Next Level's next step: ADSL

Next Level Communications, a company synonymous with VDSL and video transport, is changing its image. During last night’s first quarter earnings report, NLC said it’s moving into ADSL and has turned on a two-stream ADSL platform at South Central Rural Telephone Cooperative in Kentucky.

“This is big news for us, not only because we have a happy customer, but because we have effectively removed questions of transport technology from the video deployment decision process,” said Chairman/CEO Michael Norris.

SCRTC signed up “40 users with a backlog of 500 customers waiting for service,” Norris said. “We’re the only full service vendor in the world who can now offer a completely line code agnostic access technology preference.”

Next Level is using VideoTele.com’s latest generation of encoding technology to squeeze about 20% more bandwidth from the ADSL pipe to deliver two video streams up to 10,000 feet. The company’s VDSL product delivers three streams 4,000 feet.

The ADSL effort is based, partially, on NLC’s digital carrier loop [DLC] product line. NLC is also boosting its DLC focus, Norris said.

“I think we overlooked an important opportunity by focusing a little too much on the video,” he said. “Whether they’re IOCs or ILECs, they can use our platform and upgrade to video by just adding a line card and a gateway or CPE.”

NLC’s largest customer, Qwest Communications, was responsible for 24% of the company’s first quarter revenue, bringing in $3.4 million. An unspecified chunk of that, Norris said, was for DLC products, while the rest was for ongoing VDSL video-based deliveries in Phoenix.

While Qwest has no announced plans to migrate to ADSL, other customers might have second thoughts, said Norris.

“The equipment will be ready for commercial deployment some time in the latter part of June,” he said. “When the IOCs are doing their modeling, perhaps some of them have been a little more reluctant on their VDSL rollouts because they had a lot of rural customers, or customers who are further out than our 4,000-foot reach. This allows them to bring that in and it really makes the business model much more robust.”

NLC’s promised 10 megabits of ADSL download capacity is still short of what’s needed to deliver high definition television – an obvious drawback for telcos planning to move to video via ADSL – but the product does migrate to VDSL, Norris added.

“Where we excel is in the end-to-end system capabilities that we bring to the table regarding our video capabilities,” he said. “Nobody can touch us there.”