DSL Prime SBC "We need video"

March 6, 2003 "The Bells, if they ultimately want to survive, are going to have to invest," WSJ editorial

     U.S. growth is dependent upon the telcos, whom I hope will rise to the occasion. I wrote the same day as the WSJ "The smartest folks at the telcos want to invest significantly"  At the Merrill Lynch conference, Randall Stephenson, CFO, SBC answered "We need to offer video where we compete with cable telephony."  He knows cable will offer voice in most of SBC territory by 2005.  BellSouth's Ackerman wants to "deliver the promise of a new frontier-a digital frontier-to America."

     So while Stephenson promises Wall Street he'll complete $10B in capital spending cuts, his company is necessarily gearing up to build its future. When the shouting ends, SBC will presumably rediscover why Whitacre promised DSL to 80% in 2002 and broadband to all customers soon after. Verizon announced "High-Speed Internet Access In Six North Puget Sound Communities" as I went to press, and Seidenberg says when, not if, for the fiber build.

     The best people in our business will deliver some answers at Fast Net Futures in San Jose in three weeks. You have no time and no travel budget, but you should come anyway. http://www.pulver.com/fastnet/ code "DSLP". If you need to know, be there.
   
"Peace is a gift of God, to be invoked with humble and insistent faith." Pope John Paul II

** Adtran Brings High Density to M13 Market
Cabling and Protect Innovations Set new Standards

ADTRAN's new MX2820 is a high-density multiplexer that provides nine fully redundant M13s in a 23rack, only 2U high. Simplified management, cost savings, space efficiency, and a 1:1 protection system make the MX2820 the most compelling multiplexing solution on the market today.    http://www.adtran.com/info/?mx2820launch (ad)

ST, Infineon talk 100 meg VDSL
Infineon ships 3 million ports
VDSL chips will be a $100M market in 2004-5, although little is likely in the U.S. or Europe. But SBC, Qwest, Bell Canada, British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Korea Telecom, Telenor, Telecom Italia and others were represented in Toronto at the FSAN meeting, planning for their future. Sales are already strong in Korea, NTT is close to a major decision, and China Telecom is looking for a way to meet customer demand and is expected to be a major customer.

     In Europe, Belgacom is considering higher speeds, while France Telecom is readying a response to the video deployment by Free. SBC is preparing a backup strategy in case they don't buy DirecTV, and reviewing whether fiber to the home or fiber to the curb/VDSL is the more effective.

    Cisco is becoming a surprise large customer, delivering building systems in many parts of the world with 10 meg symmetric VDSL going over building wires. They and Ericsson are developing a complete line of products around the Ethernet in the First Mile specification. Don't be surprised to see several other VDSL chips ready for testing soon; Broadcom, Globespan, and an Asian chipmaker are rumored close.

Both ST and Infineon, reach for 100 meg, introduced a new measure - bandwidth in both directions added together. Thus Infineon headlines "New QAM-VDSL Chip-Set Exceeds 100 Mbps" and explains the VDSL5100 provides asymmetric data-rates of 70 Mbps downstream/40 Mbps upstream and symmetric data-rates of 50/50 Mbps up to 1,700 feet (500 meters). ST headlines "ZipperWire VDSL Chipset Delivering Up to 100Mbps, " with fewer explicit details.

      Until this week, DSL speeds were characterized by the highest speed obtained in a single direction. I wouldn't change that practice, although I appreciate why so many are reaching for Technet "100 Mbps" goal.

http://www.pulver.com/fastnet/ code "DSLP".

ST is back with VDSL Alcatel Micro was once the dominant DSL chip vendor, leveraging the system division's DSLAM market dominance and backing that up with aggressive chip pricing to others. Maintaining that lead in modem chips for many years required tough decisions, especially when Texas Instruments decided to price as low as necessary to win customers. After initial heavy losses, TI's doing pretty well, just announcing 20M chips shipped. Eventually, Alcatel sold the division to frequent partner ST. ST promises me "lots of news" as they deliver on an aggressive roadmap to be a "profitable market leader." ST, Ikanos, and Alcatel have been discussing with customers VDSL/ADSL chips that would be close in price to ADSL only chips, but that's a future goal.

     Now that ST has VDSL chips sampling, they report important first steps towards a VDSL-DMT standard with interoperability testing with Ikanos VDSL-DMT before the telcos assembled at Toronto's FSAN. This was crucial, because Metalink & Infineon have been working together to provide customers two sources. Next step will be DSL Forum sponsored testing at the University of New Hampshire.

Infineon's new VDSL 5100, sampling soon, is a shrink to 0.13 micron production technology. Infineon claims at longer ranges, the VDSL5100 delivers symmetric 10 Mbps over 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) and up to 4 Mbps at 12,000 feet (4 Km) using Band 0. They are pricing aggressively, with the 4 band chip headed toward $15.

Next Level released the next generation of their equipment: smaller, less expensive, and designed for deployment in North American telcos. Manitoba is very interested, with Bell Canada watching closely and likely to expand VDSL as soon as they have some capital spending budget. "We're turning a profit on television and high-speed Internet services today," said Tony DiStefano, vice president of All West Communications, in Next Level's announcement they had shipped over 100K VDSL video lines and nearly as many high speed data connections. The team in Rohnert Park are fighting valiantly to keep control of the products they've built as Motorola seeks total control. 

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Qwest to 7 meg
Half Verizon's price, twice Japan's
Props to Qwest for providing the faster option, although at this price the take rate will probably be negligible. Qwest is charging $52 for the connection, with ISP charges on top of that. Qwest did not discuss their costs, so I looked directly at the facilities required. I calculate the difference to Qwest between providing 7 meg (peak) as compared to 512K is $1-3 on the network side, and $2-6 on the ISP/backbone side, but only when they get to huge volume. Inside the provider's network, backhaul has to be upgraded, for which there is sometimes an additional cost of lighting fiber, and switches need to be more robust. Internet transit for Qwest, a primary provider with peering, is of cost inexpensive, but the $2-6 cost estimate is for an independent who has to buy transit. Since few internet sites can serve content at multi-megabit speeds, over-subscription can be very high. The actual cost of the increasded speed is therefore, surprisingly low when the custom er base is large enough for efficiency. Anyone who doubts that should look at Japan, where Forbes reports Yahoo BB is close to profitability at about $26 U.S., including ISP.

     Like much in telecom, this is a scale play. There are two profitable equilibria: high volume at low price or low volume at high price. If a Verizon or Qwest did as Son does in Japan, and keep prices low, volume is likely to be large enough to make that profitable. But getting from today's situation to the huge volume is a tough road, with losses along the way. Unfortunately, at smaller volumes, the cost skyrockets. You can't efficiently oversubscribe until you have thousands of customers per CO and tens of thousands per internet backbone connection.  That's more than any of the ISPs in Qwest territory are likely to have. In addition, the only users likely to buy the faster services at high prices are the heaviest users, an "adverse selection" that drives up network costs. Steve Alexander, who broke the story in the Star Tribune, thought ISP charges would be very high.

     ADSL was designed to deliver 7 meg downstream, but crippled quarter speed services dominate Europe and North America. In Berlin, I looked 4 senior telco speakers in the face, congratulated them on their accomplishments (Europe is building ahead of the U.S.) and asked them why they were providing service so inferior to what Asia is offering. Someone has to ask the hard questions, after all. As I've written before, I wish we had a Masa Son bringing better service in the U.S..

** ISP ALERT! Wanforce is offering rock bottom pricing on an enormous inventory of Access Servers, Routers, Switches and DSLAMs that we have just taken in inventory from an insolvent company. Backed with 90-day warranties on Cisco, Lucent, Adtran, Juniper, Foundry, Sun and HP equipment. For quotes, email fatpipepete@wanforce.com or call Peter M. Roberts, Wanforce Technologies 636-449-7333 www.wanforce.com (ad)

Diamonds are forever
Nokia not exiting the DSLAM business
"We are doing far more than continuing to service the ports we have sold so far.  Nokia, having doubled its broadband market share through  4Q 2002, aims to be a leading player" Anthony D'Arcy writes. The former Diamond Lane/Sonoma operation is shutting down, but nearly 100 engineers will continue developing the line, most based in Scandinavia. Sales, per analyst numbers relayed by the company, have reached in excess of 200,000 ports a quarter. Graham Ellis tells me North Europe (including Estonia) and China are in growth mode for DSL.

 http://www.pulver.com/fastnet/ code "DSLP".

     In my earlier article, I credited George Hawley with the initial design of the highly-reliable Diamond Lane DSLAM. He writes that although he co-founded the company, he doesn't deserve the credit for the actual design.

**  TI's AR5 platform provides a complete ADSL router reference design solution from the network stack to the silicon. This package includes a new Linux-based networking software package (NSP) enabling manufacturers who are developing feature-rich ADSL routers to easily customize and differentiate their products by adding higher level functionality to their products

http://ad.doubleclick.net/clk;5150875;7846380;s?http://www.ti.com/ar5. (ad)

M2DSL, VDSL testing moving forward
M2DSL is new name for 10MDSL
60 engineers at the Newport Beach T1E1.4 meeting focused on the next generation of DSL. A new standard, M2DSL, is on the way for multi-rate, multi-pair systems.Vendors are bringing to market multi-pair systems, a developing standard typically targeting a sweet spot around the Ethernet speed of 10 megabit symmetric. The working group agreed to change the name of 10MDSL to simply M2DSL, where M2 = multi-rate multi-pair. That's M (superscript 2, like squared) DSL, if your email client didn't pick it up exactly as my Eudora sent it.

    Progress was also made evaluating spectral compatibility of ESHDSL systems up to approximately 5.7 Mb/s and on lab evaluation methods for VDSL. Lots of good people working hard to get standards set by the end of the summer.

** The best way to follow the news of cable Internet access is Kinetic Strategies'  http://www.cabledatacomnews.com . It's free. (ad) Michael Harris does a great job. Highly recommended. 

*** ADTRAN Mini-DSLAM Delivers on Cost and Space. ADTRAN's new Total Access 1200 Mini-DSLAM is a 24-port standards-based system that's perfect for space-limited RTs or customer premises applications. Just 1U high, the Total Access 1200 is easy-to-install, scalable, and remotely manageable. Low start-up and low per port costs make the Total Access 1200 the most economical DSLAM on the market. http://www.adtran.com/info/?dslp012803 (ad)

Voyan "The world isn't ready"
High speeds, low prospects
Dick Relkus of Voyan has cash in the bank and could have continued R & D on their MIMO designs, which dramatically improve the performance of bonded multiple lines. "The stuff we got blows the world away" he believes, "but the world isn't ready." Prospective customers who have seen the prototype confirmed to me the results were very impressive. One target market looked promising but small, businesses wanting more than T-1 speeds. The enormous potential, of course, is for an ILEC maximizing the performance of a fiber bundle. John Cioffi has calculated that if a 25-100 pair bundle were effectively maximized, telco copper can deliver more bandwidth than coax or most fiber deployments. But that will require technology, politics, and investment that look to take too long to develop for a company like Voyan to cash in. The technology is interesting, and attracting attention from prospective purchasers.

** The networkZONE is a lively on-line technical forum that gives readers a designers-eye view of the chips, technologies, standards, and design practices for LANs, WANs, telecom systems, and wireless networks. Edited by Lee Goldberg, the site is a part of the analogZONE constellation of specialized technical web sites.  http://www.analogzone.com/net_main.htm (ad) Goldberg's one of the best of the tech reporters, and author of Green Electronics/Green Bottom Line

Email http://www.pulver.com/fastnet/ code "DSLP".

Briefs
 Chips
 People
 Wall Street


Employment Ads are free for three issues to any company in the field looking to hire. Just send a short ad with a dedicated contact to editor@dslprime.com. If you wish to keep your company anonymous, that's fine, and replies will come via editor@dslprime.com if you like.


Pulse Telecom

Immediate opening for a senior level Design Engineer to design a wide range of magnetic components with minimal supervision. The incumbent of this position must resolve product-related problems on existing designs, and mentor and coach junior engineers. The incumbent of this position is responsible for helping Pulse maintain superiority in technology, price, quality and time to market within the constraints of available resources.
 
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Wanforce

*Sales Representatives with a strong IT/Telecom sales background *CCIE with strong networking background (separate position)

Rapidly growing Wanforce is your reputable source for new, used and refurbished hardware with the knowledge and experience to help you design, configure and install your solution from start to finish offering support the entire step of the way. 

Contact Peter Roberts, Executive Vice President,  pete@wanforce.com
 
FS-VDSL Committee    October 20th, 2000
© fs-vdsl 2000