Rollout Woes Seen For DSL
By Loring Wirbel, EE Times
San Jose, Calif. - The inaugural DSLcon conference here last week had the feel of a gold rush, as chip and systems startups joined the hordes panning the flow of digital-subscriber-line technologies for the nugget of a follow-on to today's ubiquitous dial-up modem. At least half a dozen new DSL companies added to the buzz of mergers and alliances at the show, led by Cisco Systems Inc.'s $236 million acquisition of NetSpeed Inc.
The excitement suggested that carriers and OEMs are loath to acknowledge the rollout problems DSL services may face. The poor and undocumented quality of existing copper loops could mean any DSL scheme will require serious upgrades in today's telephone networks.
In part, the flowering of new business is a response to the Universal ADSL Working Group's belief that "splitterless" asymmetrical DSL based on the pending G.lite specification can become a mass consumer market in a matter of quarters, if not months (see Jan. 26, page 14). But DSLcon speakers warned that there are no easy solutions to the looming barriers to deployment.
And few seemed to heed the warning of Clive Hallatt, manager of strategic partnerships at PairGain Technologies Inc. (Tustin, Calif.), that "60 players in a $1 billion market indicates that a shakeout is inevitable." Even as Cisco picked up NetSpeed, newcomers emerged on all fronts.
In semiconductors, executives from Integrated Telecom Express Inc. (Santa Clara, Calif.) shopped around a concept for subrate discrete multitone (DMT) coding (see story, right). Joseph Choghi, former Siemens Components Inc. executive, spotlighted the efforts of his new company, Synthcom Inc. (Menlo Park, Calif.), in High-level Data Link Control (HDLC) devices for ISDN-speed DSL and in asynchronous-transfer-mode (ATM) segmentation processors for higher-rate DSL. Centillium Technology Inc. (Fremont, Calif.) pushed its Universal DSL as an alternative to DMT-based G.lite. Danny Gur, president of Israeli mid-speed-DSL chip specialist Metalink Inc., promoted the continued use of mid-speed symmetric DSL services for business customers.
But the chip players were overwhelmed by new OEMs:
Rick Tinsley and Eric Andrews of Newbridge Networks Inc. have joined with Kingston Duffie of Whitetree Inc. to form a new access specialist, Turnstone Systems Inc. (Mountain View, Calif.)
Gilles Concordel, promoter of the Joint Procurement Consortium for ADSL at Pacific Bell, has joined with Larry Blair of Ipsilon Networks to create RedBack Networks Inc. (Sunnyvale, Calif.)
George Marshall of ZeitNet and Adaptive Networks is tossing his hat into the DSL ring with startup OnPrem Networks Inc. (Fremont)
Stefan Knight of ATM Ltd./Virata is helping start a subscriber-side company called CopperCom Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.). Formed by Charlie Bass and Gordon Lee, it is examining multiple user services rather than data-only DSL modems.
"If a mass market is real, you couldn't expect new business activity to slow down," Knight said. "The trick now is to get real rollouts from carriers and differentiation within open standards for the system suppliers."
Tightening links
The running joke last week was which newcomer would prove the best candidate for acquisition by Cisco, but the internetworking giant proved at the show that its intentions are no laughing matter. On Tuesday, Cisco offered 3.704 million shares of stock to acquire all shares of NetSpeed (Austin, Texas)
NetSpeed has developed ADSL products based on carrierless amplitude/phase (CAP) line coding. Earlier this year, it used splitterless concepts developed by Globespan Semiconductor Inc. to launch EZ-DSL.
Just last summer, Cisco acquired DSL specialist Dagaz Technologies, a division of In-tegrated Network Corp. Observers of the NetSpeed deal at DSLcon wondered whether Cisco had gotten too little from Dagaz.
But Enzo Signore, manager of xDSL product marketing at Cisco, said Dagaz had brought experience in developing equipment for European markets and in Network Equipment Building Systems (NEBS) specs for central-office ruggedization. NetSpeed, for its part, brings a presence in the North American market and a broad set of customer-premises equipment, including SpeedRunner PCI cards.
"NetSpeed and Cisco both were early participants in UAWG, and we both supported PPP [the Point-to-Point Protocol] over ATM," Signore said. "Acquiring NetSpeed in the aftermath of the Dagaz purchase shows our commitment to developing a retail channel for DSL modems."
Even as Cisco and NetSpeed merged last week, Aware Inc. and Analog Devices Inc. loosened their ties. ADI based its original ADSL chip set on designs from Aware. But xDSL product-marketing manager Rupert Baines at ADI said last week that both companies are now free to develop products independently. ADI will appoint a dedicated software team to upgrade software for the msp900 family of ADSL devices. Aware, meanwhile, can license its algorithms to other semiconductor players and was expected to announce just such a deal at the end of last week.
Some of the original DSL specialists have fined-tuned their designs. Motorola Inc., whose CopperGold ADSL solution is almost a year late, showed working samples of both a transceiver and a line driver at the conference. Motorola is working to marry CopperGold with the 850SAR/860SAR family of PowerPCs for ATM applications. Brian Schreder, strategic planner for ATM at Motorola Semiconductor, said the company will push the PPP-over-ATM model for ADSL.
Lucent Technologies Inc.'s microelectronics division provided more details on its WildWire chip set for G.lite ADSL. Bob Rango, general manager of the modem and multimedia group, said Leo-1, a special spin of the 1600 DSP device, will provide downloadable support for both V.90 analog modem algorithms and G.lite ADSL. For customer-premises equipment, Leo-1 will interface to the Orion-1 analog front end. Lucent will use its 400-Mips 16210 Sabre DSP as a central-office access multiplexer, allowing support of several Orion-1 devices.
The chip group is developing the designs initially for Lucent's own switching and access division, which plans to offer three separate carrier systems for DSL access: the AnyMedia Access System, integrating a DSL access multiplexer (DSLAM) with a 5ESS switch; a non-integrated DSLAM; and a digital-loop-carrier (DLC) solution.
Despite the activity, DSL may not be ready for prime time. Dataquest Inc. analyst Brett Azuma is generally bullish on DSL but believes carriers and hardware vendors that have built business plans based on expected take rates of 25 percent or more are doomed to fail. As little as 5 percent of the potential customer base may actually be served by any DSL within five years' time, Azuma said.
Central-office equipment must stay small and NEBS-compliant to be acceptable for carriers, he said, and DSL service providers must aim for monthly subscription prices of no more than $50 for sub-T1 rates and $120 for T1 and above. He called UAWG predictions that G.lite modems could be ready by Christmas a "frankly unrealistic objective, since that would imply a draft standard by May."
Hallatt of PairGain said carriers can't assume one size will fit all and must aim for a mix of tiered DSL services for business and home applications. Traditional telco providers are worried about cannibalizing their T1 business, he said, and "carriers want something that is stable. DSL represents a big change, with no obvious business model for the carriers to follow."
DSL's Achilles' heel could be the DLC pedestals that serve many rural areas. Unlike loops that run straight from a central office, there is no obvious way to provide DSL concentration from a DLC pedestal.
"The DLC problem will not be solved quickly or simply," Hallatt said. "You can provide a single-line DSL 'plug' for the pedestals or put concentration into new DLCs, but you can't just go retrofit a bunch of hot, power-hungry boxes into the pedestals in the field."
The problems are magnified when competitive local-exchange carriers (CLECs) and Internet-service providers (ISPs) seek to provide DSL service. The Telco Reform Act requires incumbent local-exchange carriers (ILECs) to lease copper and central-office space to new carriers, but many ILECs are threatening to sue the newcomers if DSL services carried in a cable binder group interfere with existing data services carried on other wires.
Michael Malaga, chief executive of CLEC NorthPoint Communications Inc., said the problems don't end there. "The biggest problem is the incomplete databases on loop conditions," he said. "We can order copper, Pacific Bell will tell us with what they think is accurate information how long the loop is, and they can be off by a factor of two or three."
During a Monday test seminar at Tektronix Inc., Rick Puckett, marketing manager of Tektronix' cable network analysis division (Bend, Ore.), said carriers also have disincentives in cleaning up their local loops. Load coils were inserted into local loops to prevent high-frequency signals in the voiceband from attenuating on long lines. |
