Those of us who have been following DSL over the years are aware that DMT has gained broad acceptance by standards bodies and by many prominent vendors. Globespan on the other hand resulted from Lucent's spinoff of Paradyne, the pioneer of CAP technology. Sabit Say's presentation talked about a VDSL deployment activity in which his company, Next Level Communications, has been engaged along with a major phone company over the past year. What should be of interest to TV Technology readers is that video delivery to phone subscribers is one of the motivating requirements of that deployment. The reach of the loop from the subscriber to a remote cabinet is 3 to 4 kilofeet.
Fiber connects the cabinet to the telco central office.
The targeted payload is three MPEG-2 streams and 1 Mbps symmetrical data channel. The line rates for this are 20 to 26 Mbps downstream and 2 to 4 Mbps upstream. Session 5 was a mix of the technical and of the higher-level concern about the influence of government regulation. Talking briefly about regulation first, Charles Eldering, president of Telecom Partners Ltd., called attention to the incongruity of slow-paced regulation and the rapid onset of newer and newer digital telecom services that are subject to regulation. He proclaimed that, in the future, regulatory distinctions will be impossible to make between voice, video and data carried over a single broadband pipe to the residence.