49er just curious.. have you seen this....
Vendors Team Up to Speed ADSL Work
By FRED DAWSON
Competitive local-exchange carrier ICG Communications Inc. is blazing an aggressive trail into ADSL services that is likely to be followed by many other CLECs as vendors make progress toward speeding deployment of the fledgling technology.
ICG can move rapidly into high-speed asymmetrical-digital-subscriber-line service thanks in part to the progress that Lucent Technologies has made toward simplifying the delivery of ADSL from its switch locations, said Sheldon Ohringer, president of ICG's telecommunications unit. ICG has voice and data services operating in California, Colorado, the Ohio Valley and parts of the Southeast.
"Today, we have 30 colocations in central offices completed for voice, and we are now adding data connections," Ohringer said. "By the end of the year, we will be colocated in 100 central offices for voice and data, and we intend to add another 100 in '99."
ICG is the first CLEC to announce ADSL deployments on anything approaching this scale. The company has been working closely with Lucent to facilitate integration of DSL gear at the 5ESS central-office switch, including symmetrical and very high-speed versions, as well as the asymmetrical version, officials said.
"Our coming into this market is based on an understanding that integration is the key to making ADSL a mass-market service," said Mark Irvin, manager of data-applications products for Lucent's 5ESS line.
Lucent has agreed to partner with Westell Technologies Inc., a leading supplier of ADSL systems, in delivering hardware and software solutions that are tightly mapped to the design of the 5ESS-2000, Lucent's top-of-the-line digital central-office switch. By the third quarter, the companies hope to have the first phase of this integrated product line available for deployment, Irvin said.
The first phase consists of linking the DSLAM -- digital-subscriber-line access multiplexer, a module that multiplexes ADSL onto multiple subscriber lines -- with the switch within the switch cabinet, Irvin said. Along with compacting ADSL into the space used by the switch, this step will reduce some of the complexity associated with connecting POTS (plain old telephone service) line cards and the DSLAM, he said.
By early 1999, the companies intend to offer a line-card solution that will enable ADSL connection by simply replacing the POTS line card with one supporting both POTS and high-speed-data access. This will greatly reduce the time that it takes to install a customer from the central-office end, Irvin said. Further steps toward integration will follow, he added.
The Lucent-Westell connection extends the integration effort to many other vendors, as well, including the digital-signal-processor suppliers that each is partnered with and parties to other alliances. These include the Universal ADSL Working Group, created by the telecommunications industry and several computer companies earlier this year. What it all adds up to is that CLECs and telcos alike will be able to add ADSL features to the more than 100 million lines served by 5ESS switches by year's end, officials said.
Other points of cooperation among competitors are taking shape, as well, as vendors race to create a sufficiently flexible standardized platform to meet the wide range of service requirements set by the carriers.
For example, Alcatel, Analog Devices Inc. and Texas Instruments Inc. have begun working together to ensure interoperability of their DSPs in the implementation of the American National Standards Institute's T1.413 Issue 2 standard. This is the foundation for the Lucent-Westell effort and for the UAWG's approach to developing an "ADSL.Lite" standard for delivery of plug-and-play consumer modems.
"What we're finding is that we're all able to make the adjustments necessary to achieve interoperability through software," said Jurgen Lison, ADSL-program manager for Alcatel. "By sharing our ideas, we're able to sort through the solutions that make the most sense and compromise on those solutions, which is a much easier discussion to have than if we had to make changes in hardware."
These efforts at "front-end" ADSL compatibility complement a wide range of licensing agreements that Alcatel has put together for the back-end interoperability that is essential to assuring wide-scale vendor delivery of the ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) NICs (network-interface cards) that are required to complete the ADSL connection to the computer.
"Our announcement [with the ADSL DSP suppliers] is only a small part of the interoperability effort," Lison said.
To speed the process, Alcatel has licensed its chip technology to several suppliers of DSPs for customer-premises equipment, Lison said. In addition, Hayes Microelectronics Corp. plans to begin delivering personal computer plug-in boards compatible with Alcatel's ATM-over-ADSL solution by the end of this month, he noted.
Another DSP supplier, Motorola Inc.'s semiconductor unit, has been working closely on interoperability issues with a number of vendors, as well, in some instances providing a link to the integration efforts of Lucent and Alcatel. Partners in this effort include Ericsson, Westell and Amati Communications Inc., which is now a unit of TI, said Rick Hall, strategic planner for xDSL systems at Motorola.
Motorola has developed a means of meeting a key ADSL-performance target in the area of power requirements, Hall said, noting that the firm's "Copper Gold" chips meet the total power target of 3 watts, including the high-voltage line driver that feeds the line from the central office, as well as the transmitter/receiver at the subscriber end.
"We've cut the typical power level that you see in the market today in half, which means that you can install more line cards in a space without dissipating too much heat," Hall said.
"The next step for us is to address the interoperability issue," Hall added. "People want to be able to deploy the full-rate T1.413 implementation in the DSLAM and then have it talk to whatever is out there at the customer premises, whether it's ADSL.Lite or full-rate or something in between."
Like Alcatel, Motorola is finding that the steps needed to achieve this scale of interoperability in its DSPs can be accomplished in "firmware" (the software that is embedded in the chip), without requiring hardware changes. As things now stand, Hall added, it looks like multiple vendors will be able to meet the $500 per-line price target set by the telcos to make ADSL deployable on a mass-market basis.
"I think that everything that we and our competitors are doing in working with this standard demonstrates that this cost goal can be easily met," Hall said.
Perhaps the biggest hurdle that suppliers face is finding a universally acceptable means to eliminate the need for a splitter and a separate line at the customer premises, which is a primary goal of the UAWG, Hall noted.
"The question is whether the solutions that people are offering today are optimum," he said, adding that it remains to be seen whether agreement on the splitterless solution can be reached by year's end.
ICG, while it was the first CLEC to join the UAWG, is not gating its rollouts to the availability of a consumer-level option in the near term, Ohringer noted.
"There's huge demand in the business community, including the work-at-home sector, for high-speed access at prices below T-1 rates, and that's a market that we'll be able to serve right from the start," he said.
------------------------------------------------------------------------ |
