Voice over DSL, a huge market for WRS. VxWorks or pSOS sits on a lot of these boxes. This market will take off, and WRS will grow with it.
Khan
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DSL ready to carry voice
services
By Will Wade
EE Times
(04/06/00, 3:16 p.m. EST)
SAN JOSE, Calif. ? Digital subscriber line technology is finally
becoming established as a mainstream format, but key chip and
system vendors and service providers are already looking at its next
stage of development. Although most current users see their speedy
DSL lines as an ideal means to access the Internet, the hot
application this year is going to be voice traffic over the same lines.
And in the near future DSL will likely embrace a wide variety of
other uses, including interactive gaming, streaming video and
advanced voice services.
"We believe that DSL has reached critical mass," said Robin
MacGillivray, vice president of business solutions at Pacific Bell, who
delivered a keynote address at the DSLCon 2000 trade show here
earlier this week. "But we have to take DSL beyond just data."
Pot of gold
The majority of consumers who are familiar with the technology
consider DSL a fast alternative to a dial-up analog modem, but
MacGillivray noted that the technology offers far more than just
Internet access. Because it can deliver an always-on connection with
significant bandwidth, she said, DSL pipes have the potential to bring
data, voice, information and entertainment into a home or business.
And that means extra sources of revenue coming in on the same
copper wiring. "A high-speed connection allows vendors to deliver an
array of valuable services," she said. "That's the real pot of gold at
the end of the DSL rainbow."
This trend is most clearly observable today in the deployment of
voice-over-DSL (VoDSL) lines. The technology was one of the most
talked-about subjects at the conference, and one company,
CopperCom Corp. (Santa Clara, Calif.), set up kiosks with
copper-colored telephones running over symmetric DSL (SDSL) lines
for anybody to try. The company makes central office switches and
end-user hubs for multiline voice applications over DSL-based
networks. It announced at the show that one of its service provider
customers, Picus Communications, has deployed the nation's largest
number to date of voice services over DSL.
Vendors say it is easy to translate analog voice signals into digital
format, and once the voice information is packetized it can be sent
across a data network like any other information. The only key
difference is ensuring that the voice packets receive priority to
maintain a continuous stream of voice packets in real-time. Both
chip and system companies are rapidly rolling out enhanced versions
of their DSL products that incorporate algorithms and hardware to
support voice traffic. Using CopperCom technology, Picus has
established VoDSL service in 41 cities in Virginia and the Washington,
D.C., area and the company plans to expand that network
throughout the year.
The economics of VoDSL are easy to grasp. A single twisted-pair
copper telephone line delivering analog voice calls can generate
about $70 per month in revenue, including both local and
long-distance service, according to information compiled by Copper
Mountain Networks Inc. (Palo Alto, Calif.). But the same wiring can
deliver multiple voice lines over a single DSL connection and
therefore significantly increase the revenue stream for a service
provider, according to Muni Perzov, voice product manager at
Copper Mountain.
That company is currently using SDSL technology to produce
systems carrying up to eight voice lines and expects to offer several
times that much capacity by the end of the year. "It makes a lot of
business sense for companies to get into offering voice services over
DSL," said Perzov.
DSL deployment is booming. Some estimates show that there were
more than 500,000 lines running in North America by the end of last
year, but that figure is predicted to swell more than fourfold to 2.1
million this year and could approach 10 million by 2003. VoDSL is
still a nascent market; a study from Cahners' In-Stat Group
(Scottsdale, Ariz.) measured the total market at $47 million last
year. However, the same study predicted that revenues will top $1.1
billion this year and grow to more than $9 billion in 2003.
"The key to understanding DSL is to realize that it is a
high-performance platform that can offer a variety of services," said
Perzov. "One of the great things about this convergence is that
service providers can get all these extra revenue streams."
Extra charges
Service providers are already looking at the business model based
on voice services that allow a single DSL line to deliver new services;
for the same infrastructure investment they can start to charge for
every type of service. Want to play Ultima Online? Charge for the
bandwidth. Want to download movies? Charge for the extra
bandwidth. Want to add extra phone lines when business surges or
your in-laws come to visit? Charge for the extra bandwidth. Need to
organize an unexpected videoconference? It's easy to set up and
charge for the extra bandwidth. The list goes on and on.
"DSL gives us a powerful platform and that will eventually lead to a
lot of new applications that we can't even imagine now," agreed
Jennifer Stagnaro, vice president of marketing for CopperCom.
The only concern is bandwidth. "Those kind of applications are going
to require an incredible amount of bandwidth," said Peter Meade,
managing partner for market analysis firm TeleResearch Inc.
(Carlsbad, Calif.) and conference director of DSLCon. He said it
remains to be seen how fat a pipe those kinds of services will
demand, but it could easily top 10 Mbits/second, which could far
outstrip the available capabilities of current dominant DSL versions.
Asymmetric DSL (ADSL) is currently rated to deliver a maximum
downstream bandwidth in the 6-to-8-Mbits/s range, while SDSL
delivers 1.5 Mbits/s in both directions.
And both of those figures can be dramatically scaled downward,
depending on a user's distance from the central office and the quality
of the line. "To get that kind of power now you practically need to
have the central office in your basement," said Meade.
What current DSL formats do have the power to deliver now is voice,
because that doesn't really tax the network much more than existing
data streams, said Shannon Pleasant, director of voice and data
research at In-Stat. A full-motion, broadcast-quality movie would
demand about 3 Mbits/s, which is the speed used for MPEG
compression video, but very few DSL loops can deliver that now.
Videoconferencing, which is not generally expected to offer the same
quality as a movie, can get by with less bandwidth. And interactive
gaming is also a definite maybe, with bandwidth demands also lower
than needed for streaming video.
There are two leading DSL flavors in the market and they have been
segmented by user group. The traditional Bell companies are using
mostly ADSL in their offerings to consumers, while the competitive
local exchange carriers (CLECs) have adopted SDSL and are
aggressively targeting the small business community. Although SDSL
has lower bandwidth, it offers faster upstream capabilities, which is
required by many businesses that have to send as much work as
they download. The consumer market is dominated by users that
primarily download information from the Internet and rarely send
anything more than e-mail messages. This makes ADSL ideal for
them now and the Bell companies are betting that the higher
bandwidth will allow them to offer new entertainment services to
garner new sources of revenue.
Pacific Bell also has plans to expand its bandwidth capabilities by
bringing the central office equipment closer to residential
neighborhoods. According to MacGillivray, the company currently can
reach some 12 million potential homes and businesses with DSL
service and that figure will reach 18 million by the end of the year.
By extending its fiber-optic network and moving the central office
equipment closer to the end users, she said, the company will triple
its potential penetration of DSL service, reaching 77 million homes
and offices by 2002. That could go a long way toward increasing the
bandwidth of the service and allowing newer services and newer
sources of revenue.
Credibility issue
Another possibility is to enhance the existing DSL capabilities.
Motorola Inc. is using echo-cancellation technology to increase ADSL
bandwidth to 11 Mbits/s and beyond. In-Stat analyst Pleasant said
this would be another way to increase bandwidth and revenues
possibilities, if it can be made to work. "Motorola has a credibility
issue with me," she said, remembering that the company was one of
the very first entrants into the DSL market with its CopperGold line,
but for years had difficulty making the chips actually work.
One thing nearly all the vendors agree upon is that there is no
shortage in demand for DSL products and services. And with that
much money at stake, it is nearly guaranteed that somebody will
step up to the plate and deliver what the market is demanding.
"Availability is the biggest challenge we have to overcome," said
PacBell's MacGillivray. |
