Hey! the Yahoo thread had somebody reading a print copy of an
article about C-Cube tonight. Rover tf finds that C-Cube is in DSL.......
Subj: CUBE PR
By: Rover_tf
Date: Feb 25 1998 6:58 P.M PST
Reply To: Msg. 1 by YahooFinance
Hope this hasn't been posted lately, as I've been gone.
In the Feb16 issue of LANTIMES, good ol' Alex gets the cover story.
Of course its not about a CUBE product, but about how CUBE is in
the process of transferring most of its telecommuters from ISDN to
xDSL services. It does however paint a good picture of CUBE as a
high-tech cutting-edge company. Score one for the PR people.
Rover
Hopefully the stock price goes up like their Mbps will.
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Here's the link......................
lantimes.com
ADSL gets access call
Standards promised, but availability is still hung up on expensive deployment
By Brian Riggs
he computing industry has tagged Digital Subscriber Lines as the next big thing for remote access, despite a glaring lack of deployable services and standards.
The spotlight shone last month when heavy hitters Compaq Corp., Intel Corp., and Microsoft Corp. announced plans to spearhead a consortium--called the Universal ADSL Working Group (UAWG)--to standardize an easy-to-deploy, megabit-speed version of Digital Subscriber Line (xDSL) technology.
Services, although far from universally available, are also widespread enough for some cor- porations to begin migrating telecommuter and remote-office connectivity to xDSL from more traditional access services.
"DSL lets us pull the plug on ISDN," said Alexandre Balkanski, president and CEO of C-Cube Microsystems Inc., a developer of digitized video products in Milpitas, Calif.
This month C-Cube will start using xDSL to provide remote LAN access at 384Kbps and 1.1Mbps speeds to telecommuters' homes throughout the San Francisco Bay area.
But xDSL faces a long, hard road before the vast majority of corporations will be able to consider it for remote LAN and Internet access.
The UAWG effort addresses only a modicum of the issues that are preventing the widespread deployment of xDSL services. And vendor members are already squabbling over the most basic of details of the yet-to-be written specification, potentially diluting its impact on service deployment.
Speed the easy way
Service providers have tested xDSL--which carries data and voice traffic at speeds up to 8Mbps over standard copper wires--and deployed it regionally for just more than a year.
In addition to providing high bit rates, xDSL promises to be much easier to order, install, configure, and manage compared with ISDN and other remote-access transports.
"We had a lot of disappointments with ISDN lines which are very cumbersome to put in place," said C-Cube's Balkanski.
The installation of xDSL lines is much more straightforward, he said, and higher data rates will provide telecommuters better access to LAN files and applications.
C-Cube engineers will be able to run CAD/CAM applications over xDSL connections provided by Covad Communications Co., a competitive local access carrier (CLEC) in Santa Clara, Calif.
C-Cube marketing personnel and other employees will use the high-speed lines to quickly transfer Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, Microsoft Excel spread- sheets, and other large files.
Eventually, xDSL is expected to replace the ISDN services to which more than 50 C-Cube engineers now subscribe. Between one-third and one-half of C-Cube's 800 employees will have xDSL connections by the end of the year, Balkanski estimates.
C-Cube is the exception, however, and not the rule.
Despite more than a year of service deployment, xDSL services elude the vast majority of corporations.
Service providers' slow deployment of xDSL has made it difficult to predict how widely the services will be available. The Yankee Group Inc. expects 300,000 xDSL lines to be installed by year-end and 1.78 million by the year 2000. Similarly, TeleChoice Inc. forecasts 1 million lines by the turn of the century. A year ago, however, TeleChoice estimated 5 million xDSL lines by 2000.
This fluctuation is owing in part to service providers' discovery that xDSL services can be difficult and expensive to deploy.
For example, asymmetric DSL (ADSL) typically requires telco technicians to install "splitters"--specialized customer-premises equipment (CPE) that separates voice and data traffic--at every customer's office or home.
Ameritech Inc., which late last year began offering ADSL services in Ann Arbor, Mich., needs to install a splitter, rewire part of the subscriber's house or office, install a NIC in each subscriber's PC, and then reconfigure the PC's software to support the service. Peripheral installation and PC configuration "is not the sort of business we want to be in," said Mark Hubscher, Ameritech's director of xDSL product development in Chicago.
So PC industry leaders have been working to make xDSL installation and configuration as plug-and-play as possible.
"Microsoft is working on a set of wizards that will inspect the PC for the [ADSL] modem, install the appropriate drivers, connect to the network, install the appropriate network stacks, configure properly, and make the appropriate registry modifications," said Joseph Mouhanna, group manager of public network platforms at Microsoft.
Mouhanna declined to comment on when ADSL support would be available, but industry rumors say that Microsoft expects it to be integrated into Windows 98.
Compaq plans to sell Presario PCs with Alcatel Inc. ADSL equipment already installed to Ameritech's ADSL service subscribers. When ADSL services are more widely available, Compaq plans to sells the units in other areas as well. Intel plans to enable its Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, which ship with many new PCs, to connect to external xDSL modems.
And xDSL equipment vendors such as Lucent Technologies Inc., NetSpeed Inc., Northern Telecom Inc., Paradyne Inc., and Rockwell Semiconductor Systems have developed a number of proprietary ways to deploy ADSL services without splitters.
The trade-off for simple, splitterless installation is speed. Splitterless ADSL equipment tops out at about 1.5Mbps--roughly eight times the speed of ISDN but only a fraction of the 8Mbps speeds of "full-rate" ADSL equipment.
US West Communications Inc. plans to use Paradyne and Netspeed's competing splitterless equipment in a 40-city service rollout to be completed this summer. Ameritech Inc. and Covad are also among the service providers that plan to offer splitterless ADSL services later this year.
But there is no standard for splitterless ADSL that promises to pave the way to interoperable equipment.
"The key to all this is the standardization process," said Clive Hallett, manager of strategic partnerships at Pairgain Technologies Inc. in Palo Alto, Calif.
"The RBOCs [regional Bell operating companies] want to be able to offer ubiquitous service using any [xDSL] modem. Up to this point that has not been possible," he said.
An International Telecommunication Union (ITU) subcommittee called G.lite ("lite" refers to a "light," or low-speed, version of ADSL) is comprised of vendors developing splitterless ADSL CPE. But the subcommittee is far from writing specs for fully interoperable equipment, according to industry insiders.
"G.lite is insufficient," said Covad President and CEO Chuck McMinn. "G.lite specifies line coding and a little bit more but it does not specify all the things you need to have interoperable CPE."
Enter the UAWG.
Led by Compaq, Intel, and Microsoft, the UAWG's members include all five RBOCs and a broad array of other service providers and equipment vendors.
The UAWG's plan is to write an extension of the ANSI T1.413 ADSL standard that will define splitterless ADSL and lead to interoperable equipment. The UAWG's recommendations will be submitted to G.lite for ratification expected as early as this autumn. Products incorporating the Universal ADSL specification may be ready as early as year-end.
"This move addresses some of the key obstacles to making [xDSL] an effective mass-market service," said Joe Zall, president of !nterprise networking service at US West in Denver. "This is going to allow us to bring high-speed data and Internet services to the homes of our consumers more quickly and less expensively than it would have otherwise."
Specific line speeds for Universal ADSL have not yet been determined but Kevin Kahn, co-chair of the UAWG and director of communications architecture at Intel in Hillsboro, Ore., expects speeds of approximately 1Mbps downstream from the telco to the end user's PC and 384Kbps the other direction.
But the UAWG is already starting to break into factions which threaten to grind splitterless standardization to a halt (see "Splitterless contention," below).
And analysts warn that although splitterless ADSL addresses one of the hurdles preventing xDSL widespread deployment, it is no panacea.
Load coils and bridge taps have both been part of telcos' copper plants, but can interfere with high-frequency signals produced by ADSL services. Both must be removed from local loops for ADSL services--including Universal ADSL--to be run over them.
Even with a splitterless ADSL standard in place telcos will still have to do loop qualifications to resolve load coils and bridge tap issues, the UAWG's Kahn said. |
