DSL grows from lamb to lion Vendors look for management solutions >BY BETH SNYDER, Switching & Transmission Editor

Digital subscriber line equipment first began as a trickle, then grew to a wave of modem pair systems. Then a swell of multiplexers-or D-SLAM aggregating equipment in the central office-hit the market. Now the DSL tide is surging again, this time to management systems.

Both Amati, a discrete multitone (DMT) ADSL equipment maker, and Motorola, a DMT ADSL chip maker, recently released control and monitoring software systems for taming their DSL products. Of course, the other DSL vendors and chip makers have endorsed the need for good management, and many are working on proprietary and simple network management protocol-based systems.

"Unfortunately, management is usually the last thing that equipment vendors work on," said Kieran Taylor, broadband consultant for TeleChoice, Verona, N.J. "Management is going to be a key differentiation once the DSL market matures.

Amati plans to forge a cooperative agreement with network and element management company Euristix Ltd. to develop an SNMP-based element management system for its ADSL DMT system. Amati is licensing the Euristix Raceman EMSX element management system as the basis for an SNMP system called ADSL View Manager that will support Amati's Allegro access concentrator.

Amati and Euristix plan for the View Manager to eventually interface with higher-level system managers such as Hewlett-Packard's OpenView, IBM's NetView and Sun Microsystems' SunNet Manager.

Using an outside SNMP network management company could give Amati an advantage over the competition, Taylor said.

"They are able to leapfrog the development process. That can dramatically increase the time to market for fully-managed, SNMP-based DSL," he said.

"By offering a high-level management interface, Amati is permitting the service provider complete visibility into the ADSL infrastructure-a key feature if the services are to be offered as rapidly and universally as the potential market is demanding," said Jim Steenbergen, Amati president and chief executive officer.

Motorola encourages modem and D-SLAM manufacturers to build on its software for network management. Copper Gold Control Software capabilities include link initialization and control, transceiver initialization, programmable link parameters, operations message interface, overhead channel operations, error reporting and accumulating link statistics.

ADSL manufacturers that plan to use the Motorola CopperGold chip when it is released could use the new software to build SNMP or proprietary management systems.

The DMT line code, by nature, constantly samples the line and collects information, Taylor said. It is designed to feed information into an element management system. However, not all systems being designed today collect and present that data in an easy-to-use or value-added way that performance monitors or network managers can read, he said.