InFusion on ADSL:
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RBOCs vow 1999 will be DSL's year
By Tim Greene
Network World, 08/17/98
Long berated as foot draggers in the race to offer high-speed digital subscriber line services, the big regional phone companies are making noises that 1999 will be the year for DSL.
Here's what you can expect from the RBOCs next year:
BellSouth will offer DSL that is faster than T-1 but slower than T-3. The offering will come with guaranteed quality of service for ATM over DSL. Bell Atlantic will launch DSL services that boast various servjust going point to point. US WEST will be able to support more customers with its Megabit service.
While business customers will have to pay far more than residential customers, the added corporate features warrant the extra cost, regional Bell operating companies claim.
Current residential DSL service for Internet access is just raw bandwidth, with no guaranteed speed across the entire network.
"It's an as-is service. If it works, it works, and if the customer is satisfied, fine," says John Cahill, executive director of BellSouth's advanced networking division.
Even as they tout new offerings, RBOCs acknowledge they cannot offer DSL everywhere. They are going to target metropolitan areas where large numbers of people telecommute and businesses need to connect remote sites.
"Our thrust is to connect as many of our customers as possible with broadband access to network services. The problem is, when you get into rural areas, the cost is prohibitive," says Matt Rotter, executive director of US WEST's Megabit DSL services.
Next year, BellSouth is looking to offer DSL services that will run over new or specially conditioned copper lines and will support higher bandwidths. "It will use ATM quality of service on part of the link at a higher price," Cahill says.
Business customers want service-level guarantees for availability, bandwidth and time to repair, he says.
Bell Atlantic also wants to offer different service-quality levels and prioritization schemes. DSL is now considered a point-to-point connection, but in the middle of 1999, Bell Atlantic will offer a service supporting multiple destinations, according to Fran Leithead, Bell Atlantic product manager for XDSL business marketing.
Multiple destination support will be accomplished using a DSL scheme whipped up by industry heavyweights, including Microsoft, Cisco and FORE, to run PPP sessions over ATM over a DSL link.
This way, one customer could connect with an ISP in one PPP session, for example, and start a new session connecting to the corporate network using PPP over ATM.
The scheme requires outfitting the customer site with an ATM interface to the DSL line.
Bell Atlantic is also shooting for symmetric DSLs to fill the void between 56K bit/sec dedicated lines and T-1 lines.
Most current DSL services are asymmetric, with download speeds more than double the upload speeds. "Our plans are to get [DSL-based] fractional T-1 services out to the business market that would be competitively priced," says Liethead.
He says the company is weighing how high to set prices for its business-class DSL by looking at what it already charges for similar-speed frame relay and ATM services.
Down at BellSouth
BellSouth's Cahill says his company is looking at symmetric DSL at speeds faster than T-1 but slower than T-3.
The symmetric DSL implementations are nothing more than fractional T-1 and T-3 under a different name, according to Frank Dzubeck, president of Communications Network Architects in Washington, D.C.
In fact, RBOCs already use high-bit-rate DSL to provision T-1 lines.
Meanwhile, competitive local exchange carriers (CLEC) push symmetric DSL, Dzubeck says. "But really what they're implementing is fractional T-1. They can't call it that because if they do, they'll get into the bind of RBOC comparisons," he says. "DSL is used as a digital local loop equivalent of T-1 services, and that's where it should be at this moment, trying to knock down those T-1 prices."
Problems solved
While they are bristling now with bright ideas about DSL, RBOCs have been far slower to deploy the technology than CLECs. In part, DSLs say, that is because they face a raft of technical and regulatory problems and market pressures CLECs don't.
Some potential customers are skeptical. "Maybe they are letting some of the leaders go out there and establish a market presence for DSL. It makes you wonder if it is going to be one of those things where there will be a lot of hoopla, then nothing happens," says Rick Curry, a store technical operations team leader for J.C. Penney.
But the RBOCs can and do rattle off a long list of impediments. The RBOCs are prevented by the Federal Communications Commission from offering long-distance service, which means they cannot directly link sites that span local calling areas without calling in a longdistance carrier. This limitation hobbles RBOCs when they try to offer end-to-end services to customers, the RBOCs say.
Waiting for standards
RBOCs also evaluate gear by stringent routines so they only put case-hardened equipment in their networks. That testing takes longer than the tests CLECs might use.
And RBOCs, more so than the competitive carriers, have waited for standards to settle down. With their greater reach, the RBOCs say they need to install gear that can be installed and maintained across their service areas.
That is not so much a problem for CLECs, according to Eric Geis, general manager for the western region for Rhythms, a Colorado-based CLEC. If Rhythms has pockets of unique gear, that's OK to a limited degree, Geis says.
Despite standards problems, US WEST dove into DSL early with its Megabit service, and had to decide whether DSL sales would hurt other services.
"Some customers who are probably buying Megabit would have bought ISDN. [With Megabit] they clearly get more bandwidth for less money," USWEST's Rotter says.
Some critics say RBOCs also fear cannibalizing their T-1 services, which are close in bandwidth to some DSL offerings. DSL prices are typically a fifth or less than T-1 prices.
But even competitors see DSL as supplemental to T-1 services, not as a replacement. "For many of our industrial customers, that is exactly their network design. A fraction of their links are T-1 lines, another proportion are DSL. DSL is an addition instead of a replacement," says Gloria Farler, vice president of marketing for Rhythms.
That may change, she adds, as pragmatic network managers become more confident in the reliability of DSL.
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