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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (3058)	3/12/1999 4:38:00 AM
From: Raymond Duray	Respond to of 12823

Gentlepersons and the rest of you as well, This is an RFC: infoworld.com Nortel combines best of DSL with best of Ethernet for 10Mbps Internet access On March 23, another new Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology will be announced by a major telephone equipment manufacturer. And you heard it here first. EDSL is not what Nortel will call its new technology. Nor will the company call it 10,000Kbps (vs. 56Kbps) modems. Nortel's new DSL will be called EtherLoop, short for Ethernet Local Loop. Northern Telecom (Nortel) has been in digital telephony since 1976. Its annual sales grew 20 percent in 1997 to $15.5 billion. And its telephone switches now provide 120 million digital lines worldwide. (See nortel.com.) Jack Terry joined Nortel in 1974. Today, he is assistant vice president of broadband technology and architecture. He is an award-winning fellow of the IEEE. Terry knows everything there is to know about the copper wires running into the telephone central offices of the incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs). He is the principal inventor of EtherLoop. And I spoke with him last week. Terry confirms that Asymmetric DSL (ADSL), so popular among Compaq, Intel, Microsoft, and the ILECs, has problems that slowing down won't fix. ADSL wasn't even designed for Internet access. It was designed so ILECs could broadcast video on demand. To develop EtherLoop for Internet access, Terry started with the basic transmission properties of "binder groups." A binder is a standard telephone cable through which 25 wire pairs snake toward ILEC central offices. And binders are grouped. Any DSL must grapple with the sad fact that signals sent down telephone pairs interfere (crosstalk) within and among binders. A binder group has to be treated as a shared medium. Terry's primary design criterion for EtherLoop was that it could be deployed by competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs). That and carry Internet packets the way an Ethernet LAN does, rather than broadcast constant bit-rate video streams. Terry says EtherLoop is "stealth" technology. It can be installed on ILEC binder groups with minimal interference, administration, and cost. No rewiring is required, so EtherLoop requires virtually no service calls. EtherLoop operates through one telephone pair, which can also be carrying plain old telephone service (POTS). EtherLoop multiplexers near the media distribution frames in ILEC central offices split off POTS for ILEC voice switches and run Ethernet over to CLEC packet switches. EtherLoop will carry Internet packets from homes and offices at speeds as fast as 10Mbps. Terry estimates that the total transmission capacity of a 50-pair binder group is 250Mbps. Of course, the farther an EtherLoop modem is from its multiplexer in a central office, the slower it operates, approximately 5Mbps as far as 6 kilometers. EtherLoop's secret is that it does not transmit continuously. Like Ethernet, it transmits packets in bursts. Between Ethernet (IEEE 802.3) packets, idle EtherLoop multiplexers test their transmission environments and recalculate per-line equalization. ADSL's continuous modem synchronization assures that binder groups are overflowing with transmission energy, much of which becomes the crosstalk ADSL struggles with. EtherLoop reduces power and therefore noise in binder groups. EtherLoop is agile among transmission rates, frequencies, packet starts, power, and methods of modulation. EtherLoop multiplexers share binder group transmission capacities, avoiding noise at times and frequencies, and like Ethernet, staying out of one another's way. EtherLoop does not suffer collisions. EtherLoop modems only speak when spoken to by EtherLoop multiplexers. EtherLoop is coming to market with a multiplexer chip that handles as many as eight telephone pairs. This chip contributes to EtherLoop's 10-to-1 power-space advantage over ADSL. Rotation among pairs is maintained, Terry says, to minimize delay for IP telephony. Terry wants EtherLoop to be a standard so Nortel will submit it to the International Telecommunication Union or to the IEEE. Nortel is also submitting EtherLoop to a "publishable technical audit" by Bellcore. Terry expects to receive a clean bill of spectral compatibility from Bellcore. It's easy to predict that ILECs will try to prevent CLECs from deploying EtherLoop, claiming interference in binder groups with POTS and ADSL services. The Bellcore audit will help Nortel's CLECs overcome ILEC foot-dragging at public utility commissions. Let's wish EtherLoop well in the fierce competition ahead among DSLs, ILECs, and CLECs. Technology pundit Bob Metcalfe invented Ethernet in 1973 and founded 3Com in 1979, and today he specializes in the Internet. Send e-mail to Metcalfe@infoworld.com. Missed a column? Go back for more. Well, I regard myself as among the clueless, however, ahem, Frank et.al. is there anything to this proposal? I was suprised in reading the Pulver report that MGCP, which I thought was an accepted standard is not really close to ITU acceptance. Is this Metcalfe piece yet more dreams and hopes, yet not reality? As I say, I submit my RFC. TIA Best, Ray