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Excess Bandwidth Corp., which believes the battle for dominance in the high-bandwidth world of DSL modems is just beginning, has developed a symmetric-DSL chipset it claims can provide significant advantages over the more common asymmetric-DSL technology.
Virata Corp., also convinced of the promise of symmetric DSL (SDSL), moved in June to acquire Excess Bandwidth in a $315 million stock purchase expected to be completed later this quarter.
"ADSL will continue to be dominant in the near term, but there are those who believe that [SDSL] will be the ultimate winner," said Will Strauss, an analyst at Forward Concepts Co., Tempe, Ariz.
"SDSL offers some very compelling features," he said. "Symmetrical operation is something you really need for voice-over-DSL; it degrades gracefully as you move out to 20,000 feet or so, and it's multirate-adaptive, so you can throttle the service to whatever people are willing to pay for."
Excess Bandwidth has introduced its EBS720/710 SDSL processor, a two-chip implementation that supports two new SDSL standards: HDSL2 and G.shdsl.
"We're in a race right now to see who can be the first to fully digitize the phone-service content," said Mitchell Khan, vice president of marketing at Excess Bandwidth in Cupertino, Calif.
"This includes not only digitizing for data services, but also digitizing for voice services, and we think the emerging standards for SDSL are really the only viable technology for doing that," Khan said. "There are a lot of reasons why ADSL may not be...