Vendors Must Provide Turnkey VoDSL Solutions

Electronic News, April 23, 2001 by H. "YOSHI" YOSHIZAWA

In the wake of the dot-com fallout, DSL Internet service providers (ISPs) are finding profitability difficult as they compete against each other for a shrinking market.

The upfront equipment costs and phone-line upgrades required for DSL also make it difficult for ISPs to compete in this space as these costs negate nearly any potential return on investment. These two factors have made it critical for ISPs to deliver new value-added services in addition to DSL's standard high-speed Internet access. Now more than ever, DSLISPs are looking to capitalize on the service differentiation advantages and additional subscription-fee revenues that technologies such as remote network management, virtual private networks (VPNs), wireless LAN support, and voice-over-DSL (VoDSL) can offer.

Arguably, the DSL valueadded service with the most potential for widespread adoption is VoDSL. The capability of supporting multiple toll-quality phone lines and high-speed Internet access over a single DSL connection will provide compelling cost-savings to both consumers and small businesses. These cost-savings are so compelling, in fact, that Cahner's In-Stat Group, Scottsdale, Ariz., is forecasting 10 million active VoDSL lines in the U.S. market by 2004. Accordingly, DSL ISPs are looking to electronics OEMs to help them meet the growing demand for VoDSL by supplying them with VoDSL-enabled residential gateways and routers.

With this increasing demand from ISPs for DSL products with integrated voice support, electronics OEMs face the familiar, but nonetheless difficult, challenge of designing a product that supports a cutting-edge technology and bringing that product to market under severe time and cost constraints. When roadmaps call for new product releases every six months, spending precious development time learning the ins and outs of VoDSL design is a luxury most OEMs can't afford. Instead, many OEMs focus their engineering expertise on ensuring that their DSL hardware supports the various service-layer applications their ISP customers require, such as monitoring DSL signal integrity or other quality of service concerns. Still, other OEMs have chosen to focus their engineering and financial resources on refining their manufacturing process because they don't have the in-house technical expertise necessary to develop their own VoDSL solutions. Whatever the case may be, OEMs are looking to avoid the more technically sophist icated portions of VoDSL product development. This means that semiconductor component vendors must shoulder the burden of VoDSL product development.

However, a component vendor offering various VoDSL-capable ICs may find that simply supporting VoDSL functionality in one or two components is not enough to earn a design win from a VoDSL OEM. No matter how feature-rich or high-performance a VoDSL component may be, that component's value is lessened if an OEM needs to waste development time integrating the component into a new or existing product design. The integration demands are equally daunting for software. Developing middleware and device drivers or having to port an operating system to support a third-party VoDSL IC can further inflate an OEM's product development schedule.

The realities of VoDSL product development make the mission for semiconductor component vendors clear: Vendors must provide OEMs with a time-to-market advantage by delivering a complete turnkey VoDSL reference design combining best-of-breed hardware and software. However, developing such a product in-house would be no small feat for even the most technically diverse and design-savvy semiconductor vendor. Gathering the hardware and software expertise that's required to quickly develop a complete VoDSL reference design is a formidable task. The answer to this problem can be found in a component vendor that takes the initiative to create a turnkey VoDSL reference design through strategic partnership and joint product development.

A component vendor with the initiative to start the joint development of a VoDSL reference design should begin the process by identifying which companies provide the hardware, software and technology expertise they lack. The vendor then should partner with these companies to jointly develop the VoDSL reference design, leveraging each other's particular areas of expertise to create a technically proven solution. Such a product would need to provide all the necessary hardware components, including a network controller to provide processing power and peripheral support, to handle various VoDSL signal protocols and a DSL physical layer (PHY).

However, the most critical ingredient for a turnkey VoDSL reference design is software. No matter how robust the reference design's hardware solution is, widespread adoption of this product hinges on providing a complete, technically proven software solution--including an operating system, design tools, device drivers and middleware-that is easy for OEMs to implement and modify.

To make the investment in developing this VoDSL reference design profitable, a component vendor would need to market this reference design to as many different OEMs as possible. To achieve widespread adoption by different OEMs, the reference design would need to offer the flexibility to support a variety of VoDSL and networking applications. Although it is impossible to support all the applications, OEMs could conceivably implement in their VoDSL products, a component vendor providing a turnkey VoDSL reference design should make the design robust enough to support as many current and emerging applications as possible. For example, suppose an OEM designing a new VoDSL-capable residential gateway wants the product to support 10/100Mbit/sec. Ethernet for home networking. Additionally, with the various wireless networking technologies currently being developed for the home market, the OEM may also want the next generation of its residential gateway product to support IEEE-802.11b, HomeRF or other wireless LAN st andards.