xDSL Finds a New Home

Gentle Readers,

My last xDSL post hit Newtech last night, and I thought it would be off-topic. I have been informed that it would 'probably' be alright here since it is a bandwidth technology and that is what multimedia will be dependent upon as the 'richness' of the medium grows.

I do not know how many of you have joined me here, nor if I enjoyed your company on Newtech, or Servers, or Webapps, or Basics, or HTML, or Critiques, or for that matter on the old Design list; I am not sure anyone enjoys Ops most of the time but; Hello Multimedia!!!

Onward! Last night I intimated that switching technology could be a problem to the use of the largest of the optical 'pipes' that will enable xDSL. I reread it and realized that it could be misconstrued. The large telco switch makers (Nortel, Lucent, NTT, etc.) are able to handle the volume. It is the local switching offices that cannot use these massive and expensive units that will be the bottleneck.

To this a large group has formed an ADSL Consortium. It is so new that people are still joining as charter members. Just getting into the business of ironing out its charter and the contributions of members. These companies can see 'the writing on the wall' that the backbone providers, including a few new ones are headed toward the provisioning of the bandwidth availability necessary to make it possible and thoroughly expect to sell that bandwidth, especially if the other people do go into competition with them. By the end of this year, there will be approaching 60,000 miles of major fiber optic trunklines connecting major, secondary and tertiary metropolitan centers in a high speed network. There are three major business entities that are doing only this.

During the next few weeks the news will be full of the Consortium with an ever-growing list of participants. I am not sure anyone can afford to be "out of the loop." It has the computer press all abuzz right now, be it general professional ones or targetted ones. The most current list I have is:

-- Telephone Companies - Ameritech, Bell Atlantic, BellSouth, GTE, SBC, Sprint and U S West

-- PC Vendors - Compaq, Intel, Microsoft and Paradyne

-- Chip and Equipment Vendors - Alcatel, Aware, Lucent, Rockwell, TI and Westell

Expect Nortel, PairGain, Level One, AdTran, ADC and others to quickly follow. Some of those have already reached an informal development agreement, in lieu of a published standard that is still about a year away, to use compatible technologies for the consumer products, and are the reason for this other group. The aim is "plug and play" by plugging into the phone jack and the USB port on newer computers. As you may or may not know, most serial ports will be a bottleneck. Older PCs even have to have the communications chip onboard the modem to surpass 9600. I know, been there, done that with a cheap 14.4 k modem in an old machine. If you have one of those older PCs; it needs a 16550 chip or equivalent, instead of the older and slower 16450.

Peace,
Clarke