Verizon to deploy SHDSL

Verizon Communications plans to launch its first symmetric high bit-rate DSL service next week as soon as it receives expected approval from the FCC on Aug. 5.

Verizon has tested to SHDSL using Alcatel DSLAMs in Baltimore and Tampa, Fla., but will begin a commercial territory-wide launch in its major metro markets next, starting with New York City and Albany and moving to the Washington, D.C., and Boston metro areas. By the end of the year, Verizon plans to have 388 central offices equipped with Alcatel equipment, though it has not yet settled on a vendor for modems, said Anthony Price, vice president of wholesale and business solutions for Verizon.

The launch is designed to address the gap in Verizon’s small and medium business offering filling in the space between its traditional ADSL and dedicated line services, bringing higher service quality and better guarantees of bandwidth. SHDSL runs up to 1.5 Mb/s in both directions, but unlike its ADSL service, which provides an unspecified “best effort” capacity, Verizon is deploying the service with variable bit-rate, non-real time technology quality of service technology. While it doesn’t guarantee maximum capacity over the line at any given moment, it prioritizes SHDSL traffic over all other DSL and data traffic coming into the CO. Price said those service level improvements will make the service very attractive to its small and medium-sized business customers that need more reliability than ADSL but can’t justify private line services.

“Of course there will be some overlap between ADSL, SHDSL and what we call our dedicated lines,” Price said. “But it all comes down to what type of application our customers are using. If it’s a mission critical application, the customer will probably go for the dedicated line with its guarantees. But if the application is less than mission critical, customers will probably go with SHDSL.”

Verizon will charge between $150 to $370 per access line for the data-only service. In addition it will offer its standard host of managed small-business services, including firewall, e-mail and hosting.

Unlike Verizon’s first round of DSL deployments, the carrier is going with the International G.SHDSL standard, most prominent in Europe. When Verizon and its RBOC brethren deployed ADSL in the mid-90s, it selected non-standardized equipment, since most of the American RBOCs selected the same vendors, ADSL became fairly standardized in the U.S., but Verizon wasn’t able to reach the cost-savings and interoperability that following an international standard would reap.

“Because there were a couple of different technologies out there, there just weren’t the efficiencies you’d see with an international standard,” Price said.