Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)

Introduction

When you connect to the Internet, you might connect through a regular
modem, through a LAN connection in your office, through a cable modem or
through a Digital Subscriber Line (DSL)

What is DSL

DSL is a very high-speed connection that uses the same wires as a

regular copper telephone line, and can carry both data and voice signals (using
the phone for calls and surfing the net) at the same time.

History of DSL

While the theoretical capacity of copper to transmit data was long known,
the practical use of telephone wires for high speed data was first demonstrated in
the late 1980s. Joseph Lechleider, now retired from Bellcore, through
mathematical analysis demonstrated the feasibility of sending broadband signals,
and is considered by many the originator of all these technologies. He went on to
suggest the power of asymmetry, (the A in ADSL), recognizing many users would
benefit from the higher data rates possible in one direction. His colleagues speak
of him with great fondness, and he inspired many of the other pioneers in the
field. The editor of DSL Prime would appreciate photocopies of any of his
seminal papers from the late ‘80s or early ‘90s.
The first efforts created ISDN and then the two circuit replacement for T-1
lines that came to be called HDSL. ISDN never was effectively marketed in the
US, but remains popular in Europe. HDSL, on the other hand, was very
successful, and is used for most T-1 circuits installed today. In the early 1990s,
many sought a way to deliver broadband to more users,
John Cioffi, now a Stanford Professor, developed DMT, the standard for most
DSL circuits. By separating the signal into 256 subchannels, many problems
relating to line noise and disturbance can be minimized. He founded Amati,
where they designed equipment that in 1993 had dramatically better results than
all competitors in Bellcore testing and became the most common standard.
Several of his competitors to this day think it was not the best technical solution
at the time, but carried the day because of Cioffi’s personal brilliance. They
blame other companies for not putting appropriate resources into other
technologies, and the success of Broadcom, whose founders were major
participants, speaks to the alternatives.
While these debates were raging at Bellcore, standards committees, and
technical journals, others were impatient to bring product to the market. The
dream was to deliver video on demand, a telco goal while the cable world was
promising 500 channels. Kim Maxwell, also of Amati, was a key founder of the

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 ADSL Forum, which brought the industry together and today is the key institution.
But while the technologists believed deployment was practical, little happened in
the field, so an alliance was formed between telcos and computer companies
(Intel and Compaq, especially) which became the UAWG and developed the
G.Lite standard. G.Lite is coming to market in late 1999, and aims to reduce the
installation and other costs of DSL.

Advantage of DSL

n You can leave your Internet connection open and still use the phone line
for voice calls.
n The speed is much higher than a regular modem (1.5 Mbps vs. 56 Kbps)
n DSL doesn't necessarily require new wiring; it can use the phone line you
already have.
n The company that offers DSL will usually provide the modem as part of
the installation

Disadvantage of DSL

n A DSL connection works better when you are closer to the provider's
central office.
n The connection is faster for receiving data than it is for sending data over
the Internet.
n The service is not available everywhere.

How DSL Works

A standard telephone installation consists of a pair of copper wires that the

phone company installs in your home. The copper wires have lots of room for
carrying more than your phone conversations, capable of handling a much
greater bandwidth than that demanded for voice. DSL uses this extra bandwidth
to transmit huge amounts of data without interfering with the original functions of
the wires.

One of the ways that POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) makes the
most of the telephone company's wires and equipment is by limiting the
frequencies that the switches, telephones and other equipment will carry. Human
voices, speaking in normal conversational tones, can be carried in a frequency
range of 0 to 3,400 Hertz (cycles per second -- see How Telephones Work for a
great demonstration of this). This range of frequencies is tiny. For example,
compare this to the range of most stereo speakers, which cover from roughly 20
Hertz to 20,000 Hertz and the wires themselves have the potential to handle
frequencies up to several million Hertz in most cases. Modern equipment
sending digital rather than analog data can safely use much more of the
telephone line's capacity.

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 Other Types of DSL include:

Symmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL)

used typically for business applications such as video conferencing. The

traffic from the user to the network is upstream traffic, and from the network to
the user is downstream traffic. When the data rate in both directions is equal, it is
called a symmetric service.

High-data-rate Digital Subscriber Line (HDSL)

provides fixed symmetrical high speed access at T1 rate (1.5 Mbps), and
is designed for business purposes.

ISDN Digital Subscriber Line (IDSL)

provides symmetrical connection with Integrated Services Digital Network

(ISDN), and is designed to extend DSL to locations with a long distance to a
telephone central office.

Very high-data-rate Digital Subscriber Line (VDSL)

provides both symmetrical and asymmetrical access with very high bit rate
over the copper line. Deployment is very limited at this time.

Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL)

used primarily by residential users who receive a lot of data but do not
send much, such as Internet surfers. ADSL provides faster speed in a
downstream direction (from the telephone central office to the customer's
premises) than upstream (from customer's premise to the telephone central
office). When the upstream data rate is lower than the downstream rate, it is
called an asymmetric service.

Table1: Data Rate and Distance Limitation with corresponding type of DSL

Type of DSL Data Rate Distance From Central

Office
SDSL 1.5 Mbps symmetric U/D 5.4 km
HDSL 1.5 Mbps symmetric U/D 4.5 km
IDSL 144 Kbps symmetric U/D 10.8 km
VDSL 50 Mbps D / 8 Mbps U 1.2 km
ADSL 8 Mbps D / 1 Mbps U 5.4 km

Distance Limitation

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 ADSL is a distance-sensitive technology. The speed varies from the distance
to your telephone service provider. At the extremes of the distance limits,
customers may see speeds far below the promised maximums, while customers
nearer the central office have faster connections and may see extremely high
speeds in the future.

Other factors that might disqualify you from receiving ADSL include:

n Bridge taps - These are extensions, between you and the central office,
that extend service to other customers. While you wouldn't notice these
bridge taps in normal phone service, they may take the total length of the
circuit beyond the distance limits of the service provider.
n Fiber-optic cables - ADSL signals can't pass through the conversion from
analog to digital and back to analog that occurs if a portion of your
telephone circuit comes through fiber-optic cables.

DSL Standards

There are two competing and incompatible standards for ADSL. The
official ANSI standard for ADSL is a system called discrete multitone, or DMT.
According to equipment manufacturers, most of the ADSL equipment installed
today uses DMT. An earlier and more easily implemented standard was the
carrierless amplitude/phase (CAP) system, which was used on many of the early
installations of ADSL.

CAP (Carrierless Amplitude/Phase System)

Figure 1. Carrierless Amplitude/Phase System

CAP operates by dividing the signals on the telephone line into three
distinct bands: Voice conversations are carried in the 0 to 4 KHz (kilohertz) band,
as they are in all POTS circuits. The upstream channel (from the user back to the
server) is carried in a band between 25 and 160 KHz. The downstream channel
(from the server to the user) begins at 240 KHz and goes up to a point that varies
depending on a number of conditions (line length, line noise, number of users in
a particular telephone company switch) but has a maximum of about 1.5 MHz
(megahertz). This system, with the three channels widely separated, minimizes
the possibility of interference between the channels on one line, or between the
signals on different lines.

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 DMT (Discrete Multiple Tone)

DMT also divides signals into separate channels, but doesn't use two fairly
broad channels for upstream and downstream data. Instead, DMT divides the
data into 247 separate channels, each 4 KHz wide.

Figure 2. Discrete Multiple Tone

One way to think about it is to imagine that the phone company divides
your copper line into 247 different 4-KHz lines and then attaches a modem to
each one. You get the equivalent of 247 modems connected to your computer at
once! Each channel is monitored and, if the quality is too impaired, the signal is
shifted to another channel. This system constantly shifts signals between
different channels, searching for the best channels for transmission and
reception. In addition, some of the lower channels (those starting at about 8
KHz), are used as bidirectional channels, for upstream and downstream
information. Monitoring and sorting out the information on the bidirectional
channels, and keeping up with the quality of all 247 channels, makes DMT more
complex to implement than CAP, but gives it more flexibility on lines of differing
quality.

Low Pass Filter

Figure 3. Low-pass Filter

If you have ADSL installed, you were almost certainly given small filters to
attach to the outlets that don't provide the signal to your ADSL modem. These
filters are low-pass filters - simple filters that block all signals above a certain
frequency. Since all voice conversations take place below 4 KHz, the low-pass
(LP) filters are built to block everything above 4 KHz, preventing the data signals
from interfering with standard telephone calls.

Channel Separation Mode

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 To create multiple channels, Modems divide the available bandwidth of a
telephone line in one of two ways

n FDM
n Echo Cancellation

DSL Equipments

To interconnect multiple DSL users to a high-speed backbone network,

the telephone company uses a Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer
(DSLAM). Typically, the DSLAM connects to an asynchronous transfer mode
(ATM) network that can aggregate data transmission at gigabit data rates. At the
other end of each transmission, a DSLAM demultiplexes the signals and
forwards them to appropriate individual DSL connections.

Transceiver

Most residential customers call their DSL transceiver a "DSL modem." The
engineers at the telephone company or ISP call it an ATU-R. Regardless of what
it's called, it's the point where data from the user's computer or network is
connected to the DSL line.

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