OT>> For the past several years, digital subscriber line (DSL) has been seen
as the carriers' broadband high-speed access solution. Now xDSL is
here, at least in a limited fashion, but some of the problems that have
dogged deployment are still important issues, according to industry
insiders. In fact, although many thought 1998 would be the year for
DSL, it looks like it will be a few years before it is a mass market
commodity, thereby allowing cable modems and satellite broadband
services to gain an advantage. “The broadband access market is all
about momentum,” said Westell CEO Marc Zionts. “The cable
modem folks have it because of the AT&T/TCI deal which captured
a lot of attention. It's going to take some successful deployments of
DSL with significant subscriber growth to grab that momentum back.”
DSL makes a lot of sense for residential users because it offers up to
7 Mbps bandwidth on existing copper. Most carriers have elected to
deploy asynchronous DSL (ADSL). The interest in xDSL from the
incumbent local exchanges carriers (ILECs) was stimulated by the
limited--but growing--success of cable modems, though unlike
ILECs, the cable industry has nothing to lose by rolling out high-speed
access services to their embedded bases. “The cable companies
aren't undercutting their existing services by offering new ones,” Jeff
Goldthorp of Bellcore recently told attendees at the DSL ComForum
sponsored by the International Engineering Consortium. “ILECs have
to worry about things like interference with POTS and may be
slowing down the rollout.”
Many carriers are doing highly specific target marketing to subsets of
their populations. “That's a nice way to get the service started and
show good penetration rates, but it may not be the best way to create
a mass market industry,” said Bill Rodey, vice chairman of the ADSL
Forum. Another factor that may be slowing down mass deployment is
that RBOCs aren't good at marketing, according to Zionts, whose
company is co-marketing ADSL services with carriers to help spread
the word about the technology “It's not playing well because they
aren't telling a very good story,” he said. “There is a relative lack of
knowledge in the user community about DSL and its benefits. There
has to be an aggressive push by the service providers so that people
know about the service, are excited about it, and are willing to wait
until it is available in their area.”
Rodey worries that although the news on DSL is good, Wall Street
and many analysts seem to believe that cable modems have won the
war. TeleChoice analyst Beth Gage said her company estimates there
will be 2.5 million users signed up for DSL services in the next five
years. “I'm starting to get skeptical that DSL will ever be a mass
market technology where tens of millions of lines are deployed,” Gage
said. A recent report by Forrester Research agreed that DSL will
likely never gain sizable numbers. According to Christopher Mines,
director of Forrester's People & Technology Strategies service, DSL
will win only 20 percent of the residential broadband market, while
cable companies will capture 80 percent--a growth fueled by falling
cable modem prices and increasing consumer awareness.
There are many technical challenges that remain with DSL as well.
Interoperability is a big one, but with widespread testing starting to
occur, it's an issue that most vendors say is addressable. “I think the
end users are going to have input on pushing interoperability forward,”
said Frank Costello, Alcatel USA's business development manager
for ADSL. “If you move from Boston to the West Coast, you're
going to want your ADSL modem to work there or you're going to
have something to say to your service provider about that.” ANSI
and the ITU are currently drafting interoperability standards, and the
ADSL Forum is working on test suites, which are tools suppliers can
use to test interoperability.
According to Costello, in order for ADSL to be successful, the
log-on experience has to be as painless as it is with an analog modem,
something interoperability standards can help. “I still see some issues
with the end-to-end management of the quality of service that is being
delivered,” Costello said. “Things like PPP over ATM are being
introduced on internal modem cards, but there are still some issues
with external modems, and a Layer 2 tunneling protocol (L2TP) is
being worked on to address some of those problems.”
The relatively high price for providing solutions in the digital loop
carrier (DLC) arena is also a challenge for carriers. “DLCs cover
anywhere from 30 percent to 60 percent of territories, depending on
the carrier, and some of them are going to be prevented from serving
a large portion of their territories until they get a solution,” said Robert
Burke, Atium marketing director at AG Communication Systems.
“Whereas a typical central office serves 15,000 to 50,000 lines that
are wired directly via twisted pair to the customer premises, DLCs
serve between 100 and 500 lines. It's a lot less attractive pricewise to
serve customers out of a DLC, but any subdivision, office park, or
skyscraper built in the last dozen years is probably served by one.”
Burke estimates that for carriers, the cost per line out of a DLC will
be roughly twice the cost per line out of a central office.
The challenges of DSL are many, and seemingly once some hurdles
are crossed new ones appear. Vendors, however, said once the
lingering marketing and technical questions are answered, DSL
services will be popular among consumers. “For years, we've been
saying, ‘It's coming,'” Rodey said. “With a lot of excitement, we can
finally say, ‘It's here.'”
Susan O'Keefe is senior editor at Telecommunications. |
