With BellSouth's analyst meeting this morning, it became official. The three largest former Bell companies have now outlined their broadband upgrade plans, with varying degrees of specificity.

BellSouth seems to be playing it a little more fast and loose than Verizon and SBC. Company executives, in their three-hour presentation to 200 analysts in New York City today, said much of their near-term broadband upgrade plan involves upgrading DSL facilities to be capable of greater speeds. Its efforts will depend in some part on the availability of DSL bonding technology from vendors, and how well the technology fares in trials.

DSL bonding technology is an old idea that apparently has found a new home. For at least four or five years, vendors have positioned it as a method for gaining more bandwidth from DSL architectures, but as a facilitator of ADSL2+ technology, it makes enormous sense when deployed with a fiber-to-the-curb or fiber-to-the-node architecture. BellSouth believes that DSL bonding might help it achieve 24 Mb/s directly into homes.

Assuming that BellSouth's vendors come through and the technology tests pan out, this evolution could help breathe some new life into the long-term potential of deploying DSL rather than fiber all the way to homes. BellSouth now seems ready to use DSL bonding technology to make DSL what it always was intended to be--an avenue into the home for a variety of broadband services, and not just Internet access. At long last, that might be the next step for DSL.

E-mail me at doshea@primediabusiness.com.