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DSL Diversity Drives Deployment

Posted: 14th May, 2003 By: MarkJ

The global DSL Forum has today issued a new and rather lengthy press release that highlights some of the issues covered in its recent quarterly meeting. For one thing, 56.6% of the worlds broadband subscribers connect using DSL, 38% via cable modems and 4.7% through Ethernet:

DSL Diversity Drives Global Broadband Deployment Leadership

Over half of the world's broadband subscribers use DSL technology, the global DSL Forum learned at its quarterly meeting in Lisbon [5-8 May 2003]. According to Tim Johnson of London-based industry analyst firm, Point Topic, 56.5% of the world's broadband subscribers are connected through DSL, followed by cable modems [38%] and Gigabit Ethernet [4.7%].

"Beneath these global numbers is a huge variation in broadband penetration by country, even between countries with similar levels of economic and technical development," said Johnson, presenting his report to the DSL Forum on global broadband market drivers [see table 1]. "We have seen continuing fast-track growth in broadband subscribers with a trend towards greater take up in the second half of each year."

Just as ADSL is becoming a necessity instead of a luxury around the world, VDSL is taking off, supporting higher bandwidth applications, extending DSL's mass-market growth around the world. South Korea, with over 28% DSL penetration of main phone lines and 6.45 million DSL subscribers at the end of 2002, is already the world's leading country for mass market DSL. Now it is leading the way to even more connection speed and wider services as 360,000 subscribers upgraded to VDSL in the first quarter of 2003 to bring the number of VDSL subscribers in the country to a total of half a million.

"Those half a million subscribers are now connected to streaming videos and online gaming capacities that film fans, soap opera buffs and gamesters can currently only dream of in most countries," said Johnson. The DSL Forum meetings had a focus on emerging technologies and shared news of commercial deployments of further standardized DSL services using ADSL2, ADSL2plus and SHDSL all coming on stream around the world in 2003.

Equipment for ADSL2 and ADSL2plus, meeting the approved ITU standards [International Telecommunications Union] is expected to become available before the end of the year and will interoperate with existing ADSL service equipment. "That will allow carriers to build into their infrastructure the flexibility to offer a range of asymmetric services with greater speed and reach opportunities," said Tom Starr, president of the DSL Forum. "This is a cost-effective route to meeting the upgrade demands of some existing customers and providing greater performance consistency over longer distances for customers currently beyond the scope of existing ADSL."

Point Topic analysis and various service providers reports pointed to the advancements of self-install and automated provisioning, all building upon DSL Forum's technical work as today's reasons for their significantly improved business cases for DSL. According to Portugal Telecom's Jorge Peneda, manager of wholesale services, "The key to future competitiveness is meeting customer expectations. That requires clear and well communicated service levels for installation, fault repair, available speeds combined with automated provisioning to minimise cost and maximise the positive customer experience."

Dr. Balazs Varga, Sr. Development Management of Matav, Hungary's primary DSL service provider who also addressed the members, highlighted the need to support power users, including bandwidth on demand services, providing end users with dynamic service selection to meet their specific service requirements - from simple email access to video distribution via the Internet.

DSL Forum's new European Market Focus Group built upon this theme. They will be surveying service providers to assess current best practices to support power users and driving specifications to evolve networks to efficiently meet those customer's needs.

"DSL technology is the most effective route to delivering global mass market broadband," said Thomas Starr, president of the DSL Forum. "The core infrastructure of around a billion phone lines is already in place. Our role is to provide the technical, operational, knowledge sharing and end user education to facilitate that we reach our mass-market target of 200 million DSL subscribers around the world by the end of 2005.