Monday, January 8, 2007

History of DSL

Digital subscriber line technology was originally implemented as part of the ISDN specification, thus can operate on a BRI ISDN line as well as an analog phone line.
Joe Lechleider at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies) developed ADSL in 1988 by placing wideband digital signals above the existing baseband analog voice signal carried between telephone company central offices and customers on conventional twisted pair cabling.

US telephone companies promote DSL to compete with cable modems. DSL service was first provided over a dedicated "dry loop", but when the FCC required ILECs to lease their lines to competing providers such as Earthlink, shared-line DSL became common. Also known as DSL over UNE), this allows a single pair to carry data (via a DSLAM) and analog voice (via a circuit switched telephone switch) at the same time. Inline low-pass filter/splitters keep the high frequency DSL signals out of the user's telephones. Although DSL avoids the voice frequency band, the nonlinear elements in the phone would otherwise generate audible intermodulation products and impair the operation of the data modem.

Older ADSL standards can deliver 8 Mbit/s to the customer over about 2 km (1.25 miles) of unshielded twisted pair copper wire. The latest standard, ADSL2+, can deliver up to 24 Mbit/s, depending on the distance from the DSLAM. Some customers, however, are located farther than 2 km (1.25 miles) from the central office, which significantly reduces the amount of bandwidth available (thereby reducing the data rate) on the wires.

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