["broadband week" gte update]
Hi SoMo,
many thanks for the news from the h&q conference.. the following article from "broadband week" confirms your info that gte is still very strong (am only posting orctf related stuff)..
also interesting info in the article on availability of onu etc fujitsu/orctf product ("early next year") and g.lite ("vendors will begin announcing rollouts of G.Lite products next month"):
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Broadband Week for September 14, 1998:
Telcos Proceed with DSL Rollouts
By FRED DAWSON
...GTE Corp., which has been offering services in a few markets for several months, has now equipped more than 100 of the 300 central offices in the 16 states that it targeted for ADSL by year's end, said Jeff Bolton, director of the carrier's ADSL program.
"The product is meeting our expectations, and we're getting tons of equipment from our supplier, Fujitsu [Network Systems Corp.]," Bolton added.
But ISP sign-ups are progressing slowly, largely because it takes time for ISPs to prepare their facilities to handle the added traffic and to set up their marketing programs, Bolton said, adding that his company's GTE Internetworking unit has begun signing up some customers and taking orders in the Dallas area.
GTE said it was too soon to assess customer response, but early reports backed up the telco's projections on the percentage of lines that would support delivery of services. For example, a North Carolina branch showed 30 percent of its lines as nonqualifying.
That's "pretty close to our expectations that we'd be able to qualify 65 percent, on average, across all of our markets," Bolton said.
GTE expects to extend service by early next year, following Fujitsu's expected delivery of DSL-access multiplexers (DSLAMs) for installation in the remote terminals served by digital-loop carriers (DLCs). DLAMs extend the reach of central-office switches beyond their local-loop bases.
Bolton said this will happen "where we see enough customer activity to justify the cost of installing DSLAMs in DLC terminals."
GTE Internetworking is offering DSL at several price points, in keeping with the wholesale rate structure set by its parent. The lowest-cost service, operating at 256 kilobits per second downstream and 64 kbps in the return, costs $60 per month, $35 of which represents the tariffed cost of the carrier's ADSL. A 1.5-mbps/769-kbps service costs $210 per month....
The framework draft document for what will become known as the "G.Lite" standard within the International Telecommunications Union has moved through the discussion process with a minimum of contention, said Mark Peden, senior technologist for ADSL at Intel Corp. and marketing chair at the Universal ADSL Working Group, an ad hoc body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" that has been spearheading the process.
"We're very close to completion of this part of the process," Peden said.
While ratification is not expected until early next year, Peden said, vendors will begin announcing rollouts of G.Lite products next month, and he expects to see them in stores by the end of the year. He added that vendors will likely support upgrades to conform to interoperability requirements next year.
multichannel.com
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