ASSIA - DSL Solutions for Service Providers



2012: The Year of VDSL

George Ginis

posted by George Ginis
Vice President of Managed Systems Engineering, ASSIA, Inc.
January 12th, 2012

With the race to provide ubiquitous high-speed broadband for new services heating up, it looks as though 2012 is set to be the year of VDSL (very-high-speed digital subscriber line), and a great year for DSL overall.

VDSL is a powerful next-generation access technology that is transforming DSL with data rates of up to 200 megabits per second (Mbps) – greater than eight times those of the standard-bearing ADSL today. 

Furthermore, VDSL provides additional power to service providers and end users alike, enabling service providers to support higher speeds over existing copper telephone lines and letting an increasing number of consumers enjoy high-bandwidth services such as IPTV.

Although much attention recently has been lavished on fiber and cable as the future of wireline broadband Internet access, the fastest growth is actually in copper-based DSL access. DSL is a $120 billion global service revenue market with 400 million customers, and it accounts for 70 percent of the world’s broadband in the access sector — handily beating cable and fiber combined.

The enhanced performance of VDSL is expected to help keep copper in its market-leading position worldwide, while ubiquitous fiber to the home (FTTH) remains a costly and distant alternative. 

After all, nearly every building across the United States and arguably throughout the developed world already has a copper phone line installed. Extending the reach of DSL across those lines will become simpler and faster with advancing software techniques, such as VDSL.

While deployment of VDSL is still in its infancy, it has already “grown up” from first-generation VDSL to second-generation VDSL2 to third-generation vectored VDSL2. First-generation VDSL is already considered outdated technology. Currently planned deployments make use of second-generation VDSL2 systems.

VDSL2 can ideally provide data rates close to 100 Mbps in both the downstream and upstream directions, but in most practical cases is limited to less than 50 Mbps. These limitations are removed with third-generation vectored VDSL2, which truly delivers 100 Mbps in each direction and for most realistic scenarios.

Data rates of 100 Mbps and above can easily handle high-bandwidth services such as streaming video, IPTV, and web-based applications over widely installed copper telephone lines, and they provide a path to accommodate increasing demand for such services from the exploding number of mobile Wi-Fi devices.  

ASSIA has been involved with DSL since its inception, when Dr. Cioffi researched the possibility of transmitting data and video over copper lines, and defined DSL at Bell Labs. During the last decade ASSIA inventors also created vectoring technology, which dramatically improves the performance of VDSL2.

Both VDSL2 and vectored VDSL2 are major steps towards improving the consumer broadband experience.  However, the true potential and service benefits of VDSL, with data rates up to 200 Mbps, are only attainable with vectored VDSL2 combined with a DSL management system, which I will address in my next posts.

Below are links for additional reading about the telecommunications industry’s sharp focus on VDSL, which point toward a strong year for VDSL in 2012:

Analyst reports and articles:

Service-provider deployments:

Equipment and software vendor product announcements: