ASSIA, a provider of software tools that provide Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) of DSL networks, has found a sizeable niche serving the U.S. DSL service provider market that wants to make more out of their existing copper networks.
Although it has not revealed a breakdown of its customer base, the vendor claims that recent sales of its DSM product have advanced its DSL market share to over 80 percent, a figure based on Point Topic's Q4 2009 Global Broadband Statistics Report.
Dr. John Cioffi, Chairman and CEO of ASSIA, said the he "expects to further increase its penetration of the North American market in the next year."
Finding ways to squeeze more life out of existing copper will resonate with large telcos such as AT&T and Qwest, which unlike Verizon that's going for an all Fiber to the Home approach, are leveraging their existing copper plant to deliver high speed data and video services in a Fiber to the Node (FTTN) configuration with VDSL2. Dynamic Spectrum Management, along with other emerging tools such as vectoring and bonding, have been heralded as the latest and greatest techniques to expand the rate and reach of DSL networks. According to ASSIA, it can help service providers deliver 100 Mbps data speeds and above over their existing copper lines.
ASSIA is not alone in expanding the boundaries of copper, however. Alcatel-Lucent and Ericsson have also been conducting experiments with vectoring technology that can deliver even higher speeds over copper. A recent experiment conducted by Alcatel-Lucent leveraging a mixture of VDSL2, VDSL2 bonding, and VDSL2 vectoring illustrated that they could deliver 300 Mbps on two copper pairs, while Ericsson demonstrated 500 Mbps data delivery with vectorized VDSL2.
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