Cable operators' biggest advantage over telcos in the residential market — the massive amount of bandwidth they can deliver — will quickly shrink over the next 18 months if DSL developments at Supercomm were any indication.

Earlier this month in Atlanta, while numerous vendors were showing video implementations of DSL, most also said they have high-definition television service on their radar screens. Specifically, new compression techniques and the development of ADSL2+, which can send data downstream at 20 Mb/s up to 5000 feet, will eventually give telcos enough bandwidth to provide HDTV over copper wires.

AFC, which decided to pass on developing products with the ADSL2 standard and go straight to ADSL2+, wants to provide enough capacity for carriers to have multiple choices in video, said Corey Geiger, vice president of product management, marketing and customer service. “I see the offering being one, HDTV, and two, other standard video streams,” he said.

Net to Net's DSL access multiplexer, which bonds two pairs of copper, demonstrated video services running at 18 to 20 Mb/s using ADSL over short runs. The demo included two lifeline POTS lines and four Ethernet ports that could be used in homes for any combination of data and video.

“Over the next six to nine months, you'll see everything re-spun to include ADSL2+,” said Matt Byrd, vice president of marketing for Net to Net. “We're getting 9 Mb/s to 10 Mb/s at 10,000 feet.”

Driving some of the interest is the emerging MPEG 4 encoding standard, which can squeeze an HDTV signal that normally needs 12 to 15 megabytes of capacity into a 6- to 7-megabyte space. The technical part of the standard has been completed, but it won't find its way into digital TV products until the end of this year, said Chuck Van Dusen, chief technology officer of Tut Systems subsidiary VideoTele.com, which has developed a digital headend specifically for DSL providers. Products using MPEG 4 to compress HDTV will hit the market a little later, but will have a big impact on DSL providers.

Currently, however, there isn't enough customer premises equipment on the market that can handle HDTV over copper pairs, Van Dusen said. Sales of HDTV sets have been slow to date, though they are expected to pick up in the next five years. In addition, set-top boxes aren't fully developed.

However, that actually may help telcos stepping into the video market, giving them a first-mover advantage in HDTV, which few cable operators currently support. “They want to have some value to the service that makes people stick around,” said Jay Fausch, senior director of marketing for Alcatel's Broadband Networking Division.

At Supercomm, NTT rolled out a prototype HDTV set-top tuner that accepts signals over a DSL link. Though not officially priced — Van Dusen is guessing it would cost well north of $1000 per unit — it's an important step forward in the development of HDTV over copper.

“It wasn't yet invoking any of the better compression techniques,” said Van Dusen. “But there's no doubt we will be seeing set-tops soon that can handle MPEG 4 over copper.”