Alcatel moves on with DSL product line enhancements

Maintaining that a robust worldwide market exists for DSL products, Alcatel has upgraded its Advanced Services Access Multiplexer to meet future demands from a business that it expects to expand from a residential high-speed Internet user through the commercial arena to a merged multimedia communications and entertainment environment.

“There’s a clear and strong strategy at Alcatel of starting with residential broadband high-speed access, [then] allowing the operators to serve the business market incrementally, then going into the third wave of multimedia entertainment,” said Ivan Verbesselt, CTO of Aclatel’s DSL Business Unit.

Alcatel has doubled the density of DSL line cards while lowering power consumption; introduced versions for remote location deployment in self-contained single-shelf indoor environments or street-side vaults and cabinets; added ATM-based multiple qualities of services, including guaranteed frame rate; and included a multiservice Internet Protocol Services Module to complement the ATM foundation and let the unit interface directly with packet edge networks.

The upgrades are “purely incremental to the existing footprint” for operators with Alcatel equipment in the field, Verbesselt said. This will enable existing operators to continue to offer more services to what he sees as a growing market.

“We perceive the market is taking off,” he said, pointing to 15% quarter-on-quarter growth in some regions of Europe. “We’ve been having some promising signs from operators like BellSouth that there are important signs of a rebound in the U.S.”

Nevertheless, he said, “regions like Asia Pacific and Europe are definitely in a growth stage right now.”

It’s also necessary, he said, to maintain a strategy that will make products ready for the eventual residential/commercial/multimedia convergence that takes full advantage of DSL’s broadband capabilities.

“It’s not an either/or, it’s an and/and, and it’s really a sequential approach,” Verbesselt said. “It’s much more sensible to start with a pragmatic approach of first going to mass-market high-speed Internet access” and proceeding from there to commercial customers.