Copper Mountain Announces Full-Rate ADSL Line Card

By Wayne Kawamoto
Managing Editor, CLEC-Planet 

November 2, 2000 -- Copper Mountain Networks announced a new Full-Rate Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line (ADSL) Line Card that should enable European telecommunications companies to deliver simultaneous voice and broadband data services to customers served by Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) phone lines.

Designed for use with Copper Mountain's CopperEdge 200 and CopperEdge 150 DSL Concentrators, the new CopperEdge Annex B ADSL Line Card is expected to be fully compliant with Annex B of the International Telecommunications Union ITU-T recommendation G.992.1, which defines specific requirements for ADSL systems operating in the frequencies above baseband ISDN services.

The CopperEdge Annex B ADSL Line Card should enable carriers and service providers to offer consumers converged voice and data services over the same copper pair they currently use only for dial-up ISDN voice and data services. The CopperEdge Annex B ADSL Line Card will support 24 ports and feature user-downstream speeds of up to 6.144 Mbps, and upstream speeds as high as 640 kbps.

Supporting ADSL service with both the 2B1Q ISDN line code (50kHz baseband) common throughout most of Europe, and the 4B3T ISDN linecode (70kHz baseband) prevalent in Germany and parts of Austria, the CopperEdge Annex B ADSL Line Card is supposed to enable providers to utilize the advanced features of Copper Mountain's CopperEdge DSL concentrators to cost-effectively provision, scale and manage simultaneous voice and data services for millions of European subscribers who are currently served by ISDN phone lines.

"ISDN is widely deployed in Europe, especially in Western Europe and Scandinavia," said Sam Knight, Copper Mountain's director of international marketing. "The CopperEdge Annex B ADSL Line Card will enable carriers and DSL service providers who standardize on CopperEdge concentrators to aggressively expand their footprints throughout Europe's rapidly growing consumer broadband market. The CopperEdge Annex B ADSL Line Card is expected to be the first ITU-T Annex B-compliant, Full-Rate ADSL solution delivered from a DSL concentrator based on Internet Protocol (IP) intelligence. Our emphasis of support for interoperation with a wide range of third-party customer premise equipment (CPE) enables carriers to select from among best-in-class CPE vendors as they build their networks."

Pricing and Availability
Copper Mountain's CopperEdge Annex B Full-Rate ADSL Line Card will be generally available in January 2001 at a U.S. list price of $12,995.