Canadian-made bonded DSL rings throw telcos a lifeline

A Calgary-based company has hit the market with a technology that can provide telcos with 400 megabits per second over their legacy copper wires. It could be the magic bullet telcos need to compete with the cable industry's much bigger bandwidth pipe, and at one-twentieth the cost of extending fibre closer to the home. A Calgary-based company has hit the market with a technology that can provide telcos with 400 megabits per second over their legacy copper wires. It could be the magic bullet telcos need to compete with the cable industry's much bigger bandwidth pipe, and at one-twentieth the cost of extending fibre closer to the home.Telcos are continuing to lose ground to cablecos when it comes to high bandwidth and differentiated services. Genesis Technical Systems says it's offering telcos an affordable solution with its patent-pending Bonded DSL Rings (BDR) technology, which the company maintains would let rural and urban telcos move voice, video and data traffic much faster over their existing copper infrastructure.Genesis demonstrated a proof of concept of BDR at the Broadband World Forum in Berlin, Germany in October 2007 and at the MINT Lab in Edmonton in November 2007."DSL modems have to resynchronize with the network, and they tend to drop," says Stephen Cooke, president of Genesis. "DSL was designed for web stuff and email. HDTV is another matter altogether. If you're at home watching a high def video, and a neighbour comes home and turns on his modem, that might cause you frame loss and pixelization. This is a problem, because it is high revenue traffic for the telcos."BDR combines point-to-point DSL technology with a ring topology. Standards-based Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2 (VDSL2), Resilient Packet Rings (RPR), and DSL Bonding (G.Bond) are used to form Bonded DSL Rings in the access loop, which then allows for a total upstream and downstream bandwidth of up to 400 Mbits/s."Optical rings are very common," says Cooke."Why not use those rings to secure QoS while also maintaining the high bandwidth that comes over short distances with the latest DSL standards? To keep the distances short we would put a device in the ‘pedestal' - the little green canister on your street corner or an overhead line - and that piece of equipment would be powered from the central office. By using the bonding technology we could take multiple physical links, say ten twisted pairs, and combine them into a single logical link."The home gateway would be owned by the telco, with phone jacks and gigabit Ethernet ports and each ring node being a multiplexer that could add, drop, and pass traffic through the ring."The tier one carriers would never do this"However, Keith Nissen, a principal analyst at research firm In-Stat in Arizona, is more cautious in his assessment of the impact of the technology."The tier one carriers would never do this," says Nissen. "They have grandiose plans which will require lots and lots of bandwidth into the home in the future, and they want to lay down fibre and not share it."Nissen agrees that fibre is a huge investment, and that major cities are first up. And the telcos are not feeling the squeeze from cable in rural areas, as it simply doesn't have the reach. In fact, Nissen is a little stumped when it comes to how to address the rural need."I'm not so certain what the viable alternatives are in rural areas. WiMAX has some promise. I do think that the BDR technology could have appeal to small, independently operated companies, of which there are many in the United States. They are not in a position to lay down fibre, and they will want to use the assets that they have in the ground as much as possible."Genesis, however, has the top players in mind, claiming positive feedback from big players like Deutsche Telekom, though in Canada, Telus Corp has taken a ‘wait and see' attitude. This may be because over the past few years Telus has been investing in a major network upgrade, in part to support IPTV.Cooke argues that the money could be better spent on his company's technology. "Most MPEG-4 streams are at 12 Megs," says Cooke. "We can provide up to 400 Megs per second, which means we have a lot of headroom."Nissen, however, is skeptical: "When they say 400 megabits per second, it may still only come down to 20 megabits per household," he says. "It depends on whether this is ADSL or VDSL for available bandwidth. I'm not sure that this is a better solution than bonding multiple DSL to each home, which would probably meet our needs well into the future. I'd say this is not a slam dunk alternative, but definitely an alternative."

Canadian-made bonded DSL rings throw telcos a lifeline

News | 08/12/2008 5:26 pm EDT

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