Symmetricom previews SHDSL solution

Access equipment maker Symmetricom hopes to help carriers cash in on the underserved enterprise market with its newly announced GoWide integrated access device (IAD), slated for general availability this fall.

Building on Symmetricom’s GoLong ADSL loop extender for the small office/home office (SOHO) market, GoWide will combine up to eight individual copper phone lines into a single circuit that will provide data rates up to 15 Mb/s. The Internet access device uses asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) over G.SHDSL to bridge what Symmetricom CEO Tom Steipp calls the "T-Chasm"—that gap between copper-fed 1.5 Mb/s T-1s, affordable to businesses with less than 500 employees, and the optical 45-Mb/s T-3s that large corporate offices can spread out the costs of the larger connection.

The GoWide IAD will provide up to 2.3 Mb/s of throughput on each of those eight lines, sufficient for intregration of data and voice services over DSL. Virtual private networks will be supported with burstable rates up to 10 Mb/s.

According to Symmetricom, 95% of the buildings with over 50 employees do not have direct fiber access today. As a result, even service providers with dense fiber clouds cannot use that bandwidth to reach many small to medium enterprises—making those customers ripe for conversion to cable broadband.
Brian Quinton is Editor of Upstart. He can be reached at brian_quinton@upstart.com.