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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

April - 2010 - issue > Technology

PhyR™ Retransmission System Overcomes ADSL Challenges in Rural India

Shankar Bala
Monday, April 19, 2010
Shankar Bala
As one of the fastest growing economies in the world today, India has its own unique set of challenges, especially when it comes to connecting broadband transmissions. For this reason, broadband has become a national priority for the government, and a recognized necessity to help drive growth throughout the country. With this challenge, the Government of India (Dept of Telecom and Ministry of Communications and IT) has set broadband communications as a priority with the hope of having 20 million broadband-enabled homes by 2010. Additionally, the State-run telecommunications provider (BSNL), has an ongoing tender to support nearly 8 million customer premises equipment (CPE) over the next 3 years, providing broadband services, information and employment in order to connect rural India. Connectivity in rural India will allow the Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) industry to now consider setting up call centers in previously remote locations, supporting various services on broadband that includes tele-medicine, tele-education, entertainment, voice over internet protocol (VoIP) and more.

So what does that mean for broadband services, such as DSL? In general, rural locations are typically longer reach markets for DSL, since the existing copper infrastructure may not be robust enough, which could, in turn, increase susceptibility to impulse noise. As a result, the focus in recent years has been on improving the robustness of DSL connections in rural areas, such as in India, against non-stationary or impulsive noise (that leads to residual errors and restrains). A considerable effort had been invested in standardization, but with the exception of a new slightly improved interleaving scheme (extensions of some framing parameters and interleaving memory leading to even higher coding overhead); no conclusive progress has been made up until now.

To address these broadband challenges in rural areas, Broadcom Corporation has developed an innovative data retransmission system that is implemented above the DSL physical layer and called PhyR™ (pronounced ‘Fire’) technology. This new retransmission technology has been tested in the field, deployed by several telcos worldwide and proven to provide ten times more protection against impulsive noise when compared to a traditional Reed Solomon (RS) + interleaving scheme, and with much less overhead and physical constraints. PhyR technology overcomes the limitations of high bit error rates in the DSL standard, enabling telecom service providers and carriers with a cost-effective, scalable solution that is available today and ready to roll out across existing central office (CO) and CPE hardware via a simple remote firmware upgrade.

What does PhyR do specifically for India?

PhyR technology improves the robustness of DSL connections in rural India, against non-stationary or impulsive noise. Extending the DSL reach allows carriers, such as BSNL, MTNL, Bharati and others, to obtain more customers by providing additional service coverage in rural areas or urban areas where you have legacy wiring and infrastructure that may not be provisionable today. Improving the DSL reach also helps carriers to increase data rates and bandwidth for existing customers and helps to reduce total support calls by significantly lowering the number of cyclic redundancy checks (CRCs) and errors.


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