Market Coverage and Service Quality in Digital Subscriber Lines Infrastructure Planning

Abstract

Digital subscriber lines (xDSL) belong to a family of technologies that provide the ability to transmit digital data over local telephone (copper) infrastructure. As the second most popular broadband platform in the United States, it is estimated that over twenty-five million xDSL lines are in service, capturing nearly 30 percent of the U.S. broadband market. While the service range of xDSL is somewhat limited, often extending to a maximum of 18,000 feet from a central office (CO), available bandwidth also decays as distance increases from the CO. As a result, there are often marked disparities in the quality of xDSL service within market areas. This article proposes a bi-objective location model for maximizing both service coverage and quality of coverage in siting digital subscriber line access multiplexers (DSLAMs). An application of the developed model highlights important implications for telecommunication policy.

Who’s Superconnected and Who’s Not? Investment in the UK’s Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Infrastructure

“…Firstly, this coefficient could have been impacted on by premises being densely located close to the exchange and therefore still achieving acceptable speeds over copper. Indeed, DSL coverage is highly geographically nuanced based on premises location (Grubesic & Horner, 2006;Grubesic, 2008;Grubesic et al 2010). Perhaps this is suggestive that in future research, it might be more appropriate to use the percentage of postcodes with NGA enabled instead of sync speed measurements as the dependent variable.…”

The Multi-Technology Footprint of the National Broadband Network in Australia: Exploring the Urban-Regional Divide and Socio-spatial Patterns for Inequality

“…However, a feature (and weakness) concerning households connected via HFC and FTTN technologies is that end-user speeds are dependent on their distance from the node. Specifically, the further a premise is from the node, the more opportunities for ambient environmental interference and slower service speeds over longer copper lines (Grubesic et al 2011). Even though the use of loop extenders or similar technologies could potentially mitigate these challenges, this presupposes the copper lines are high quality and already have signal strength (e.g., 110%) capable of supporting the target/ promised rate for a householda rarity for regional and remote customers (Grubesic and Mack 2015).…”

Introduction to the ISOLDE X Special Issue

“…Middleton 2011), congestion and travel costs (Marianov and Serra 2011), retail market cannibalization (Drezner 2011), modeling closest assignment (Lei and Church 2011), and broadband service coverage and quality (Grubesic, Matisziw, and Murray 2011). What is truly special is the varied advancements along technical, substantive, and/or policy implications lines in these articles but is certainly true of all the articles presented at ISOLDE.…”