Bonded DSL Broadens Broadband
Standards offer service providers greater
opportunity to satisfy multimedia demands
The ITU has developed specifications that will allow DSL
service providers worldwide to offer considerably faster broadband to
users.
The standards allow the combining of two or more of the traditional copper
telephone lines used for DSL, to transport data from the service provider
to a single subscriber.
This will allow consumers or businesses with more than one telephone line
to benefit from the combined bandwidth of all lines — a feat not
previously possible.
The specifications are seen by operators as a way to guarantee the triple
play of voice, video and data services over DSL. While video is theoretically
possible over DSL, in practice it has been difficult to provide to all
locations — especially where those locations are far from the telephone
exchange. The concept of combining lines or ‘bonding’, as it
is known, has seen much interest in countries where two or more lines
are common in a business or household.
Yoichi Maeda, NTT Corporation and Chairman of the Study Group that authored
the specifications notes, "Bonded DSL lines are the key to offering
consumers bandwidth hungry applications like video and gaming. It is also
an ideal way to offer higher bandwidth to businesses."
Many operators see the standards as crucial given the push towards multimedia
services. As well, multiple wire solutions — where the wire is already
in place — are often seen as a cheaper solution to rolling out new
fiber. It's a way of leveraging existing infrastructure, while maximizing
customer service.
G.bond (the G.998 series of ITU-T Recommendations) simply increases the
data rate in proportion to the number of lines that are bonded. So two
bonded lines will double the data rate for both the upstream and downstream.
Likewise three bonded lines will triple the data upstream and downstream
rate, and so on. This is independent of the DSL technology (ADSL, VDSL
etc.).
The three different types of G.bond offer multiplexing of various service
data streams (Ethernet, ATM, TDM) over multiple DSL links.
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