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Date:      Sun, 17 Mar 1996 01:25:56 -0500
From:      "Louis A. Mamakos" <louie@TransSys.COM>
To:        Tony Kimball <alk@Think.COM>
Cc:        hackers@freefall.freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: hackers-digest V1 #986 
Message-ID:  <199603170625.BAA11556@wa3ymh.transsys.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 16 Mar 1996 23:10:48 CST." <199603170510.XAA16862@compound> 

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>    From: <hasty@rah.star-gate.com>
> 
>    BTW: I am looking around for ADSL modems anyone knows where I can
>    get two cheap ones!
> 
> PairGain claims their 2d generation models will be out in June/July
> "between $600 and $1000".  This is the "Etherphone" model.  With two
> of these and a dry pair, I should get 4Mb/s downloads and 640Kb/s 
> uploads through my ISP.

This presumes that you can get dry pair betwixt you and your "ISP",
which is going to be a pretty good trick more and more.  When the T1
circuits are delivered muxed up on a T3 bearer, it becomes an
interesting problem.  It's never really been clear to me how the ADSL
stuff gets deployed on the public network, rather than on private
facilities.  It's getting more and more common that the major telecom
facilities in a office building are on fiber systems, either async
150Mbs systems, or OC-3/OC-12 SONET systems.  The copper you see is
for POTS lines, and it some cases, it pops out of a T1 channel bank at
the site.

The larger Internet Backbone Operators (like UUNET, who I work for)
are looking really, really hard at technologies to aggregate and
multiplex customer connections.  

In the "bad old days", we'd have an seperate external box with a
CSU/DSU, V.35 (or EIA 530 cable), and high speed serial port on a
router for each circuit.  Just working the power, space and cable
managment problems for a rack of 16 T1 CSU/DSUs, 16 DSX-1/T-1 cables,
and 16 V.35/RS-530 cables is quite a signifcant resource.  All that
stuff is just there to be broken and take up space, power, and HVAC.
	
The technology in use today has equipment with integral T1 CSU/DSUs.
This is solely because of the space and labor (that is operational
expense) required to terminate all these T1 connections.  When you
elimate all those components, the capital costs go down, as do the
maintenance costs.

The stuff we're looking for tomorrow has DS3 bearers, each carrying a
bundle of 28 T1 circuits.  That is, a pair of coax right into the
termination equipment, and the T1 circuits never see twisted pair
cable; they're demuxed in the hardware.. The challange is to figure
how how to terminate hundreds of customer T1 circuits per site, and
this stuff just has to be compact (or even better, not even there in
the first place).

The tough part is figuring out where you put random ADSL hardware into
this picture.  It will be interesting to see what the pentration of
ADSL hardware will be into the market.  Much of the stuff that I've
seen from the local RBOC has been ADSL capacity installed to support
video trails, which they're trying to figure out how to use.  With
more and more customer premise equipment being manufactured with
integral T1 CSU/DSUs, it will be interesting to see what they can do
with it.  From the RBOC's perspective, they'll need a critical mass to
want to support this stuff in their infrastructure.

The other interesting hardware you may see more commonly is HDSL,
which can deliver standard T1 transmission over lesser quality twisted
pair facilities.  It has the advantage of popping out at a standard
DSX-1 signal level, which can be DACS/MUXed easily as required in the
Central office, since it's compatible with existing vast
infrastructure of T1 transmission gear that they have.

> ISDN is obsolete.

Hey, the technology works pretty well.  It's a tariff/rate problem
that needs to be solved..

Louis Mamakos



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