iiNet to trial Broadcom's DSL boosting technology

Stuart Corner
Monday, 02 August 2010 18:02

Your IT - Entertainment

iiiNet is planning trials of technology from chip-maker Broadcom that it hopes will significantly improve the performance of its recently launched IPTV service, provided by Fetch TV.

The technology PhyR (Physical Layer Retransmission), pronounced 'Fire', is designed to improve voice, data and video services delivered over Broadcom's ADSL2+/ VDSL2 firmware by detecting and replacing corrupt data as it is transmitted. For the technically minded full details can be found in this Broadcom white paper.

 

iiNet is able to exploit the technology only because both its DSLAMs and its Bob CPE use Broadcom chipsets. iiNet says it will start trials shortly, and if successful, the technology will likely become available to all iiNet customers later in the year.

iiNet CTO, Greg Bader, said: "similar trials in France have been very promising, seeing a near ten-fold improvement in noise resilience and a significant drop in faults on customers' lines. Put simply, if the technology delivers what it promises, it will mean more customers will qualify for iiNet's fetchtv 2 service."

Greg Fischer, vice president & general manager of Broadcom's Carrier Access line of business, said: "French IPTV provider, Free, saw a dramatic improvement in quality - resulting in an increase of eight percent in customers' eligibility rates."

Bader added: "Although we're still in early stages, we're confident that the technology will improve all services running over ADSL, surpassing our competitor's offerings."

He told ExchangeDaily "We will trial it in the labs first and then with staff and then out to Whirlpool users. A lot of those people know their line stats and performance back to front. After that we would expect to roll it out pretty quickly, by the end of the year. We don't expect the implementation to have an customer impact so we can roll it out on a wide scale very quickly."