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Technology Stocks : LAST MILE TECHNOLOGIES - Let's Discuss Them Here -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ftth who wrote (3294)	4/2/1999 10:53:00 AM
From: Kenneth E. Phillipps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12823

Article from Internet Week says US West will offer DSL that carves up to 16 voice channels out of a single DSL line and still provides a line for high speed data. Cost for voice is only $10 per line. This product is from Cisco. There is another article in Sounding Board about this technology. Nortel also has a product. As a self employed lawyer in a solo shop, I can tell you I am definitely interested in a product like this. This will be a dynamite product for law offices and medical offices. internetwk.com Ken Friday, April 2, 1999, 10:01 AM ET. DSL To Deliver Voice, Data By CHUCK MOOZAKIS U S West will offer by year's end a service that carves up to 16 voice channels out of a single digital subscriber line and still provides a high-speed channel for data, possibly for as low as $10 per voice line. That could present IT managers with the strong business case for DSL that has been lacking with some other convergent services, including ISDN and ATM. Enterprise users are understandably intrigued by this development. “My 800 dial bill is running upwards of $125,000 per month, and I'm doing everything I can to get the price down,” said one engineering manager at a large Midwest insurance company. “I would love to have one pipe for [multiple] at-home people.” Currently, the insurer relies on dial-up Internet access and toll-free numbers for voice in order to link remote users to headquarters. Jonathan Rudes, senior man-aging director of Newmark Real Estate Inc., said such a service would be a major advantage in marketing his commercial properties to prospective tenants. “If I can save space and provide advanced services without having to run additional equipment, that would be a major advantage formy office buildings,” said Rudes, who already offers DSL to one of his buildings. “They need high-speed Internet access and multiple phone lines.” Pricing for U S West's “derived voice service” (DVS), which is currently under development, hasn't been finalized, but it is expected that the voice lines will run about $10 each, said Larry Yokell, director of product development for MegaBit Services, part of U S West's !nterprise networking unit. That's about 50 percent less than a regular voice line. For now, DVS puts U S West ahead of the pack of other suppliers rolling out DSL services. SBC Communications Inc. has a segmented voice/data service dubbed Integrated Pathways, but it's based on a T1 line, according to an SBC spokesman. BellSouth and Bell Atlantic said they do not have similar offerings. Regional and national ISPs, such as Rhythms NetConnections Inc., Covad Communications Co. and NorthPoint Communications Inc., said they are focused on data-only DSL services at this time. IT managers should expect similar services from other vendors and service providers, said analyst Laurie Falconer, who follows DSL technology for TeleChoice Inc. “The carrier needs to get the voice piece of the business because that's where the revenue is. If they can provide multiple services to the same company, that customer will be tied closer to the carrier and less likely to bolt,” she said. “For the IT manager, it's much more efficient. If he or she can use only one provider for multiple services, it's easier to manage and provides an opportunity to save on voice lines.” DVS will use rate-adaptive DSL, a technology that dynamically adjusts to dirty lines or other transmission hiccups, Yokell said. DVS will run on DSL access multiplexers (DSLAMs) and other hardware being developed by Cisco and CopperCom Inc. RADSL can deliver data downstream at 6.1 Mbps and upstream at 1.5 Mbps. CopperCom's technology, called Copper Complete DSL, is a hardware and software combination that creates as many as 16 voice channels on a DSL pipe, said Jennifer Stagnaro, vice president of marketing at CopperCom. With RADSL, CopperCom could support 16 64-Kbps channels while still leaving room for 512 Kbps of data, assuming U S West decided to offer a full-throttled version of the technology. With compression, voice channels could be cut to 32 Kbps, leaving 1 Mbps for data. The CopperCom technology is currently being tested and is expected to go into trials next quarter, Stagnaro said. Cisco declined to comment on the specific technology it's developing for U S West. Copper Complete takes disparate voice and data streams and pools them through a small customer-premises device, which packetizes the data and voice traffic for transport over one DSL line. The blended traffic is carried through the DSL pipe to Cisco DSLAMs located at a U S West switching center. There, the traffic from several DSLAMs is concentrated onto an ATM switch, where the data is siphoned off to the user's ISP. Voice traffic is sent to a CopperCom gateway, where the packetized voice is converted back to digital and funneled to the public telephone network.