Bringing DSL home

Service providers know they must get DSL to the masses. But how? Advances in manufacturing could be significant as the end user becomes less and less involved

It's easy to preach to the choir. In the case of DSL, the estimated 6 million North American residential users who will have signed on for the high-speed service by the end of this year, according to TeleChoice, are the choir. These users are familiar with the Internet and already know what broadband can do for them. They have seized the opportunity to use it at home.

Getting them to sign on for DSL was more about making sure the service was available than actually selling it to them. With bandwidth multiplying, line-use issues getting resolved and prices falling, the availability issue is fading. Now the priority is to bring DSL into the homes of the everyday PC user, those intrigued but not yet informed, and most important, those who just don't yet appreciate the value of DSL.

Various DSL market players are taking different but necessary approaches to solving this dilemma. Some companies are increasing broadband-specific content; some carriers are expanding access areas; others are reducing service prices - all of which should give users a reason to take DSL for a test drive.

Yet these strategies ignore one piece of the puzzle: DSL is still an add-on. Is it realistic to expect customers to invest in additional equipment and deal with installation issues before they are even sure what they will do with DSL? If users had DSL capabilities built into their new PCs and a defined and easy path to service, however, the technology would be there, ready and waiting for them to explore.

A new approach to mass adoption of residential DSL calls for building DSL connectivity into next generation PCs. With this new provisioning model, based on software-based communications technology, DSL could become a reality quickly and affordably and also offer users an experience as ubiquitous and simple as the dial-up connection.

Software-based modems, or soft modems, have proved their value in the analog realm. Major OEMs such as Gateway ship soft modems in various product lines. According to industry analyst firm VisionQuest 2000, approximately one-third of the 60 million client PC modems shipped in 1999 were soft-ware-based. Like their current analog counterparts, new DSL soft modems leverage host-signal processing techniques in which the host central processing unit (CPU) is used to perform the communications algorithms (Figure 1).

By moving this functionality to the CPU and eliminating the need for a digital signal processor chip and its on-board ROM, the hardware component is significantly reduced, which translates into a substantial cost savings. With processor speeds continu-ally increasing, worries about host-based communications consuming too much computing power have become a non-issue. OEMs are realizing that money saved through hardware elimination can translate into making built-in DSL a standard feature in high-end and mid-range PCs.

Aside from savings to manufacturers, soft modems can offer an advantage to users and service providers: dynamic upgradeability. A worry to consumers buying the latest technology is that their investment soon will be obsolete.

With the technical evolutions and standards changes DSL is sure to see, this is a justified concern. The ability to keep pace and easily adapt is one of the greatest value propositions of soft modem technology. This point has been proved in recent months in the analog realm with the announcement of the V.92 voiceband standard. To keep up, hardware-based modem users will have to replace their modems or have their memories flashed - a costly proposition for the users and the service providers, which up until now have chiefly carried the burden of customer premises equipment (CPE) (Figure 2). Soft modem users, however, can download and install the V.92 drivers, available later this year.

This ability to recon-figure the modem through a simple Inter-net download is particularly relevant to DSL providers. Because a CPE is expensive and specific to individual carriers, users find themselves tied to a carrier not because of superior service or most competitive value, but because they don't want to go through the hassle and expense of reinstalling a new modem.

Incumbent carriers might be able to provision equipment faster and even below cost knowing that they can lock in customers through extended subscriptions based on free or discounted modems. In the soft modem model, the playing field is leveled. Customers already have the equipment and, once they choose which provider will offer them the best service, can download the appropriate drivers to configure to that provider's specific protocols. In the future, soft modems could offer auto-detection of connection settings.

In the ever-changing Internet communications world, the lines between OEMs and service providers blur daily. The PC is no longer simply a computer; it is a communications device. Carriers that see this as an opportunity can expand their DSL subscriptions by leveraging strategic partnerships with OEMs. This type of relationship already is commonplace in terms of ISPs offering re-bates to customers through retail and OEM channels.

Although OEMs might be the ones to initially install and distribute soft DSL modems, the fact is they won't if providers don't support them. Those providers that do, however, will gain an installed base of pre-DSL-equipped customers and have those customers directly driven to their service through pre-installed software and drivers, similar to the many ISPs that host their software on PCs. This relationship model is not just about co-marketing agreements, it is about giving users the ways and means to broadband connectivity.

Looking beyond the PC, information and communication appliances soon will transform how the Internet is used in everyday life. Consumers already are hearing about homes of the future, where even the kitchen refrigerator will be online, providing recipes and ordering groceries. These promises are actually close at hand, and soft communications technology can be a solution to deliver the cost savings, size reductions and design flexibility required to bring emerging digital and information appliances to consumers sooner rather than later.

Residential DSL has some distance to travel before it is wholly entrenched in the everyday user's Internet experience. But the destination is in sight, and there is no lack of companies - service providers, content providers and OEMs - that are positioning themselves at the head of this race, eager to reap the rewards of the impending broadband wave. New technologies such as soft communications are enabling companies to offer the future now. And in this case, they can offer the ease, affordability and deployability to bring DSL home.