Digital Subscriber Line: Encyclopedia II - Digital Subscriber Line - Operation

Digital Subscriber Line - Operation

The local loop of the Public Switched Telephone Network was initially designed to carry POTS voice communication and signaling, since the concept of data communications as we know it today did not exist. For reasons of economy, the phone system nominally passes audio between 300 and 3,400 Hz, which is regarded as the range required for human speech to be clearly intelligible. This is known as commercial bandwidth. Dial-up services using modems are constrained by the Shannon capacity of the POTS channel.

At the local telephone exchange (UK terminology) or central office (US terminology) the speech is generally digitized into a 64 kbit/s data stream in the form of an 8 bit signal using a sampling rate of 8,000 Hz, therefore – according to the Nyquist theorem – any signal above 4,000 Hz is not passed by the phone network (and has to be blocked by a filter to prevent aliasing effects).

The local loop connecting the telephone exchange to most subscribers is capable of carrying frequencies well beyond the 3.4 kHz upper limit of POTS. Depending on the length and quality of the loop, the upper limit can be tens of megahertz. DSL takes advantage of this unused bandwidth of the local loop by creating 4312.5 Hz wide channels starting between 10 and 100 kHz, depending on how the system is configured. Allocation of channels continues at higher and higher frequencies (up to 1.1 MHz for ADSL) until new channels are deemed unusable. Each channel is evaluated for usability in much the same way an analog modem would on a POTS connection. More usable channels equates to more available bandwidth, which is why distance and line quality are a factor. The pool of usable channels is then split into two groups for upstream and downstream traffic based on a preconfigured ratio. Once the channel groups have been established, the individual channels are bonded into a pair of virtual circuits, one in each direction. Like analog modems, DSL transceivers constantly monitor the quality of each channel and will add or remove them from service depending on whether or not they are usable.

The commercial success of DSL and similar technologies largely reflects the fact that in recent decades, while electronics have been getting faster and cheaper, the cost of digging trenches in the ground for new cables (copper or fiber) remains expensive. All flavors of DSL employ highly complex digital signal processing algorithms to overcome the inherent limitations of the existing twisted pair wires. Not long ago, the cost of such signal processing would have been prohibitive but because of VLSI technology, the cost of installing DSL on an existing local loop, with a DSLAM at one end and a DSL modem at the other end is orders of magnitude less than would be the cost of installing a new, high-bandwidth fiber-optic cable over the same route and distance.

Most residential and small-office DSL implementations reserve low frequencies for POTS service, so that with suitable filters and/or splitters the existing voice service continues to operate independent of the DSL service. Thus POTS-based communications, including fax machines and analog modems, can share the wires with DSL. Only one DSL modem can use the subscriber line at a time. The standard way to let multiple computers share a DSL connection is to use a router that establishes a connection between the DSL modem and a local Ethernet or Wi-Fi network on the customer's premises.

Once upstream and downstream channels are established, they are used to connect the subscriber to a service such as an Internet service provider.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Operation", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki