Ski, it sure does sound like a good possibility that the self install kit might be Westell. The guy btrader 70 (http://messages.yahoo.com/bbs?.mm=FN&action=m&board=4686867&tid=wstl&sid=4686867&mid=14958) on the yahoo WSTL thread claims there is a contract announcement coming out Monday or Tuesday of next week with a telco.
This is an informative article on the deployment of fiber remotes to the neighborhoods so that DSL can be linked to every house quickly and efficiently by the ILECs. It is the ILEC deployment and the use of fiber remotes (PON) that gives WSTL the potential that it has to explosively grow.
JUNE 30, 2000
lightreading.com
Where Copper Meets Glass
On the face of it, passive optical networks (PONs) and digital subscriber line (DSL) services couldn't be less compatible. While both are low-cost, high-speed techniques for delivering data to homes and offices, PONs run over fiber and DSL uses copper connections. (See PONs: Passive Aggression for more on PONs.)
But industry sources say there's a new dialectic at work, making PONs and DSL the ideal partners in building out next-generation carrier nets.
Here's why: Recent U.S. regulatory rulings from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) are giving ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) an incentive to get DSL services up and running on a grander scale. As a result, DSL services are expected to explode in the near future. And that's leading carriers to expand the buildout of their networks to support DSL.
PONs will reduce the costs of expansion. Specifically, carriers say they'll use PONs to extend bandwidth cheaply from the central office to multiple outdoor vaults, where telecom gear is linked to last-mile copper or fiber. PONs would let carriers use just one fiber from the central office to deliver bandwidth to up to 32 remote outdoor vaults. Inside each vault, the PON link would be hooked to a DSL access multiplexer, which in turn could pass bandwidth over existing copper wire to homes and businesses.
"PONs are definitely going to be the fastest, cheapest way for incumbents to expand DSL services," says Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corp. cimicorp.com, a consultancy. He says the link between DSL and PONs is already happening in the network of SBC Communications sbc.com (NYSE: SBC).
According to that carrier's Web site, over 4,000 outdoor vaults are going in this year. They'll be populated by Litespan-2000 and -2001 Digital Loop Carrier DSL devices from Alcatel SA alcatel.com. Nolle says sources at Alcatel told him that many of those outdoor vaults will be fed by PONs--also supplied by Alcatel. "The Litespan-2001 has been upgraded specifically to handle PON feeds," he says.
Neither Alcatel nor SBC would confirm the use of Alcatel PONs in SBC's network at press time. ...
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-- by Mary Jander, senior editor, Light Reading (http://www.lightreading.com)
lightreading.com
Standards
PONs emerged from the lab thanks to a 1995 group formed by British Telecommunications PLC
bt.com. Dubbed the Full Service Access Network (FSAN, fsan.org)
coalition, the group soon included Alcatel, BellSouth, Fujitsu, Lucent, NEC, NTT SBC, Siemens,
Nortel Networks, NTT, and a range of other carriers and equipment vendors.
The goal of the FSAN group was the same as its name: to find the cheapest, fastest way to
create a "full service access network" that would extend emerging high-speed services, such as
IP data, video, and 10/100 Ethernet, over fiber to residential and business customers worldwide.
The group decided to use ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) over a simple physical network
with a minimum of moving parts. ATM is an ideal transport for PONs because it supports quality of
service guarantees for a range of traffic types-voice, data, and video--over a single link.
By 1999, specs for a fundamental ATM PON had been written and approved by the ITU-T
(International Telecommunication Union, www.itu.org) as specs G.983.1 and G.983.2 in the
ITU-T's Study Group 15 (which addresses transport networks, systems, and equipment).
This specification helped fuel the marked increase in PON product development that's taken place
over the past six months. Today, trials of commercial PON gear are underway around the world,
including projects sponsored by NTT in Japan; Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, Comcast and SBC in the
U.S.; and Singapore Telecom.
All the best,
Michael |
