Huawei said it has demonstrated a prototype version of DSL capable of transmission rates of up to 700 Mbps.
The company is calling this version of DSL SuperMIMO. It uses four twisted pairs to achieve its elevated data rate. The company said it has developed a technique to minimize crosstalk among the twisted pairs to help boost the rates expected on each twisted pair from about 100 Mbps to about 175 Mbps.
Huawei noted that at 700 Mbps, the SuperMIMO technology makes DSL practical for high-bandwidth applications such as base station access.
The caveat is the same for all DSL technology; transmission rates drop with greater loop lengths. The 700 Mbps is good at a distance of 400 meters, Huawei said. These are relatively short loop lengths by North American standards but perfectly within reason for many densely populated Asian and European markets.
Huawei counts among its customers China Mobile, China Unicom, China Telecom, Vodafone, France Telecom and Telecom Italia.
Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and other companies are also working to push bonded DSL to hundreds of megabits per second, though Huawei’s claim of 700 Mbps appears to have pushed the state of the art.