Ikanos: Our 192 Port Vector VDSL Chips Are In Customer Tests

Builds custom chassis to show off 100 meg on every port. “Customers probably will delay volume deployments until late in 2014. Our chip is production ready and will be available well before that,” Kourosh Amiri of Ikanos tells me. It’s an impressive chip, designed for node scale vectoring of 384 ports. It does full cancellation of noise in all tones, which Ikanos claims is substantially more effective than the competition’s “partial cancellation.” A ten gigabit serdes is built in to support the high speed interconnect needed for this kind of performance. (The picture shows Ikanos' reference chassis supporting 384 ports at 100 megabits.) Contrary to Deutsche Telekom’s claims that it’s “impossible” to unbundle vectored VDSL, Ikanos is perfectly comfortable with two ISPs sharing the binder. “As long as the two DSLAMs are within about 50 meters, we can communicate between them and cancel noise on all lines,” adds Amiri. Telecom Italia and Fastweb have an official memorandum of understanding they will do just that. http://bit.ly/WR6tug Each is passing several million homes with fiber/DSL, often in the same node. Huawei, #2 DSLAM vendor to Alcatel, is understood to have the contract and presumably will choose Ikanos chips. Ikanos is serious about interoperability. “If you manufacture VDSL chips, bring a board to our labs and we’ll be glad to test with you.” They claim they are working closely with their lead competitor and expect few problems in interop. Promises, promises I’ve been hearing from everyone in VDSL for a decade, so I’ll remain skeptical of everyone’s claims until they are proven in the field.Thursday, 04 April 2013 22:09 First tier telecomm accessories supply Original Article here