BellSouth to offer 3 Mb/s DSL

BellSouth today announced it is launching a 3 Mb/s DSL service, filling out the high end of its tiered broadband portfolio.

BellSouth now offers tiers at 256 kb/s, 1.5 Mb/s and 3 Mb/s downstream, with maximum upload speeds at 384 kb/s. The new product comes without any technology upgrades, using standard ADSL line cards. It is available to about 75% of BellSouth’s current DSL footprint: BellSouth officials said that its network relies heavy on remote terminals, and through its deployments over the last few years the carrier has shortened average loop lengths to the point where it can offer the enhanced speeds to most of its customers. The service is still a best-effort technology, varying the further a customer is from the CO, but BellSouth won’t offer the 3 Mb/s service if it doesn’t qualify well beyond 1.5 Mb/s speeds, said Rich Wonders, senior director of broadband marketing for BellSouth.

“We look at the 3 Mb/s as part of our evolving product platform,” Wonders said. “We’ve found that the applications that are demanding higher speeds are starting to move out of the niche and into the mainstream. Businesses and even many consumer customers are starting to demand more bandwidth.”

The 3 Mb/s service also opens the way for the next step in BellSouth’s broadband plan: on-demand bandwidth. Though BellSouth has not committed to any deployment timeline, it has been investigating the idea of a “turbo” feature that would offer broadband customers the ability to gain a temporary boost in capacity while using high-bandwidth applications such as downloading a movie or online gaming. BellSouth is also looking into the possibility of allowing customers to tailor their bandwidth in specific ways, such as offering higher capacity connections during daytime hours for business customers.

“The investments we’ve made in our infrastructure have put us in a position where we can offer these kind of services--allowing customers to shape their bandwidth, so to speak,” Wonders said. “Right now, though there isn’t a lot of commercial demand for that kind of application, at least not in North America. We are beginning to see it in other parts of the world, though.”