For competition to thrive, however, the regulatory framework must ensure that operators can offer a full range of services. It is predicted that once consumers in particular, but also business users, develop a taste for high-bandwidth services such as movies on demand, the need for ADSL, which has a downstream data flow limit of 6.1Mbps, will fall away. This is where vDSL comes in. This means that as the distance from exchange to customer increases, the benefits provided by the technology decrease proportionately. At 4500 feet, for example, the data transfer rate plummets to 12.9Mbps, which is little more than ADSL can provide.
Distant collocation is important because it opens the door to all sorts of other services.
The thing that hasn't hit the press so much recently is that vDSL is getting serious backing from a lot of the big telcos - they're very keen to deliver it. It comprises 22 telcos, including BT, France Telecom, Deutsche Telekom and Qwest. New operators are also inevitably showing interest, but because vDSL has a range of less than a thousand feet, it raises the spectre of sub-loop unbundling. Monopoly warning If Oftel, under reappointed boss David Edmonds, fails to ensure that any operator can provide vDSL at street level, the result will be a de facto monopoly, he added. Some of BT's rivals are taking such a possibility very seriously.