Alcatel-Lucent intros VDSL2 bonding, sleeping modems

By several accounts, the main gating factor on the deployment of VDSL2 bonding is the availability of customer premises equipment (CPE) that supports it. In fact, Alcatel-Lucent said its gear has supported VDSL2 bonding for several months and that it is now testing the first CPE for the North American market – starting with two modems in its own CellPipe portfolio.

Some have attributed the lack of CPE support to a lack of demand for VDSL2 bonding in the market. When asked this month why Zhone Technologies doesn’t sell bonded VDSL2 gear, Steven Glapa, the vendor’s vice president of marketing and product management, said, “We haven’t seen anyone looking for it.”

The technology is limited by a few factors, including the simple requirement for extra pairs of existing copper. Thus far, most residential DSL bonding has involved ADSL2+. For example, last fall, SureWest Communications launched 10-Mb/s and 6-Mb/s broadband services over a bonded ADSL2+ network in its incumbent territory.

In addition to VDSL2 bonding, Alcatel-Lucent also announced a new ADSL modem that switches into low-power mode when not in use. When traffic levels drop, the modem automatically lowers its bit rate and cuts its power consumption by 25%. The technique is based on industry standards but hasn’t been widely employed, the vendor said, because re-activating the modems from low-power mode can cause power fluctuations, leading to crosstalk and destabilizing the network. Alcatel-Lucent is offering the products now because it has overcome those issues, the company said.