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 DSL Forum launches the "DSL Anywhere" marketing report to maximise customer reach, increase bandwidth and drive profit By Tom Starr, DSL Forum Vice President and Chairman Emeritus
Tom Starr serves as DSL Forum Vice President and Chairman Emeritus, and has served as a member of the DSL Forum Board of Directors from the inception of the DSL Forum in 1994 to the present. Tom Starr is a Lead Member of Technical Staff in SBC Laboratories in Hoffman Estates, Illinois. Tom is responsible for the development and standardization of new local access technologies for SBC's network. These technologies include ADSL, HDSL, and VDSL. From 1988 to 2000, Tom has served as Chairperson of ANSI accredited standards working group T1E1.4, which develops xDSL standards for the United States, received the Committee T1 Outstanding Leadership Award in 2001, and now serves at ATIS-NAI Vice-chair. Tom participates in the ITU SG15 Q4 group on xDSL international standards. Tom is a co-author of the books "DSL Advances", published by Prentice Hall in 2003, and "Understanding Digital Subscriber Line Technology" published by Prentice Hall in 1999. Tom previously worked for 12 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories on ISDN and local telephone switching systems. Twelve US patents in the field to telecommunications have been issued to Tom. Tom holds a MS degree in Computer Science and a BS degree in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois in Urbana, IL. DSL Anywhere, a marketing report produced by the DSL Forum, has been launched to identify technical options for delivering the benefits of broadband digital subscriber line (DSL) services to everyone, regardless of where they live or work. Customer reach well beyond historic limits, delivering greater bit rates, service quality and flexibility for bandwidth hungry applications are all now possible over the ubiquitous telephone networks around the world. Service providers now have the tools necessary, using the options in the DSL Anywhere marketing report combined with the ITU standards and the extensive portfolio of equipment and network technical reports produced by the Forum, to technically reach anyone, anywhere. Extending the reach of broadband typically will accelerate the profit potential and customer satisfaction of more of their customers. Recent developments Simplification and automation in order flow-through and operations practices by telephone carriers, a new IP-centric architecture, greater interoperability of DSL customer equipment, as well as new standardised DSL speeds and options have revolutionised DSL service. DSL today provides a host of technology options that can provide integrated broadband internet access, high bandwidth real-time data service, video, and voice service to any location with telephone service today. Over the last several years, DSL technology has experienced ever-increasing demand from the subscriber community and now accounts for more than 60% of the total broadband connections worldwide. In the first three quarters of 2004, DSL added 24 million subscribers, reaching a global total of 85.3 million. In February 2005, DSL subscribers passed the 100 million-subscriber milestone - a major landmark on the way to a global mass market for this world-leading broadband technology. That means 10% of the world's phone lines are delivering the very real benefits of the digital society to people in every region. However, a portion of the worldwide user community has continued to be unable to get DSL service because they are either located at too great a distance from the service provider's central office (CO) or they are not served by a copper loop directly from the CO. In addition, the need to support higher-bandwidth solutions such as ondemand video services has driven the need for continuous innovation in DSL technologies. Impact of DSL Anywhere DSL Anywhere equips service providers with the technical options for enabling DSL service to anyone with a telephone line, as well as radically increasing the bandwidth and bit rates available to DSL users. This in turn enables new services for DSL subscribers, and increased profits for the carriers. In launching the DSL Anywhere marketing report, the DSL Forum essentially destroys three DSL "myths": that DSL can not serve anyone more than three miles from a CO; that DSL is limited to speeds of below 1.5 Mbps; and that the service provides little or no profit. None of these if any longer true. Today, DSL is already available to about 80% of customers in developed countries. We expect the average DSL availability to exceed 90% by the end of 2006, and several network providers have announced plans to make DSL available to virtually every customer they serve. Understanding the details of physical plant and the environment inwhich DSL services operate, allows the telephone carrier to ensure that the service can be provided a particular customer. The causes of service failures and the particular focused upgrades to their copper loop plant required for superb service standards can be identified, and the repairs and enhancements to the plant can be made at a controlled cost. Technologies that "bring the DSL service closer to all customers" have been developed. These include new and highly cost-effective ways of deploying remote DSL equipment in the carriers' outside plant, methods for extending DSL services over loops of any length using repeaters and regenerators, and methods of integrating DSL into existing remote devices such as digital loop carriers (DLCs) deployed to support voices services. Since DSL bandwidth is a function of loop length, these technologies not only allow DSL service to be deployed to customers that were impossible to reach before, they also allow DSL service to be deployed at uniformly higher bandwidths to all customers served. Placing the serving node closer to the customer may shorten the loops, and some major service providers are preparing to deploy fibre-to-the-node (FTTN). With FTTN, a node is typically located at the serving area interface (SAI), providing the advantages of easy connection to the distribution cables at a point where the loops are short enough to support very high data rates. Using current generation VDSL technology or ADSL2plus/RE, 20 Mbps downstream rates can be achieved up to about 4,000 feet. A standard for second generation VDSL (VDSL2) technology is being developed in the Alliance for Telecommunications Industry Solutions (ATIS) subcommittee NAI (previously known as T1E1.4) and ITU-T Q4/15. VDSL2 systems are expected to support 20 Mb/s for over 5,000 feet, or 30 Mbps for over 3,000 feet. The loop reach of VDSL2 is better than VDSL1 due to the use of increased transmitted signal power, trellis coding, and other refinements. These rates/reaches are based on the use of one-pair of wires. Selective loop bonding could also be employed with VDSL2 to achieve much greater rates and reaches. FTTN will deliver the bit-rates needed to provide competitive triple-play services, without the high costs and delays for constructing new cables to every home. Enhancements to DSL physical layers increase bandwidth/loop reach upstream, while reducing the effects of noise and cross talk. Inaddition to planned VDSL2 improvements, enhancements to the ADSL and SHDSL standards have increased the rate/reach combination on both shorter and longer loops. Combining higher service bit-rates with universal coverage is vital to enhancing the profit potential of DSL services. Additional revenue depends on getting the latest multimedia applications that demand higher bit-rates to the greatest number of customers at the lowest possible cost. These applications include broadcast video, video-on-demand, MP3 music, photo/video sharing, gaming, video telephony, and remote education. There are three keys to enabling these revenue-producing applications: increasing the bit-rate and stability of DSL by increasing the traffic capacity and quality-of-service capability of the network; and structuring service offering to encourage use of these applications. Quality of Service DSL Anywhere enables carriers to achieve these goals. However, advanced broadband applications need more than a fast line and wide deployment, they require a network with capacity for the additional traffic and the ability to assure the quality-of-service (QoS) for the traffic. QoS includes assured end-to-end connection speed, delay, and packet loss rate. DSL Forum Technical Reports 059 [TR-059] and 092 [TR-092] define a network architecture that can support QoS on demand. This provides greater control and flexibility to the customer, enabling the customer to enjoy more of the new compelling applications that are online. Most customers are limited to 1.5 Mb/s or less by the terms of their service offering, not due to limitations of their phone line. While ADSL technology already delivers nearly 6 Mbps to many existing customers, many of these customers choose the lowest cost DSL service tier that limits them to 1.5 Mbps (and sometimes less). In other cases, the carrier limits the DSL service to a single, worst case tier, representing the lowest common denominator of all customers. With the deployment of DSL Anywhere techniques in the near future, ever-greater numbers of customers will be able to receive connections at these higher rates. 3 Mbps service offerings are becoming more prevalent, and one can expect rates as high as 20 Mbps in Europe in the future. Also new options are rolling out, with a TR-059 based bandwidth-on-demand service, providers are offering the customer with a basic DSL service, the option to temporarily increase their bit-rate for the duration of a session (such as to download movies). In this case, the customer would pay the low basic monthly fee with a supplementary fee for each higher speed session. Therefore the customer has access to higher speed without paying for it all of the time. The DSL industry has created the reality of xDSL as high bandwidth and profitable services that can reach any customer currently served by copper loops. Improved operations, new architectures and enhanced physical layer standards to increase the bandwidth and flexibility of the DSL broadband transport that are the essential foundation of the exciting new services that today can be delivered to customers everywhere. A critical resource for emerging and established DSL markets, DSL Anywhere is available to download from the DSL Forum website at www.dslforum.org, and includes all that a service provider needs to know to extend access to robust, reliable DSL services. Specific links:
DSL Anywhere: About the DSL Forum The DSL Forum is an international industry consortium of over 200 leading service providers, equipment manufacturers and other interested parties, focused on developing the full potential of broadband DSL to meet the needs of the mass market. It works to streamline processes, develop specifications and share best practices that set the stage for effective deployments, and explosive global DSL growth. It has set a target of 500 million broadband DSL subscribers by 2010. By developing new standards and embracing new applications, DSL Forum is tailoring DSL to meet the needs of the next generation of multi-media services and the online community. Established in 1994, more information about the DSL Forum is available from its industry site www.dslforum.org. Information tailored to end-users is available on www.dsllife.com. DSL - more than a phone line - it's a global solution.
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