One casualty, though, appears to be G.Lite low-rate asymmetric DSL, which many vendors are shunting aside in favor of symmetric technology. I find that lots of deployments are still going on at full speed. Mindspeed itself recently let go of 75 employees as part of parent Conexant Systems' announced cut of 1,500 jobs. Yet Kovanic said product design for broadband communications applications, including DSL, is moving forward. To lower the cost of DSL you need to design newer and newer boxes, so the design activity has not slowed.
Market data suggests as much.
From the fourth quarter of 1999 to the end of 2000, the number of DSL connections in the United States jumped from 500,000 to 2.4 million. And that's still only 2 percent of available copper connections, according to market research firm Telechoice. Even so, silicon vendors targeting DSL are changing the product lineup to focus on areas that promise higher returns. Acknowledging the problems associated with deploying DSL, the company has come out with software to run on top of its multiport CX28985 device to allow DSL lines to be tested remotely. Mindspeed claims a service provider can conduct single-ended tests remotely with the help of its LoopWizard software, running on preinstalled ARM processor cores in its device.