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April 26, 1999

DSL Comes Together

continued...page 3 of 3

Related links:

sidebar story: Compaq Pushes DSL Hardware And Software

InternetView: Universal ADSL Slow To Start

Perfect Partners

PDF file: Emerging DSL Standards and Universal ADSL And Its Competitors
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And from our sister publications:

InternetWeek High Speed Access: DSL Gets A Boost

Tele.Com Speed Traps

Tele.Com DSL in Spite of Itself

At the moment, DSL is largely an Internet-access technology. But with the average access times over the Internet typically at 300 Kbytes per second regardless of the size of your pipe, it makes sense for some value-added services to originate at your competitive local exchange carrier, where the bandwidth is closer to the size of your pipe.

These services are trickling into the marketplace but should pick up once DSL deployment deepens. Software outsourcing, for the enterprise and for consumers, is one area that makes sense. Nova Scotia's MTT, acting as both incumbent and competitive local exchange carrier, outsources software to its DSL end users via a server farm at the central office.

For businesses with complex voice applications, access to the public switched telephone network over DSL is a relatively fledgling market, but services exist such as Rhythms NetConnections' PBX Express Service, which lets your Internet service provider outsource high-speed PBX services over the DSL wire. Jetstream Communications' CPX-1000 voice gateway lets competitive local exchange carriers provide plain old telephone service for up to 16 phone lines plus data over a single DSL connection. CopperCom is also competing in this market.

Multiple-destination routing is a relatively new service but one that will let competitive local exchange carriers route their DSL end users directly to other high-speed connections via the central office, possibly bypassing the slow public Internet. Covad Communications offers one form of it with its TeleSpeed network, which connects DSL end users directly to their companies' network circuits and provides Internet access.

The result is greatly improved throughput compared with doing VPN access over the Internet. Cisco's 6400 Broadband Concentrator is likely to become a common component in such routing applications where end users need to be dynamically routed to streaming video, videoconferencing, entertainment sites, Internet access, and corporate networks.

Conclusion
It will take more than infrastructure to jump-start DSL with the mass-market consumer. Awareness of what level of service DSL provides for end users will be critical. To that end, the ADSL Forum, a coalition of DSL vendors, is launching a national advertising campaign to raise consumer awareness of DSL. The ad campaign is expected to focus on the improved lifestyle that DSL users will gain with all that bandwidth. The campaign will likely coincide with rollouts of UADSL technology, which we probably won't see until winter.

The DSL market is lagging behind the cable-modem vendors, but with millions of potential customers, it's too early to say whether any real market share has been relinquished.

Meanwhile, DSL has advantages for business customers that cable-modem service providers are not in a position to offer--in particular, use of existing wire and dedicated point-to-point circuits.

For the really intrepid, there's even at least one wireless DSL vendor--AirDSL.com Inc.--that operates in the 2-GHz to 40-GHz spectrum. It will be interesting to see how the market shapes up near the end of the millennium.