ATLANTA—Despite its rocky young history, digital subscriber line technology is being marketed in new ways to businesses for all communications services, including data, voice and video.
Tuesday at the Supercomm show in Atlanta, 11 DSL suppliers heralded united support for DMT (discrete multi-tone modulation) for standardizing very-high-bit-rate DSL. The standard, which is interoperable with ADSL, allows carriers to offer high-quality voice, video and data services over DSL. The 11 vendors agreeing on the standard include Alcatel, Ericsson, Intel, Texas Instruments and Thompson Multimedia among others.
Verizon Communications Inc. today unveiled an extended contract with Alcatel for its DSL networking equipment to bring the Internet access technology to more customers. Verizon officials said that the company is deploying DSL equipment in 1000 additional switching centers and that four-fifths of its customers will have access to the technology by the end of the year.
This week, Nokia Inc. is demonstrating upgraded routers that will allow operators to provide the same virtual private network services over multiple access technologies, including DSL. For users, the new technology is slated to unify and accelerate service provisioning.
“The enterprise customer is no longer tied to one type of access for VPN service,” said Graham Ellis, director of marketing for Nokia Broadband Systems. “It simplifies the network, it simplifies the business relationship.”
The simplification is made possible by Nokias MPLS-enabled edge routers over which encryption can be layered to ensure secure corporate communications, Ellis said.
“In the past, in order to provide a frame connection to a customers, you could have had up to five different functional groups,” Ellis said. “If youre able to simplify all that, you have the opportunity to cut a number of steps out of the process.”
Nokia also unveiled its Remote DSL System, to help carriers extend their DSL offerings to hard-to-reach regions. Additionally, Nokia launched a new video conferencing technology that allows business users in remote offices or home offices with DSL to join video calls with a headquarters with higher speed access.