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February 8, 1999

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Universal ADSL Slow To Start

By Jason Levitt

t's been four months since I wrote a fairly positive article on the state of Digital Subscriber Line technology ("Waiting For DSL, Oct. 5"). Many years of development have been squeezed into that period, a testament to the stakes in the "last mile" of the Internet access marketplace. Regional Bells and local carriers have been laying down infrastructure, and PC vendors are even starting to offer bundled DSL products.

One bundling of note is the first shipping G.lite modem, which Compaq announced in November and developed in cooperation with Lucent Technologies and Aware Inc. G.lite, you may recall, is one of the three names used to describe the consumer-grade DSL standard that concerned companies have been rushing to get to market. The other two names for G.lite are G.992.2 (the actual standards reference number) and UADSL (Universal ADSL).

To avoid future consumer confusion, the Universal ADSL Working Group hopes that Universal ADSL will be the name used in product literature. It's hoped that this standard, which will be finalized in June, will make a DSL modem a generic item you could buy at Radio Shack, and thus help galvanize a market for high-speed Internet applications.

Compaq has been the only vendor so far to ship a UADSL offering, the 1.5-Mbit Max Digital Modem, which Compaq bundles on select systems. Strangely, I was unable to find a picture or specifications for the modem anywhere online, but I was able to see one in a Compaq Presario 5670 at my local Circuit City store recently.

The Max Digital Modem is a PCI card that works both as a perfunctory V.90 modem and as a UADSL modem using Lucent's Wildwire chipset. The Compaq systems ship with a note that says you have to download an upgrade for the Max Digital Modem software if you want to use it for UADSL. However, according to Compaq, that software won't be ready until the end of March. This isn't such a big deal when you consider that no Internet service providers offer UADSL service yet.

Dell Computer is also offering DSL on a PCI card, though it is Cisco Systems' (formerly Netspeed's) proprietary EZ-DSL technology. Dell has partnered with US West, which is deploying compatible DSL service in 14 Western states. Dell doesn't yet have an offering for areas outside US West's coverage.

UADSL is having a predictably slow start, but at least the price is right. These products add only $100 or so to the cost of a system.