicom has been studying the market and technology for cable modems and ADSL products, but it has not announced a solid schedule for product development.
Per-line costs already on the decline
ADSL implementations cost about $2,000 per line, half of which is represented by the users premises modem. The DSPs that accommodate ADSL's computational demands account for a large percentage of this cost, and they will only get cheaper with the economies of mass production.
"For ADSL, the problem now is that the chipset is very expen-sive," said Maliflix's Lim. "Of course, cost very much depends on supply and demand- Cur-rently, there is a limited supply of chipsets, mostly from US-based companies, and ADSL modems cost over $1,000.
To help bring prices down, Amati has entered into a joint development effort with Texas In-struments under which Amati's DMT technology will be used in the development of an ADSL chip based on TI's 1,600 MIPS DSP, the TMS320C6x.
Berry foresees 50,000 users by lie end of this year. And Amati has a goal of reaching a price point of $500 per subscriber line by mid- 1998
US Robotics is also working to-ward lower ADSL prices- At Networld+Interop, the company made a series of announcements, regarding its ADSL strategies First, it is aggressively pricing it's current ADSL offering, the Viper DSL user modem, at $495 Together with supporting concentrators, this reduces the per-line price to $l,000.
"There is no reason ADSL cannot be priced similarly to narrow band," said Ronald Westernik, vice president of marketing for the company's broadband access communication department.
US Robotics also announced ADSL-Lite, a standard defining low-end xDSL services. ADSL--Lite would be a symmetrical product offering two-way commu-nication at speeds of l2SKbps to SS4Kbps, making it a lower-cost and higher-performance alterna-tive to ISDN. "We are attempting to deliver a lower-priced product for a CLAC, telco or whoever can offer a beyond-ISDN service" Westernik said,
US Robotics' 56Kbps modems can be upgraded to ADSL-Lite through software. The hybrid x21 DSL modems will also run.. on TI's TMS320C6x DSP platform and will use DMT technology licensed from Aware. The first x2/ DSL product will be an internal card priced at under $250. It is scheduled for' availability in the first half 1.998. In. the same way, US Robotics' current CAP-based ADSL products will be upgradable to DMT.
Aside from cost, another major issue that needs to be settled for ADSL is that of standardization. "There has to be some sort of standard before we can launch a product," said Peter Yeow, mar-keting communications executive at O.R. Computer.
The ANSI working group TI. F 1.4 has approved an AD~SL standard for rates of' up to 6.lMbps, called ANSI standard T1.413. The ETSI has contributed an annex to Tl.413 to reflect European require-ments. Issue II, under study by the T1E1.4 group, will add a mul-tiplexed interface at the premises end, as well as configuration pro-tocols and network management, to the standard.
Cable drawbacks minimize threat to ADSL
While there are clear advantages to cable modems, many in the in-dustry do not believe the threat to ADSL is substantial, as there are also many drawbacks.The weaknesses of cable mo-dems are that the technology is still under development, voice is handled on a separate line, band width is split among users, there is no firewall protection and they mainly provide one-way trans-mission. Also, there are many places where cable is not widely available.
"The big advantage of cable modems is speed, because they are faster than ADSL," said Malifax's Lim. "However, good quality video only requires 1.5Mbps, so at the moment, there is no necessity for 1OMbps to 3OMbps speeds."
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