DSL Comes To Main Street: U S West plans to expand service to 35 more locations by June

Now that the personal computing industry has forced an asymmetrical digital subscriber line standards compromise, it's the telcos' turn to deploy the technology. U S West took a big step in that direction last week when it unveiled plans to upgrade its DSL offering in Phoenix and roll it out to 35 more sites by June.

Key to U S West's rapid action is its infrastructure preparation. The carrier already has prepared one-third of the 226 wire centers that will be equipped to deploy the so-called MegaBit Services and U S West.net Internet offerings. The centers will support 5.5 million customer access lines throughout the carrier's 14-state region.

The deployment gives U S West greater reach to consumers and businesses, lets end users scale up to greater speeds, and requires less installation hassle because it is based on splitterless ADSL, said Greg Gum, executive director of MegaBit Services.

The so-called universal ADSL splitterless technology, backed by Microsoft, Compaq and Intel, internalizes the splitter function and eliminates the need for inside wiring and truck rolls to install the service. But it maintains ADSL's always-on connectivity and high-speed connections over standard phone lines.

Because of the upgrades, U S West will introduce MegaBit, a new class of service that will give users three high-speed options-1 Mb/s upstream and downstream; 1 Mb/s downstream and 4 Mb/s upstream; and 7 Mb/s downstream and 1 Mb/s upstream. Services introduced in Phoenix in late October include MegaHome for work-at-home users, which will be upgraded to speeds up to 256 kb/s; MegaOffice for telecommuters with speeds up to 512 kb/s; and MegaBusiness for larger business users with speeds up to 768 kb/s.

The carrier also provides MegaCentral service, which gives businesses the ability to keep employees continuously connected to their private intranets and lets Internet service providers keep customers linked to the Internet. That service will be boosted by U S West's plans to add points of presence to its backbone (see story on page 7).

"What this really does is drive up our ATM sales," Gum said.

U S West is using NetSpeed's SpeedRunner modems that plug into phone jacks, LoopRunner ADSL access switch in the central offices and FireRunner remote access server.

The LoopRunner is the centerpiece of the product offering. It can detect the type of technology being used in the home-carrierless amplitude/phase modulation or discrete multitone, splitterless or not-and switch the end user to the appropriate modem pool, said John McHale, NetSpeed president and CEO.

The FireRunner product works well with the MegaCentral service because it lets U S West provide viable modem pooling service for ISPs and offer more options to corporate LAN managers, Gum said.

"It was significant that NetSpeed had the architecture and the ability to provide it to us in a timely manner," he said.

While agreeing that the rollout is a major step for high-speed access, Lawrence Vanston, president of Technology Futures Inc., Austin, Texas, said the DSL model eventually will require a fiber solution. His consultancy forecasts the "ADSL generation" will continue until 2007 when DSL solutions will become more problematic because of greater demands for higher access speeds.

- New Media Editor Vince Vittore contributed to this report.

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