Before it was cool, DSL loomed on the horizon as much as a decade ago

Thousands of customers used digital subscriber line technology even before its vogue resurgence last year. David Sobin was one of those users in New Jersey - in fact, he and his AT&T Network Systems team designed and built the equipment.

A decade later, Sobin and several other defectors from AT&T Network Systems, now Lucent Technologies, have joined Ariel Corp. and will introduce a line of DSL products at Supercomm '97 in New Orleans.

When AT&T began selling the service to Bell regional holding companies in 1986, it was called CO-LAN. For about $30 a month, customers got a 20 kb/s fixed link to a company, university or government local area network. RHCs, like Bell Atlantic that sold Sobin the service, provided modem boxes with POTS splitters to customers who plugged them into a phone and PC. Inside the central office, the RHCs installed a data networking type of pre-asynchronous transfer mode switch, POTS splitter and a rack of voice/data modems at the other end of the customer connection.

In 1995, Bell Atlantic told Sobin it was turning off the CO-LAN service because customers were lacking interest. Sobin then went to AT&T Network Systems to propose working on next generation equipment, but he was turned down.

The next year when AT&T spun off Network Systems into Lucent and offered management buyouts, Sobin took the offer. Along with about a dozen other people from the original CO-LAN group, he went to Piscataway, N.J.-based Ariel Corp.

Now Ariel is preparing to show its three asymmetrical DSL products: a DSL access multiplexer, customer interface unit and element management system. Sobin, vice president of Ariel's communications systems group, said the system is based on ATM, which is what carriers have said they prefer.

Coming from a telephone company environment may be an advantage for Ariel, said Vern Mackall, analyst with IDC, New York.

"The good thing about Ariel is that the folks that have a good understanding of the telcos and are going to be in a better position to deal with these [RHC-specific] issues,"he said.