Alcatel-Lucent supercharges DSL with 30 percent speed boost

Stuart Corner
Thursday, 31 January 2008 14:54

Business IT - Technology

Alcatel-Lucent has introduced a new technology option into its range of IP-DSLAM products that it claims has the potential to boost bandwidth by 30 percent, and improve performance on problem lines that are unable to support demanding services like IPTV. According to the company's web site,   the technology, known as  Smart DSL, is a unique solution that allows operators to stabilise DSL lines that are not operating at optimum performance, without compromising their usable bandwidth. The traditional means of getting a problem DSL line to function correctly has been to increase signal-to-noise ratio,  but this reduces bandwidth significantly.

Alcatel-Lucent Smart DSL consists of new features in the ISAM DSL Access Manager family (Alcatel-Lucent's DSLAM) combined with support for these features in the  line testing and quality management system. According to the company, "combined these technologies can be used to troubleshoot and remedy problem lines (eg after a customer complaint), or to pro-actively optimise line performance." Alcatel-Lucent claims that this optimisation can increase throughput by as much as 30 percent.

The main cause of line instability in DSL lines is crosstalk from other lines. According to Alcatel-Lucent, in a typical operator network, up to 25 percent of lines are potentially unstable because of crosstalk, which limits a carrier's ability to deliver high revenue earning premium services such as IPTV.

Alcatel-Lucent says it has developed a technology known as Artificial Noise and Virtual Noise (ANVN). Virtual Noise is an optional part of the VDSL2 standard so ANVN works with any VDSL2 standard-compliant CPE that supports VN, and Artificial Noise will work with every existing ADSL modem or any flavour, according to the company. Alcatel-Lucent has a very significant share of the global DSLAM market, which means this technology should have a large deployment potential.