ASYMMETRIC DIGITAL SUBSCRIBER LINE (ADSL)

Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) are used to deliver high-rate digital data over existing ordinary phone-lines. A new modulation technology called Discrete Multitone (DMT) allows the transmission of high speed data. DSL facilitates the simultaneous use of normal telephone services, ISDN, and high speed data transmission, e.g., video. DMT-based DSL can be seen as the transition from existing copper-lines to the future fiber-cables. This makes DSL economically interesting for the local telephone companies. They can offer customers high speed data services even before switching to fiber-optics.

DSL is a newly standardized transmission technology facilitating simultaneous use of normal telephone services, data transmission of 6 M bit/s in the downstream and Basic- rate Access (BRA). DSL can be seen as a FDM system in which the available bandwidth of a single copper-loop is divided into three parts. The base band occupied by POTS is split from the data channels by using a method which guarantees POTS services in the case of ADSL-system failure (e.g. passive filters).