Another boost for the broadband revolution - Industry Trend or Event

An improved international SDSL standard, with a longer reach and less interference, is being tested for a possible release next year.

Incumbent operators lost another excuse for stalling competitors' broadband rollouts when a new standard for high-speed access technology was approved this month.

The standard, G.991.2 has been formally adopted by ITU-T study group 15 of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in Geneva. First specified last April by the ITU, the single pair high bitrate digital subscriber line [G.SHDSL] promises longer reach, higher data rates and less interference for delivering broadband services.

"People are excited about [G.SHDSL]," said Jouni Forsman, an analyst at Egham, England-based Gartner Group Ltd. More than 30% of European operators said they would deploy G.SHDSL by the end of 2002, according to a recent Gartner survey.

Competitive operators say the new standard could transform the playing field for local broadband access because incumbent network owners can no longer claim symmetric varieties of DSL cause crosstalk, when a strong data signal in one line interferes with a signal in another line.

Operators say incumbents often don't allow SDSL in their networks, in particular in the Netherlands, France and the United Kingdom. "G.SHDSL is designed not to disturb other broadband services so [it] should be allowed by incumbents," said Richard van Maurik, head of DSL development at Versatel Telecom NV, of Amsterdam.

Waiting for deployment

But widespread deployment looks to be at least more than a year away, according to analysts. As with many standards, development progress has been slow and implementations have suffered.

"[G.SHDSL is] rather attractive, but it's taken longer to reach the stage of approval," said Tim Johnson, director of Access@Ovum at Ovum consulting Ltd., based in London. "This was being hailed a year ago. I think it has held back the market."

The Cailfornia-based DSL Forum does not foresee commercial rollouts of G.SHDSL starting until early next year, given that chipset manufacturers are currently evaluating product with system vendors.

"The usual scenario is that you get a lot of expectations at this point, but the implementation sometimes falls a little bit short," said Gavin Young, chairman of the DSL Forum's technical committee. But even so, "G.SHDSL will subsume the needs for the older SDSL, HDSL, HDSL2 and IDSL," he said.

Good for the SMEs

Other operators are enthusiastic about the new technology, citing the technology's main selling points: it is a worldwide standard which reduces interoperability problems; it extends the reach of DSL by 30%; and it is spectrally friendly. "As far as we're concerned, we'd be absolutely interested in using G.SHDSL," said Josie crane, a spokeswoman for Atlantic Telecom plc, of Aberdeen, Scotland. "It fits with our desire to reach small and medium enterprises [SMEs]. It has a better reach, more speed [and] has better compatibility with other DSLs."

"G.SHDSL will give us the capability to do everything the incumbent can do," said Versatel's van Maurik. In June, they plan to introduce a commercial SDSL service, which is upgradable to G.SHDSL service. "[Currently] we either use fiber or leased lines for high end users, and ADSL is only suitable for Internet access. SMEs will be a market we can serve with G.SHDSL."

Chipset manufacturers are confident that G.SHDSL's greater reach and spectral compatibility will eliminate the threat of crosstalk that incumbents fear in other symmetric DSL technologies, such as SDSL or HDSL2.

But Christine Santelli, product marketing manager for symmetric DSL at Virata Corp., of Santa Clara, California, maintained that crosstalk isn't an issue because DSL is not yet widely deployed. "One percent of phone lines in the U.S. carry DSL right now," she said. "It takes 10-20% of lines to have DSL before interference becomes an issue." Virata corp. is testing it G.SHDSL chipsets in labs with noise conditions, where they are running 1.5 Mb/s over 18,000 feet, according to Santelli.

COPYRIGHT 2001 EMAP Media Ltd.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group