The Internet has surfaced as the dominant early market for residential broadband. ADSL, a transmission system capable of realizing rates from 1 to Mb/s over existing telephone lines, fits Internet access requirements perfectly, and offers telephone companies a tool for connecting virtually all Internet users at megabit rates before the next century. ADSL is asymmetric-high-speed downstream, lower-speed upstream-to counteract speed limitations imposed by line length and crosstalk. The transmission technology itself has two essential forms, single-carrier and multicarrier, which must press Shannon's limit to squeeze so many bits through so little bandwidth. With complicated line coding and other features such as integral forward error correction and ATM/Ethernet mode interfaces, ADSL will be the most complex modem ever attached to a telephone line. This will not prevent ADSL from reaching consumer-level pricing within the next two years. We can expect some commercial deployment in 1997 and virtually ubiquitous availability by the end of 1999.
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