BANGALORE, INDIA: Alcatel-Lucent has announced that its research arm, Bell Labs, has successfully demonstrated downstream VDSL2 speeds of up to 300Mbps over distances of up to 400 meters using DSL Phantom Mode technology.

Alcatel-Lucent has created a 300Mbps pipe using what it has dubbed “Phantom Mode” technology to create a “phantom” channel in between two physical copper pairs, applying vectoring to eliminate the resultant cross-talk and bonding all three pairs, real and virtual.

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Kamalini Ganguly, analyst, Ovum, says: "This will be an additional tool in the arsenal of providers looking to boost bandwidth capacity with existing copper assets. However, we are unlikely to see commercial deployments until at least 2012. In the interim, bonding, vectoring, and other technical developments are likely to extend the life of DSL, which is good news for both DSL vendors and consumers."

The technologies are not new, but the combination of all three is the “secret sauce”

“The timeline for the benefits of these DSL developments to reach the market remains a challenge. Bonding trials were held by Alcatel-Lucent in November 2009 and vectoring field trials are scheduled later this year. We may see commercial deployments of these two technologies in the next couple of years but utilization of both along with the Phantom Mode is still some years away. Meanwhile, AT&T is scheduled to finish its FTTN+VDSL U-verse deployment to 30 million US households by 2011,” Ganguly adds.

As Alcatel-Lucent itself points out, creating a phantom channel is not new; a version of a phantom mode circuit was invented in 1886. DSL bonding and vectoring are technology advances being adopted by other vendors too (Ericsson, for example).

But what Alcatel-Lucent has demonstrated is the impact of combining all three elements. The technology can be extended to multiple pairs, creating multiple phantom channels that would boost existing bandwidth capacity between 50 percent and 100 percent, but the most realistic scenario remains the consideration of two copper pairs, which is present in much of the US and Europe.

Given the potential bandwidth boost possible, the additional cost of using this technology would be low because it would use existing copper lines.