Growing demand for bandwidth, DSL subscriptions lead to equipment upgrade

One of the world's largest telecommunications equipment manufacturers has upgraded its DSL equipment due to an explosion in demand for high-speed Internet access services. On May 19, Alcatel released the 7301 advanced services access manager (ASAM).Jay Fausch, senior director of marketing for the company's fixed networking division, explains the new platform can process 30 times as much bandwidth as the previous model. In addition, it can handle up to 10,000 users, five times the previous capacity. The soaring demand for bandwidth is one of the primary reasons telcos need the improved equipment. Fausch is amazed at how subscriber numbers have grown since 1999. "Going back to that time, in North America you'd be hard pressed to have found more than 800,000 or so DSL subscribers on the entire continent," he tells Network Letter. "And if we look around today we're probably pretty close to the nine-million mark between the U.S. and Canada." Not only are more people using high-speed Internet, they are using more bandwidth. Users are exploring programs and services that eat up more capacity than before. "Once people get a high-speed connection, they find more interesting things to do with it," Fausch adds. "Originally you start off doing email and maybe some chat or casual web surfing, but pretty soon you discover you can stream video or you can share files of very large sizes with other subscribers." Alcatel has quickly become one of the major players in the Canadian equipment market. It claims a 90% share of the DSLAM market here, primarily through its sales to Bell Canada and Telus Communications Inc. It has a plant in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata, which it inherited when the French company bought Newbridge Networks in 2000. While the 7301 was developed at the Alcatel facility in Belgium, the Canadian campus was one of the major design centres. Fausch reports that the Ottawa staff was primarily working on the emerging residential multimedia services. Alcatel found a demand for an upgraded product since many telcos across North America are placing DSL equipment outside of the central offices in tier one regions. Many are now deploying DSL in remote locations. This may necessitate colocating with a digital loop carrier. Fausch boasts of the speeds the new platform can accommodate. The ASAM can work on DS-1 and DS-3 standards for copper; for fibre it can handle OC-3 and OC-12 and has the capacity to handle Gigabit Ethernet. The GigE capacity can connect an upstream from a host to an Ethernet network. Two years ago the National Broadband Task Force recommended offering a minimum of 1.5 megs of bandwidth to every Canadian household (NL, June 18/01). Alcatel is a strong supporter of that proposal. "That would be great. One of the things that I applaud, because I'm a big believer in broadband, is national initiatives that do lay down the challenge that we get broadband access available to everybody regardless of where they live or whatever their socio-economic status may be," Fausch tells NL. "I think there's tremendous benefits for the nation and their economy and for the people that are attached."

Growing demand for bandwidth, DSL subscriptions lead to equipment upgrade

News | 05/20/2003 4:00 am EDT

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