DSL—from A to V and back again (invited paper)

Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology deployments have steadily increased in the last several years with current deployment counts topping over 200 million lines. While Asymmetric DSL (ADSL) technology continues to see the predominate share of access lines, Very high speed DSL (VDSL) has been in development for several years and has yet to overtake ADSL in the marketplace. While the increase in broadband communication demand has certainly fueled the growth of DSL, the deployment of the management protocol defined by the DSL Forum in Technical Report 69 (TR-69) offers the greatest potential for further increasing the speed by which deployments take place. With so much broadband communication technology available worldwide, are there other factors that should be considered to elongate DSL's hold on broadband into the future? We will attempt to consider the technology and the future of DSL by examining some of the historical advances that have led to DSL's existing success.