1-Meg Modem To Debut -- [NYC] Carrier Preps Bandwidth Option To DSL
August 25, 1998 COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS via NewsEdge
Corporation : New York -- Although a digital subscriber
line standard will not be finished until October, a small
carrier plans to cash in this fall with a similar service
using products that already are shipping.
The service, a splitterless DSL-like offering, uses line
cards, eliminating the need for a special multiplexer at a
carrier's central office, which is required by some forms
of DSL. The service, however, is proprietary in that the
line card in the central office must terminate in a
Northern Telecom Inc. central office switch.
Business customers in New York's metropolitan area are
expected to be the first to try Nortel's 1-Meg Modem
when TransWire Communications Inc., a competitive
local exchange carrier based here, stokes its service in
October or early November.
TransWire already sells a limited service in Manhattan.
TransWire is the first carrier to deploy this DSL-like
technology at " popular" prices, said Peter Bernstein,
president of Infonautics Consulting Inc., Ramsey, N.J.
But some other small carriers plan to offer the 1-Meg
Modem service, including Champaign Telephone, a
carrier based in Urbana, Ohio, and MegsINet Inc., a
Chicago-based ISP that plans to launch a multistate
service this fall.
"TransWire will be closely watched because with all the
hemming and hawing in the regulatory environment,
here is a company that will be in the business
competing," Bernstein said.
Although VARs will be able to recommend the service,
there are no immediate plans for a reseller program, said
Nortel executives.
Nortel's 1-Meg Modem has a somewhat different
modulation scheme than the form of DSL pitched by the
Universal ADSL Working Group (UAWG), an
organization of carriers and hardware and software
manufacturers. UAWG promotes its own low-cost,
splitterless version of ADSL, called G.lite.
Nortel's technology will support the G.lite standard
"when it delivers the same value proposition as the
1-Meg Modem," said Stephen Edwards, Nortel's vice
president of data access solutions.
G.lite, backed by computer and software companies
including Microsoft Corp., Intel Corp. and Compaq
Computer Corp. as well as numerous carriers, is expected
to be approved by an international standards committee
in October.
Customers can expect products supporting the standard
by the end of the year, analysts said.
In addition to its work with the UAWG, Microsoft has
hedged its bets by also supporting Nortel's 1-Meg
Modem. The software giant last week said it has
installed the modem along with its Windows NT Server
Internet Telephony applications at the Microsoft Partner
Solutions Center.
Nortel's technology is better suited to running on the
aging twisted-pair wire installed throughout much of the
country, including the New York area, said Terrence
Peck, TransWire's chief executive.
Other forms of DSL have problems running on older
copper plant infrastructure at any distance, and some
forms of DSL cannot coexist in the same bindery of wire
because they radiate too much, Peck said.
Still, there is a price to pay in sheer power.
The CRN Test Center recently clocked the 1-Meg
Modem at speeds slower than some DSL modems. But
the 1-Meg Modem still is 17 times faster than a
56-Kbit-per-second modem, however, and almost eight
times faster than an ISDN modem in the downstream
direction.
"There are a lot of different proprietary technologies out
there today that will sacrifice speed for distance, so the
concept is not new," said Beth Gage, a senior broadband
consultant at TeleChoice, Verona, N.J.
Copyright - 1998 CMP Media Inc.
By Margie Semilof
<<COMPUTER RESELLER NEWS -- 08-24-98, p. PG1>>
[Copyright 1998, CMP Publications]
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