On the frontier: After years of waiting for DSL doors to open, Westell is opening a few itself

Aurora, Ill., has never been a suburb of Chicago. Though it's often called a suburb, Aurora-with nothing but prairie to the west-has always been a frontier town. Suburban sprawl just happens to have caught up with it.

The same could be said of Westell Technologies, the Aurora-based digital subscriber line manufacturer that sat virtually alone on the DSL frontier for so many years. Now, the rest of the DSL market is catching up, with a sense of commercial reality finally latching onto this long-debated technology.

Gary Seamans, chairman and chief executive officer of Westell, is the first to admit that asymmetrical DSL took a fickle and circuitous path to commercial deployment. "July 1991 was ADSL's birthday, and even then we knew it was an inescapable conclusion. No one thought about the Internet back then, and no one was smart enough to think about the idea of a data dial tone," he said.

ADSL's seminal years were spent largely arguing about technology schemes.

Westell and others were quick to support carrierless amplitude phase (CAP) modulation, while some, including Amati Communications, backed discrete multitone (DMT), the ANSI standard.

Then, an initially exuberant telco community gradually lost its zest for video, and while telcos reassessed ISDN and cable modems became popular, ADSL trials remained only trials.

Now, with ISDN on the back-burner again and cable modems seeming more like some strange dream sequence, the heat is back on ADSL, and everyone wants a piece of the market. Small-fry vendors are popping up all over, while Alcatel Network Systems snagged a much longed-for contract from the Joint Procurement Committee, a Bell company alliance.

Westell is not sitting idle among all this movement. The company has shipped more CAP products than anyone, and it recently announced its acquisition of old foe Amati to bolster its market position.

"Achieving critical mass [to challenge bigger vendors] wasn't the driving issue. It was the fact that in contracts we haven't won, our lack of DMT expertise was the major factor. We lacked control over the standard transceiver scheme, and now we have it in house. We also are building a systems-level strategy, supported by partnerships," he said.

Indeed, the Amati purchase is really one step in the company's strategy to be an end-to-end systems provider, and eventually a more consumer-oriented company.

Westell is addressing the architectural element of this strategy through partnerships with several vendors such as DSC, Lucent Technologies, Northern Telecom, Fujitsu, Microsoft and others, said David Corey, senior vice president of global marketing at Westell.

"We're looking for increased levels of integration on the systems level, along with network management, which is becoming much more important," he said.

Also, though the average consumer probably does not know too much about ADSL right now, Westell knows that will change, and the company wants to have its distribution channels in order when it does. "We're well-positioned in the carrier distribution model, but we don't know CPE channels. We'll either get that ourselves or create partnerships," said Seamans.

This attitude certainly busts the past image of ADSL developers as high-tech dreamers arguing about standards while losing money.

While most ADSL developers still operate with financial losses, Westell is shaking at least part of that image. "People aren't interested in the intellectual debate anymore, and we've tried to push ourselves away from that," said Corey.

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