Ikanos Unveils NodeScale Vectoring to Deliver Broadband at 100 Mbps and Beyond for One-Tenth the Cost of Fiber

Ikanos' NodeScale Vectoring technology will deliver the performance of fiber at one-tenth the cost of fiber-to-the-home, said John Quigley, CEO and president at Ikanos. With NodeScale Vectoring, we believe that service providers will save billions of dollars on broadband deployments by delivering high-speed, highly reliable Internet access and premium services over their existing copper infrastructure.

Ikanos NodeScale Vectoring Enables Reliable Performance

One of the challenges in deploying very-high-speed Internet access over existing infrastructure is the degradation that occurs as a result of crosstalk between coincident copper wire pairs. Each wire can often and intermittently interfere with neighboring wires, thereby introducing noise, limiting line quality and reducing VDSL performance. Other impediments including AM radio signals, power lines, lightning and other atmospheric elements inject even more noise into the copper network.

Ikanos' NodeScale Vectoring technology analyzes the crosstalk and interference environment in real time and creates a unique set of compensation signals that effectively eliminates both. In fact, NodeScale Vectoring cancels noise across an entire network node from 192 to 384 ports or more, meeting the deployment requirements of the world’s leading service providers. Handling crosstalk at that level presents a massive computational challenge requiring Gigabits of memory. With Ikanos' unique and patent-pending algorithms, compression and coding techniques, service providers can deliver 100 Mbps performance at the scale necessary to support their growing subscriber bases via a cost-effective commercial silicon and software solution.

Innovative Standards-based Silicon and Software Solution

NodeScale Vectoring was designed from inception to address the need for delivering 100 Mbps performance reliably across an entire service provider network. The complete system includes NodeScale Vectoring compatible line cards, Vector Computation Engines and G.vector-ready customer premises equipment. The system can be deployed flexibly to increase the performance of existing VDSL nodes, as part of ADSL network upgrades and in copper plants that previously served only plain old telephone service (POTS). Since the same Ikanos chipset supports vectored and non-vectored deployments, upgrades can occur on a line-by-line basis for a pay-as-you-go vectored network deployment.

Ikanos' NodeScale Vectoring complies with the International Telecommunication Union standards group (ITU-T) G.vector standard (G.993.5), which provides for dynamic spectrum management level 3 (DSM-3) through the use of advanced crosstalk cancellation techniques.

Demonstrations and Conference Session at Broadband World Forum 2010

At Broadband World Forum, ZTE Corporation will demonstrate the first DSLAM employing Ikanos’ standards-based NodeScale Vectoring technology. It will be on display in ZTE's booth, number E1, during the exhibition, October 26-28, at the CNIT La Defense in Paris.

Vectoring across the entire node is the only practical approach for realizing the true benefits that G.vector can bring to a VDSL deployment. It is critical to have centralized control and visibility on all possible sources of crosstalk that can degrade the performance in a cable or binder. Approaches which cannot address all sources of crosstalk in a node, such as line card-level vectoring, will prove to have minimal measurable benefits in real world deployments, said (Franz) Liu Feng, marketing director, Fixed Network Product Line at ZTE. NodeScale Vectoring will have a dramatic impact on service provider networks around the world, allowing carriers to deliver the performance their customers demand without having to incur the costs of overhauling their entire network.

In addition, Ikanos will introduce its NodeScale Vectoring solution at Broadband World Forum in a conference session entitled Advancing the State of the Art – ITU-T G.vector Standard Surpasses Fiber Performance Over Copper. Ikanos, along with speakers from leading service providers AT&T and Swisscom, and equipment manufacturers Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE, will participate in the session scheduled for October 26.