Digital Subscriber Line - History

History

Theory behind DSL, like many other forms of communication, can be traced back to Claude Shannon's seminal 1948 paper: A Mathematical Theory of Communication. An early patent was filed in 1987 for the use of wires for both voice phones and as a local area network.

The motivation of digital subscriber line technology was the Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) specification proposed in 1984 by the CCITT (now ITU-T) as part of Recommendation I.120, later reused as ISDN Digital Subscriber Line (IDSL). Employees at Bellcore (now Telcordia Technologies) developed Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) and filed a patent in 1988, by placing wide-band digital signals above the existing baseband analog voice signal carried between telephone company telephone exchanges and customers on conventional twisted pair cabling facilities. Consumer-oriented ADSL was designed to operate on existing lines already conditioned for Basic Rate Interface ISDN services, which itself is a switched digital service (non-IP), though most incumbent local exchange carriers (ILECs) provision Rate-Adaptive Digital Subscriber Line (RADSL) to work on virtually any available copper pair facility—whether conditioned for BRI or not. Engineers developed higher-speed DSL facilities such as High bit rate Digital Subscriber Line (HDSL) and Symmetric Digital Subscriber Line (SDSL) to provision traditional Digital Signal 1 (DS1) services over standard copper pair facilities.

A DSL circuit provides digital service. The underlying technology of transport across DSL facilities uses high-frequency sinusoidal carrier wave modulation, which is an analog signal transmission. A DSL circuit terminates at each end in a modem which modulates patterns of bits into certain high-frequency impulses for transmission to the opposing modem. Signals received from the far-end modem are demodulated to yield a corresponding bit pattern that the modem retransmits, in digital form, to its interfaced equipment, such as a computer, router, switch, etc. Unlike traditional dial-up modems, which modulate bits into signals in the 300–3400 Hz baseband (voice service), DSL modems modulate frequencies from 4000 Hz to as high as 4 MHz. This frequency band separation enables DSL service and plain old telephone service (POTS) to coexist on the same copper pair facility. Generally, higher bit rate transmissions require a wider frequency band, though the ratio of bit rate to bandwidth are not linear due to significant innovations in digital signal processing and digital modulation methods.

Early DSL service required a dedicated dry loop, but when the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) required ILECs to lease their lines to competing DSL service providers, shared-line DSL became available. Also known as DSL over Unbundled Network Element, this unbundling of services allows a single subscriber to receive two separate services from two separate providers on one cable pair. The DSL service provider's equipment is co-located in the same central office (telephone exchange) as that of the ILEC supplying the customer's pre-existing voice service. The subscriber's circuit is then rewired to interface with hardware supplied by the ILEC which combines a DSL frequency and POTS frequency on a single copper pair facility.

On the subscriber's end of the circuit, inline low-pass DSL filters (splitters) are installed on each telephone to filter the high-frequency "hiss" that would otherwise be heard, but pass voice (5 kHz and below) frequencies. Conversely, high-pass filters already incorporated in the circuitry of DSL modems filter out voice frequencies. Although ADSL and RADSL modulations do not use the voice-frequency band, nonlinear elements in the phone could otherwise generate audible intermodulation and may impair the operation of the data modem in the absence of low-pass filters.

Older ADSL standards delivered 8 Mbit/s to the customer over about 2 km (1.2 mi) of unshielded twisted-pair copper wire. Newer variants improved these rates. Distances greater than 2 km (1.2 mi) significantly reduce the bandwidth usable on the wires, thus reducing the data rate. ADSL loop extenders increase these distances substantially.