Datapro Report

ADSL Vendors Work for Interoperability

Carol Skvarla

Recent agreements among leading vendors of ADSL-related (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) technology will help pave the way for widespread deployment of advanced communications services over existing telephone lines. The result of these cooperative efforts should help assure potential customers that equipment they buy from one vendor will interoperate with equipment from other vendors.

Early this year, Alameda, CA-based Ascend Communications, a provider of remote-networking solutions, announced the licensing of ADSL discrete multitone (DMT) technology from broadband communications provider Aware (Bedford, MA). In late September, San Jose, CA-based Amati announced a cross-licensing agreement to share patented intellectual property and conduct interoperability tes ting of designs based on those patents with Alcatel. Product co mpatibility and joint interoperability testing are crucial to widespread deployment of ADSL services to meet telecommunications industry requirements for reaching the small office/home office (SOHO) and residential markets.

ADSL has gained new life as a high-speed Internet-access solution, after plans by telecommunications providers to use it for video-on-demand applications foundered. ADSL is easier and cheaper to deploy than ISDN, as well as faster, supporting speeds of up to 6 Mbps and beyond downstream (to the user) and up to 640 Kbps upstream. Initial ADSL signal-modulation implementations were based on carrierless amplitude and phase modulation (CAP), but DMT solutions now have the momentum, thanks in part to DMT's adoption as an ANSI standard.

In many initial commercial ADSL rollouts, the communications service provider provides the necessary equipment that its customers will need, but ADSL vend ors say product interoperability will be necessary once customers start buying equipment in retail channels. "If it works in the Boston area, and you are transferred, you want to know that your ADSL modem will work elsewhere," says Jim Bender, president and CEO of Aware. "We are well on our way to seeing interoperable equipment."

Says Michael Newson, spokesman for Richardson, TX-based Alcatel USA: "We all want to build products to this [ANSI] DMT standard, so we don't get into the situation faced by phone companies with ISDN, where too many problems with incompatible equipment at the central office and home level stymied acceptance and frustrated consumers."

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