On Thursday the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) settled on a standard for a technology that promises to deliver significantly improved access speeds over regular telephone lines by mid-year next year.
The Union gave its final OK to a set of technical specifications for "DSL lite," a flavor of high-speed Internet data delivery known as Digital Subscriber Line. With a speed limit of 1.5 Mbps, DSL lite -- also known as g.lite -- is 30 times as fast as today's 56-Kbps modems.
"The ITU voted to determine the standard for DSL lite," said John Goldman, communications manager of regional phone company BellSouth.
"Barring some terrible flaw in the spec... manufacturers can now begin production of equipment that's compatible with it."
While it's good news for the advancement of the technology, Goldman cautioned consumers not to expect instant nationwide availability.
"There's going to be a lag time. ADSL lite is not going to be in any type of general deployment before mid-year 1999." It will take that long before equipment is out in sufficient numbers, he said.
Though the consumer-friendly DSL lite is trailing behind increasingly available cable modems on the adoption curve, experts say that it may quickly gain the upper hand.
This is because existing DSL technologies, including standard ADSL, require more than just a modem purchase by users. They also require the phone company to "roll a truck" and install equipment at the customer's residence.
"It�s definitely going to speed up [deployment]," said Claudia Bacco, senior DSL analyst with telecommunications consulting firm Telechoice.
"All the vendors are waiting to launch new products. This is like someone pulled a gun and said 'go.' A lot of service providers have been slow to deploy g.lite, because they want to make sure its right thing to deploy in the long term."
Goldman's BellSouth, which will sell DSL lite service to third-party Internet service providers for resale to end-users, expects to price the service at US$30-$45 per month. That will translate to about $50 per month for consumers. It's about twice the rate of current Internet access cost, but 30 times as fast, Goldman said.
While some ISPs and phone companies are providing DSL services already, the news makes a purchase much less risky. Currently, different manufacturers make slightly different versions of the DSL lite equipment in various parts of the country.
"If you are in Denver or Atlanta you should be able to use the same equipment," said Goldman.
"If you're using a laptop with an ADSL modem inside, you want to make sure it will work when you take that laptop to Atlanta." ____
Competition and other uncertainties
While the phone companies rally behind DSL lite, the cable companies have already made their own high-speed modems available to customers, using the cable TV infrastructure to deliver even faster high-speed access.
Bacco thinks cable will always have an edge over phone-line based technology such as DSL lite.
"DSL is better suited for business users, and cable modem's cost and technology is better suited for $19.95 Web surfers, until DSL becomes like analog modems in terms of ease and cost," he said.
Meanwhile, Bacco also thinks unanswered technical questions about DSL lite leave open the possibility that telcos will need to roll trucks to residences to make the system work. This adds to the cost of deployment.
"The thought was you could buy a g.lite modem, take it home, plug it in, and it works. We don�t know how true that is."
Bacco said some DSL modems still require the installation of a filter that would block anything else other than low frequency traffic from coming out of a jack.
While DSL lite may not require special equipment where a phone lines meets a house, the need for filters on some products show that there is potentially an issue of electrical interference arising once people begin using the service.
Bacco thinks that to succeed, consumers must be able to hook up DSL modems without a hitch.
"Joe Web surfer has to open up his PC and install different components. It needs to be made very easy and transparent like analog modem."
Meanwhile, Goldman said to expect plenty of announcements by manufacturers conducting tests to make sure their equipment is fully compatible. This testing can begin right away thanks to the standard.
