xDSL

• XDSL.com: news, deployment statistics
• DSL Reports: equipment and ISP reviews
• Fiction v Fact: Top 17 Fictions About the Broadband Internet, Feb. 2001.
• Broadband Internet Use Up 42 Pct in 2003 -- FCC

  Driven largely by new residential and small-business customers, broadband use grew to 28.2 million lines by the end of 2003, the FCC said. The growth rate increased slightly in the second half of the year, from 18 percent to 20 percent, the FCC said. Cable-based services continued to be the most popular form of broadband service, the FCC found, accounting for 16.4 million lines. Telephone-based digital subscriber line service accounted for 9.5 million lines, while 2.3 million high-speed lines used satellite, fiber-optic or wireless technologies.

• D.S.L. Service for Linking to Internet Is Problem Ridden, NY Times, Dec. 28, 2000.

  "At the end of [2000], 3.4 million homes and businesses will have broadband Internet access through cable modems, compared with 1.2 million D.S.L. subscribers. But by 2005, there will be about 13.8 million cable-modem subscribers and 11.2 million D.S.L. subscribers, according to Jupiter Communications, a communications-industry consulting company."

• DSL speed test
• High-speed rate hikes may be on the horizon, cnet.com, Feb. 26, 2001.

  ... Sadler estimates that on a $40 broadband connection, roughly $25 to $28 dollars goes toward equipment costs, overhead and leased-line charges to the Bells, and after other administrative costs leaves roughly $8 to $10 in profit--before marketing costs such as advertisements or direct mailers. "It costs almost $900 to provision a single DSL customer," ...

• Rules of D.S.L.: Location, Location, Confusion (NYTimes, 01/13/00):

  D.S.L. is just getting started in many areas. Among the nation's 30,000 central phone offices, 4,300 were equipped for D.S.L. as of the end of September, according to TeleChoice, a consulting firm in Boston. Fritz McCormick, an analyst at the Yankee Group, said there were 300,000 residential D.S.L. subscribers and 1.1 million cable modem subscribers at the end of 1999. The number of residential D.S.L. subscribers is expected to grow to 900,000 by the end of 2000."

• DSL has a secret: "DSL provider NorthPoint Communications oversubscribes its trunks by a measure of 2 to 1, meaning the bandwidth coming into a network trunk is twice what the trunk can bear. That method works without degrading customer service because in practice, all customers aren't using their lines at the same time. "That ratio is very conservative. We are not even close to dropping a packet," says John Stormer, NorthPoint's vice president of marketing. GTE, which has done some of the most thorough real-world DSL testing, says that 10-to-1 oversubscription still provides full throughput to customers 95% of the time, even if they are all surfing the Internet simultaneously. That's because even during heavy Web surfing, the link is idle much of the time, according to Dale Veeneman, senior principal member of technical staff at GTE Labs."
• "The cost for a Cable or ADSL modem will most likely begin in the $150 to $300 range. The Cable companies and Telcos will probably have to give the modem away or rent them, like the cable box, to be able to pull customers away from each other.", "The Cambridge Newsletter"
• CLEC slashes T1 prices to $250/month; "Industry estimates place the number of cable modem users at around 300,000, while the number of DSL subscribers is estimated to be about 25,000 to 30,000." (Oct. 26, 1998)
• 2wire bandwidth meter, including upstream and downstream bandwidth
• DSL modem test (delays: 7 ms)
• With ADSL, SDSL, HDSL, and VDSL, telephone lines can carry high-rate data
• Simple extended area network (SEAN) architecture proposes to replace LANs and access networks by xDSL
• Pacific Bell To Roll Out ADSL
• Commercial xDSL pricing makes its debut
• Running the DSL numbers; hardware prices per line down to $750.
• A Consortium Seeks to Create In-Home Computer Networks

Last updated by Henning Schulzrinne