Business customers are taking to a new high-speed DSL service, with Telecom building for likely demand by enabling 72 exchanges with the technology by the end of March.
Telecom investment planning manager Gavin Knight says 95 frame relay customers are already using g.SHDSL and 25 more are being connected. The first of the g.SHDSL exchanges was enabled in the final quarter of last year.
G.SHDSL, a form of symmetrical DSL which can deliver up to 2Mbit/s up or downstream, is being used both by customers running frame relay links and those with Telecom’s IP.office service, Knight says. There were 46 g.SHDSL-active exchanges when Computerworld spoke to Knight last week, with another 26 to be enabled for the technology by the end of the month.
“G.SHDSL has the same exchange infrastructure as ADSL and only requires different plug-in cards and modems for customers,” he says. “One hundred and fifty exchanges have ADSL, so we can deploy g.SHDSL to them at very short notice.”
Telecom offers a range of DSL services. JetStream, for instance, is an asymmetrical (ADSL) service, while the lower-end JetStart is symmetrical (SDSL).
G.SHDSL is widely noted for its suitability for business users, as opposed to ADSL, which is more suited to residential users who don’t require the same speed for uploads and downloads. The symmetrical nature of g.SHDSL means it is suitable for home workers wanting to connect with their workplace LAN and for LAN-to-LAN connections between businesses, he says. “G.SHDSL is one of the platforms of the all-IP network Telecom is building.”
Telecom had been looking at deploying non-standardised SDSL last year, but decided to wait until the ITU-approved g.SHDSL became available late in the year, Knight says.
Telecom’s g.SHDSL equipment is supplied by Nokia.