Ikanos Communications this week will announce that it has started sample production of its second-generation VDSL2 chipsets, marking what should be its first large-scale attempt to get into the U.S. and European markets.

The company's SmartLeap 9402 and SmartLeap 9450 are successors to the company's first VDSL2 chipsets, which were announced in December 2004, several months before the ITU settled on the standard. In either case, the chips, which are listed at $15 to $20 per port in volume, are geared to sit on line cards in broadband access concentrators, remote units, mini-RAMs and ATM or IP DSLAMs.

For the past five years, the Fremont, Calif.-based company has been slugging it out with a handful of vendors such as Metalink for the VDSL1 market that has developed mostly in Korea and Japan. With the ITU ratification of the VDSL2 standard, though, the market for chipsets in broadband gear capable of providing up to 100 Mb/s of symmetrical service is expected to grow exponentially and become significantly more competitive. BellSouth and SBC Communications have been unusually vocal in pushing the standard, officially G.993.2, forward, and both have said they will deploy VDSL2 as soon as it's available in product form (Telephony, June 6, page 13). Additionally, Swisscom, France Telecom, KPN and T-Com are among the larger European players that have been testing the technology.

Ikanos plans to rely largely on its experience supplying 6 million ports of DSL to the likes of Korea Telecom and Yahoo Broadband in Japan to sell into accounts that have traditionally bought only from the largest vendors.

“Copper is a tricky medium to put such high performance on, and making it work seamlessly is very critical,” said Rajesh Vashist, president and CEO of Ikanos. “We're going to leverage five years of experience. We announced the first generation in December, and when the standard was published, we found that it was essentially the same as what we expected.”

The company also may benefit from its focus on one technology. Larger competitors such as TI, Conexant and Infineon are expected to target the VDSL2 market but also have other segments that will take up their time. Infineon, however, was among the first out of the gate, announcing just days after the ITU approval that it has a VDSL2 chipset sampling now and expects to be in full production sometime in the third quarter.

Vashist, though, discounts the early announcements.

“It's easy for the chip vendors to promise things if they haven't faced the issues with VDSL,” he said. “It's a much richer standard, but in that, there are more places to trip up.”

Indeed, if there has been any complaint about the VDSL2 standard it's that it can be interpreted many different ways.

“I think of VDSL2 as being the big catcher's mitt of standards,” Vashist said, noting that it in many ways, it's a super-set of both VDSL and ADSL2+ (see figure).

Selling into the U.S. market also will mean working with system level vendors with which Ikanos has not previously worked. The company is talking with several larger suppliers including Alcatel. Additionally, Entrisphere said it would use the SmartLeap set in an upcoming new line card for its BLM 1500 access system. Entrisphere, which has supply contracts with TDS and CenturyTel, was looking to deal with a chip vendor that has experience in the vagaries of VDSL, said Don McCullough, director of product marketing for the vendor.

“You're also looking for a chip vendor who, when they give you the chip specs, and they run on your test board, the specs run as they say they will,” he said. “If you find a small deviation from their spec in your testing, you have to wonder if there will be a larger problem in the field.”

SUPERSET OF VDSL AND ADSL2+

VDSL2

• IP and ATM
• Up to 30 MHz
• Up to 4096 tones
• 4 kHz and 8 kHz tone spacing
• “U0 band” up to 276 kHz for longer reach
• Eight profiles for CO, RT and MxU deployments
• Improved robustness
• Online re-configuration
• Enhanced PSD shaping mechanism
• Improved overhead channel

Source: Ikanos Communications