Rockwell Semiconductor and Northern Telecom, Inc. have forged an imposing alliance to capture the market for a promising new digital subscriber line (DSL) technology: DSL Lite.
Rockwell and Nortel last week announced they will collaborate to make interoperable DSL Lite gear that supports data downloads up to 1M bit/sec and uploads at 120K bit/sec. It also will support a simultaneous analog voice channel over a regular telephone line. While it is slower than some other DSL technologies, DSL Lite is easier to install and therefore more attractive to service providers that could provision it at less cost.
Nortel plans to make modems that fit into its existing carrier gear, reducing the hardware investment carriers would have to make in the service. The gear includes Nortel switches as well as remote line termination boxes, known as digital loop carriers. DLCs can support the majority of phone lines in a given area, depending on population density and the age of the local phone network.
Rockwell will sell DSL Lite modem chips that other vendors could use to make modems for customer products. Customers would buy the modems at retail outlets and plug in their PCs, as they do with analog modems or ISDN terminal adapters.
Other vendors already have shown interest in DSL Lite but either are proceeding on their own or waiting for a DSL Lite standard to be set.
Because there is no standard yet for DSL Lite, the alliance could get a jump on other vendors, according to Vern Mackall, a senior analyst at International Data Corp., in New York.
``You rustle the trees and try to get your stuff accepted in the market and make a de facto standard," Mackall said.
Rockwell and Nortel will not have a DSL Lite product until next year. Rockwell calls the technology customer DSL (CDSL), and Nortel calls its offering the 1-Meg Modem.
The Rockwell-Nortel alliance also could speed up a standard for the technology, said Ken Krechmer, who sits on International Telecommunication Union standards committees. ``That will get the market moving, and that means the standards work is important and we should get busy," Krechmer said.
Rockwell already sells the key chips that many modem makers use to produce analog modems, and those modem makers could follow suit with DSL Lite modems, Krechmer said.
Amati Communications Corp. plans to make DSL Lite modems but not until a standard is set, according to Tac Berry, Amati's vice president of marketing. That will happen toward the end of 1998, he said.
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