In a way, BPS Telephone shot for the moon during its DSL rollout, but it adopted the Musketeer's “All for one and one for all” credo before it decided to proceed with a project that would brings DSL service to the people of Bernie, Parma, Steele and Cooter, Mo.

Instead of rolling out service in piecemeal fashion, the company, which got its start in 1996 with the purchase of three former GTE exchanges, wanted nothing less than 100% coverage.

“If we were going to have this service, we wanted to offer it to everyone,” said David Carson, assistant general manager for BPS, which serves just less than 3900 customers in southeastern Missouri.

After some missteps in trials with unproven equipment that had customers' connections going to sleep for hours at a time, BPS turned to Charles Industries, first for its High-Speed Voice and Data Link (HVDL) technology, which helped extend DSL loops out to 18,000 feet, and second for its STEP DSL mini-DSLAM product. This allowed BPS to deploy on a scale that matched its early expectations — which weren't much.

“We didn't think many people would take the service, and we got fooled by that,” Carson said.

BPS' DSL service, called Fast DSL, quickly attracted 15% of the company's customer base. “It just kind of took off. And I expect it will continue to grow,” Carson said.

Expecting perhaps 50 circuits initially, BPS was able to start with Charles' 12-port DSLAM. Had they guessed better on the take rate, they may have started with something bigger. However, by design, the STEP DSL solution still allowed BPS to grow its footprint incrementally — and in the small increments it desired.

The STEP DSL system consists of 12 DSLAM ports, an Ethernet switch and some cabling. “You don't have to start with 1000 possible customers like you would with a big system,” Carson said.

Using this configuration, BPS kept its cost at around $100 per customer versus the $700 to $800 it would have cost to invest in a full rack system.

BPS also uses some NextLevel equipment, but Mitch Green, network engineer for BPS, said that at the time they started this project, there wasn't a whole lot of available equipment to evaluate that could provide such a low-cost start. Since Charles served BPS well with its HVDL equipment for extending loops, the company also got the nod for the DSLAM.

“Things worked out well using their equipment, and we got some pretty good support,” Green said.

Charles Industries, perhaps best known for its pedestals and assorted pair gain pieces, is just getting its foothold in the DSLAM market. Its STEP DSL is in advanced trial stages with several other independent telcos. However, Charles is no start-up. The 37-year-old company from Rolling Meadows, Ill., got its start in 1968 manufacturing and selling load coils to the RBOCs.

‘Ware the only remaining manufacturer of load coils in North America, believe it or not. We sell bunches of them,” said Mark Huntzinger, director of Charles’ access and transmission business unit.

The company has grown through a series of product line acquisitions (about 20) since it first bought Wescom from Rockwell International. Last year it bought Oasis Telecom and is still making hay with its broadband multiplexer product.

However, the future belongs to IP and Ethernet, and that's the focus of the STEP DSL product. STEP DSL, in fact, is a re-branded Ericsson product that Charles enhanced for the independent market, which Huntzinger said is the company's most important customer segment.

“Fundamentally, the product is the same, but there are certain things an independent is looking for that an RBOC is not,” Huntzinger said. Most important is a product that is plug-and-play from a company that provides support.

Most of the actual product enhancements come in the areas of cabling and installation, Huntzinger said. Charles provides a starter kit and has done work on hardening the product for remote installations.

The STEP DSL product, in conjunction with the Charles HVDL, helped BPS reach its goal of 100% coverage, and the vendor is hoping to leverage its installed base of 150 HVDL customers to sell more STEP DSL.

HVDL by itself allows operators to deliver three voice channels and one Ethernet data channel over a single copper pair. It does so by using low-noise, low-power G.shdsl line coding and multiplexing three 64 kb/s clear channel voice lines and one high-speed data line for transport. It then demultiplexes the signal at the subscriber's remote terminal.

Depending on the application and wire gauge, HVDL can deliver up to 1 Mb/s at a distance of up to 55,000 feet. At 66,000 feet, it can deliver 128 kb/s.

“The highest we have done in the field is 80,000 feet without a local power supply,” Huntzinger said.

If BPS had used remote terminals to deploy some of their DSLAMs, it could have extended local loops by another 20,000 feet.

“Had we known what the take rate would have looked like, we probably would have deployed a little differently,” Carson said. “We probably would have put some DSLAMS out in the field.”

Driving demand for BPS' broadband are teachers, who got used to broadband in their schools and couldn't live without it at home, and farmers, who will take broadband any way they can get it — DSL, wireless or satellite.

Like most of the DSLAM universe, Charles also is counting on the emergence of telco video to boost the STEP DSL product.

At this point, BPS is not offering video and doesn't have a definitive plan for if or when it might roll it out, but Green said it was a factor in choosing Charles' equipment because, “we wanted it to be a possibility if we decided to go that way,” he said.

Huntzinger said the product's video capability is ready now. It supports ADSL2+ and can get an operator into the 20 Mb/s range and would support multiple Ethernet ports. “IP and Ethernet are really taking hold,” he said. “There is a lot of ATM installed at large carriers, but even those guys are going the way of IP in the backbone. For the independents, everything is about IP and Ethernet.”

Since BPS retained the outside plant from GTE when its telecom equipment-selling founders bought the exchanges, it can't all be about IP and Ethernet yet, but it is moving in that direction.

The demand overall for IP-based DSLAMs is growing by leaps and bounds. At the end of 2004, according to Infonetics Research, the DSL aggregations hardware market reached $1.4 billion with a 9% increase in the final quarter of the year, which followed an 11% increase in the previous quarter. Worldwide IP DSLAM revenue approached $700 million in 2004, up 58% from 2003. By 2008, IP-based DSLAMs will account for 69% of total DSLAM revenue. DSL subscribers reached almost 17 million last year.

While Charles and others will continue touting such numbers, BPS is looking at its service more as a community development project than a business proposition.

“We'll both be retired before we see a return on this,” said Carson, of himself and Green. “We offered this service because our customers here need it and want it, and it's something that rural America needs as much as those in the city. We didn't get into it thinking we were going to make a lot of money on it.”

Upon further reflection, Carson said the company should see a return within a couple of years.

After all, at a little over $100 investment per customer and a 100% coverage rate, it makes for a pretty good business case.

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