Smoothing the transition from copper to fibre

The copper pairs access network constitutes a major financial asset which can be utilized in conjunction with the latest digital transmission technology, to provide a wide variety of income generating services during the lengthy and expensive transition to the fully fibered network. Two trends are emerging: there will be a massive increase in the demand for both business and residential broadband services; and the new technologies of high bit rate digital subscriber loop (HDSL) and asymmetric digital subscriber loop (ADSL) will enable a dramatic increase in the types of services that may be offered, by increasing bandwidth capability of the existing copper network. The authors discuss these technologies as well as digital pair gain systems