Alcatel-Lucent's VDSL2 vectoring: a boost to Coalition's alternative NBN

Stuart Corner
Friday, 23 September 2011 14:19

IT Industry - Strategy

This will be music to the ears of Malcolm Turnbull: Alcatel-Lucent has announced the first commercial broadband-over-copper product that makes use of VDSL2 vectoring to boost speeds beyond what is possible with standard VDSL2. Increases of up to 150 percent are claimed.

Alcatel-Lucent - the supplier of NBN Co's passive optical technology for its FTTH rollout - said: "With the first commercial availability of VDSL2 vectoring technology, Alcatel-Lucent is helping communications service providers dramatically boost the data speeds and capacity of existing copper access networks to bring consumers and businesses broadband speeds of 100Mbps and beyond.

 "By boosting the capabilities of copper access networks, Alcatel-Lucent makes it possible for service providers to make the best use of existing copper infrastructure. As a result, operators now have the ability to improve their broadband offerings and reach more subscribers much more quickly than ever before."

In an address to the National Press Club last month Turnbull said that networks in urban Australia could readily be upgraded to meet expected demand either by upgrading the HFC network "at a relatively modest cost and/or by rolling out fibre further into the field in a FTTN deployment the total cost of which is likely to be in the order of $10 billion."

Alcatel-Lucent's announcement quoted Rob Gallagher, principal analyst, head of broadband & TV research at Informa, saying: "Alcatel-Lucent's plan to make VDSL2 vectoring commercially available is very timely. Service providers and governments have stated their intent to boost broadband speeds to consumers and businesses alike, but the challenges associated with comprehensive fibre-to-the-home deployments have been a major obstacle. VDSL2 vectoring promises to bring speeds of 100Mbps and beyond to advanced copper/fibre hybrid networks and make superfast broadband speeds available to many more people, much faster than many in the industry had thought possible."

Alcatel-Lucent's press release was spectacularly lacking in specific details on what performance the new technology might offer, but according to an article in Alcatel-Lucent's Techzine online magazine "Downstream speeds of 100Mbps can be achieved at distances of up to 400m, and 40Mbps can be supported with loops as long as 1000m. In field trials since 2010 with leading service providers including Belgacom, A1 Telekom Austria, Swisscom, Orange, P&T Luxemburg and Türk Telekom, vectoring improved previous downstream bit rates by 90 percent to 150 percent."

Vectoring achieves its performance gains by managing all copper pairs in a bundle to minimise crosstalk interference between nearby pairs. So it is not well suited to the current situation in Australia where the copper lines from a single exchange are under control of different operators (ie all those that have installed DSLAMs in that exchange).

 Alcatel-Lucent says: "Because sophisticated noise cancellation is CPU-intensive, vectoring works best for the smaller number of lines few hundred) typically found in fibre to the x (FTTx) deployments '” and where measurements are available from all lines. This means that the lines all need to be under full control of a single service provider for optimal performance gains. In these scenarios, vectoring technology allows service providers to deliver significantly higher speeds, with faster time to market and faster return on