TI KICKS DSL INTO HIGH GEAR WITH NEW STANDARD PITCH

Texas Instruments last week put its brand behind what turns out to be more concept than reality when it announced it would propose a new DSL standard capable of offering 200 Mb/s in aggregate over short-run copper loops.

The new Uni-DSL proposal is still several years away from taking any product form, but having TI enter the super-fast broadband market is symbolically important if only because of the company's position as one of the leading ADSL chip vendors.

Uni-DSL, or UDSL, will offer carriers the ability to send data and/or video up to 6000 feet, though not at the maximum speed. The company also is quoting “an aggregate speed” of 200 Mb/s, meaning carriers ultimately will have the option to provide a 100 Mb/s symmetrical service, a 150 Mb/s downstream/50 Mb/s upstream service or any combination therein.

“We're calling it ultra high-speed,” said Peter Chow, chief technology officer of TI's DSL Technology Center. “We want to make the operation and the deployment a more enjoyable experience.”

However, TI's proposal is just that. The company doesn't anticipate having any chips ready for at least 12 months, and much of the year will be spent marketing the concept. Large-scale deployments won't take place until at least 2006 or 2007.

We want to generate some support for what we see is a major jump forward for DSL,” Chow said.

When that time actually does arrive, the company is promising to make UDSL backward compatible with current flavors of DSL such as ADSL2, ADSL2+ and VDSL, as well as the emerging VDSL2 standard by using the same discrete multi-tone line coding.

One issue holding back VDSL deployments in the past was the lack of compatibility with ADSL, Chow said. Indeed, many access vendors have started producing line cards that that can accept any variety of DSL.

“Having that flexibility means you put the line card in once and it doesn't matter what type of CPE your customer shows up with,” said Jay Fausch, senior director of marketing for Alcatel's Fixed Communications Group.

Of course before UDSL can be lumped in with the other DSLs, it must go through the standards process, said Erik Keith, senior analyst for broadband infrastructure at Current Analysis.

“At first glance, the problem TI will have with UDSL is that it is essentially a proprietary technology until approved by a standards body, and TI's competitors are unlikely to let TI establish a new DSL standard without some input of their own,” he said.

TI also is somewhat late to the “ultra” party. Smaller chip vendors — notably MetaLink and Ikanos — already have chip sets in equipment that can transmit 70 Mb/s downstream and 30 Mb/s upstream. At the Fast Net Futures show earlier this year, both also demonstrated chip sets that offer 100 Mb/s downstream and 50 Mb/s upstream.

By comparison, the fiber-to-the-premises network that Verizon recently unveiled in Keller, Texas, is offering a top-end downstream speed of 30 Mb/s.

“Metalink will be in the market before the end of this year with [100 Mb/s symmetrical service],” said J. Francois Crepin, president of Metalink. “We are not pre-announcing like some of our competitors.”

Perhaps the more important question, though, is whether there will be a market for UDSL or anything beyond 100 Mb/s downstream. The current VDSL market exists almost solely in Korea and Japan, where a high concentration of multidwelling units make the technology's short reach a non-issue. UDSL, under one scenario sketched out by TI, would fill a similar niche, being implemented in fiber-fed cross-connects. And while the broadband services market in MDUs is still relatively small at less than 1 million today, it's expected to grow tenfold by the end of 2008, according to a report last week from In-Stat/MDR. TI, though, is banking on video deployments by telcos of all types to require such massive amounts of bandwidth.

“The reason VDSL is becoming more important is because of what seems to be a full-court press from the service providers to get on the video bandwagon,” said Phil Skeba, a member of the DSL Forum's board of directors. “If you started to think about service providers in North America, Europe or Latin America that understand the need to get into video delivery, you're going to see companies get into putting out requirements for higher bandwidth solutions.”

However, a high-definition TV signal in uncompressed format takes up just under 20 Mb/s per stream. With 100 Mb/s, carriers could offer at least three streams and still have plenty of spare bandwidth for data and voice. Given the current penetration of HDTVs and even projecting out several years, it would appear that such large pipes are overkill. At the same time, vendors are loath to turn their backs on such scenarios.

“We absolutely look well beyond what's shipping today because the evolution toward multiservice requires us to do that,” said Fausch. “I'm not one to second guess our ability to consume bandwidth. You can never be too thin, too rich or have enough bandwidth.”