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DSL is widely perceived as the best bet in the United States for consumer, mass-market, high-speed Internet access, and it is expected to drive a new wave of applications in both the corporate and consumer markets. In the corporate arena, DSL is the clear choice for home-office workers and telecommuters who want their home desktops connected at LAN speeds, as well as for companies seeking a VPN (virtual private network) for extranet applications. To sweeten the deal, software and hardware vendors agree that DSL is the wave of the future. With Bill Gates publicly cooing over the prospect of the forthcoming DSL G.lite standard, and numerous vendors shipping or planning to ship DSL CPE (customer premises equipment), DSL's future seems assured.

And yet, many areas of the United States are still waiting for deployment of DSL and the technology lacks a standard that will drive a new commodity market for DSL equipment. For business customers, it's eerily similar to 1994, when ISDN rollouts didn't happen nearly as fast as press releases would have led you to believe. DSL, like ISDN at that time, lacks the standards and interoperability testing that will give businesses and consumers a variety of inexpensive choices for both client and server hardware.

The DSL newsgroup noise, which would also ring a bell with those early ISDN customers, is symptomatic of the industry's relative inexperience with DSL technology, but also is the result of corporate posturing and overpromising designed to generate a feeling of well-being among customers and stockholders.

"No one is making money on DSL right now," says Glenn Ward, vice president of broadband development for Bell Canada, referring mainly to the CLECs and ILECs (incumbent local exchange carriers) that are scrambling to build a DSL infrastructure. "They're in this for market share and experience." Ward echoes the general sentiment that DSL won't become profitable and widely accepted until the G.lite standard is in place. This standard is expected to shift the cost of the CPE--meaning the DSL modem--to the consumer and eliminate the "truck roll," or the need for skilled technicians to visit each DSL customer site. Currently, a technician must split the connection into separate voice and data wire segments using low-pass filters that separate the voice frequencies, at 400 Hz to 4,000 Hz, from the higher-rate data frequencies.

The Road to G.lite Just as the ISDN market was jump-started by the NI-1 standard and interoperability testing that created a standards-based market for ISDN equipment in the United States, customers and vendors alike are anxiously awaiting a standard for DSL equipment interoperability that will let the same sort of commodity market emerge. That standard, dubbed G.lite but also called variously Consumer ADSL (Asymmetrical DSL)--not to be confused with Rockwell International Corp.'s defunct QAM-based Consumer DSL chipset announced last fall--or Universal ADSL, is being developed by the Universal ADSL Working Group (www.uawg.org), an advisory group consisting of nearly all the major DSL equipment manufacturers. The initial draft proposal, Working Document 1.0, was announced at the Supercomm trade show in June. On October 23, the preliminary G.lite standard will be put to a vote by the UAWG and then is expected to be passed on as a recommendation to the ITU (International Telecommunication Union). The ITU is expected to ratify an official standard for G.lite by the end of this year.