Lucent Technologies Launches Breakthrough DSL Platform to Deliver High-Quality Voice, Data and Video Services - Stinger DSL access concentrator - Product Announcement

Cambridge Telcom Report, Sept 13, 1999

Addressing the exploding market for Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) services, Lucent Technologies Tuesday announced a new carrier-class DSL platform that will allow service providers for the first time to offer business and residential customers the highest quality of voice over DSL -- along with high-speed data, Internet and video services -- all over one copper connection.

Called Stinger, Lucent's breakthrough DSL access concentrator offers industry-leading Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities, enabling service providers to prioritize voice services while delivering dedicated access to bandwidth-hungry data services at the same time. Stinger's advanced features enable it to deliver voice traffic over DSL with the same high quality and reliability that customers expect today.

"Lucent's Stinger solution for the first time offers DSL without the trade-offs," said Curt Sanford, president, InterNetworking Systems, Lucent Technologies. "One copper wire will now deliver the highest quality voice plus high-speed Internet and data services.

"To date, DSL has primarily been deployed by CLECs to deliver data and Internet access to businesses," said Sanford. "With its carrier-class voice capabilities, Stinger will now allow service providers of all sizes to take advantage of the growing DSL market, and deliver revenue-generating voice and video services as well. This is about making DSL ready for prime-time, large-scale deployment."

DSL technology meets the growing demand for new broadband services without additional costly investment. The technology nearly doubles the capacity of existing copper wires and offers speeds up to 30 times faster than today's analog modems.

Stinger enables service providers to offer their customers up to 16 phone lines, as well as dedicated high-speed data and Internet access, over a single copper connection that runs into their home or business today.

The market for DSL services is growing at a rate of 267 percent this year, according to Computer Economics, a California-based research firm that focuses on the high-tech industry.

Primary Network Communications and MagnaCorp India Limited will be among the first customers to deploy Stinger to deliver integrated, high-quality voice, data and video services over DSL. Stinger is also currently in trials with more than 20 customers in several countries worldwide.

"We chose Lucent's Stinger after looking closely at a number of products available in the market," said Rich Phillips, president, Primary Network Communications. "Stinger's integrated architecture will allow us to deliver voice and data to our small and medium-sized business customers in a cost-effective manner, while providing the kind of capabilities that previously only large businesses could afford."

"Looking forward, we expect to see DSL deployment figures grow ten fold by the end of 2002," said Claudia Bacco, director, DSL Consulting, TeleChoice, Inc. "The Stinger product platform positions service providers to take advantage of this marketplace by having the ability to offer multiple services based on a DSL transport infrastructure."

Industry's First Integrated DSL Access Concentrator Residing in the central office, a DSL access concentrator terminates DSL traffic from the customer premises and sends it to the service provider's backbone network.

Stinger is the first integrated DSL platform to incorporate a high-speed ATM switching fabric, giving service providers end-to-end QoS capabilities. With bandwidth management and priority policing capabilities, Stinger will enable service providers to deliver differentiated classes of service to their customers. Stinger also integrates other functions such as loop qualification and service selection to provide customers cost savings in equipment, management and training.

Stinger delivers the highest capacity and scalability in the industry. With support for up to 672 ports per chassis and 2016 ports per rack, the product offers nearly three times the port density of competing products in a smaller footprint and reduces costs by saving expensive central office space.

By next year, Stinger will support up to 9000 ports on a single OC-12 trunk, making it possible to achieve large-scale deployment of DSL services from a single central office.

Stinger's multiservice platform will provide support for all versions of DSL--SDSL, ADSL (full-rate and G.Lite), IDSL and HDSL2--allowing service providers to deliver a wide range of applications from a single platform.

The product also delivers greater flexibility with support for both ATM and Frame Relay from customer premises to central office, offering service providers the choice of provisioning either an ATM or Frame-based access network.

Stinger provides substantially better performance than competing products, with 1.6 Gbps system throughput, expandable to 8 Gbps in the future. The product also leads in redundancy, with no single point of failure.

Lucent has introduced a new network management system, NavisAccess:DSL, for its DSL products. NavisAccess:DSL provides a Java-based(1) graphical provisioning interface for the Stinger and DSL TNT, as well as new tools to monitor DSL MIB variables. The provisioning interface uses a 'wizard' system, which allows service providers to configure new DSL circuits quickly.