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July - 2015 - issue > CXO View Point

Experiences in Using Broadband Technologies: A Comparative Study

By Prasanna Gokhale, CTO, Atria Convergence Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Friday, June 26, 2015
By Prasanna Gokhale, CTO, Atria Convergence Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Headquartered in Bangalore, Atria Convergence Technologies Pvt. Ltd. (ACT) is a triple play service provider offering an interesting ensemble of information, communication and entertainment solutions.

Broadband Internet access for consumers has become a necessity for most of the urban population in India and is rapidly moving towards rural India. With increasing affordability of smarter phones and penetration of social networking applications, broadband access has become a necessity. It has become as necessary as water, electricity and food. The utmost urgency to share videos and live streaming of content has almost defined the internet speed requirements. Different Internet Service Providers are deploying services through multiple different technologies in an effort to meet the customer needs.

In the below section, I am attempting to do a comparative study between each of the technologies in some detail. I hope this will provide enough information to the consumers to make an informed decision on their preferred service provider depending on their respective needs.

    DSL Based Technologies:
  1. DSL based technology over the years has evolved from DSL, HDSL, ADSL, VDSL and VDSL2. ADSL is the most prominently used technology by most of the telecom providers who have legacy phone installations with copper connectivity. ASDL can provide a peak speed of 8Mbps at distances less than 1km from the DSLAM and the peak speed drops to less than 2Mbps for distance more than 4km.

    ADSL2/2+ gives about 20-24Mbps at distances less than 500 meters from the DSLAM. At 4km distance, the peak speed of ADSL2+ is same as ADSL (about 2Mbps peak). VDSL2+ can provide up to 80 Mbps for < 300 meters, but drops to < 10Mbps for > 2kms distance. Also, VDSL2+ is susceptible to a lot of cross-talk interference if there are more than four connections within the same DSLAM. The peak speed drops down to < 20Mbps if there are more than four subscribers due to interference. Newer technology called Vectored VDSL, which presumably reduces cross-talk interference, is being worked upon. It is however estimated that this technology will take about 3-5 years to be deployed.


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