As we noted yesterday, we're seeing a flood of new DSL products being hyped by hardware vendors that promise faster speeds at longer loop lenths. The vendors are taking aim at the nation's telcos, who are slowly losing customers to faster cable alternatives (in markets they actually see competition), and a select few of which are not coincidentally flush with new broadband stimulus funds. Huawei, Alcatel Lucent and Nokia are all promising speeds upwards of 800 Mbps over multiple pair.

Ikanos has joined the "please don't let DSL be dead" party this week in a more modest fashion, promoting new NodeScale Vectoring DSL technology they claim is capable of delivering 100 Mbps downstream via DSL. The technology "will deliver the performance of fiber at one-tenth the cost of fiber-to-the-home," claims the company in a press statement. As with the other solutions noted above, the technology is primarily aimed at reducing line noise inherent in VDSL and the bonding of multiple pair:While lab tests of faster DSL technology are well and good, most of this technology will take years to leave the lab, requires multiple pair the average home may not have, and like all DSL -- will remain highly distance constrained -- making it all-but-useless for the millions of U.S. residents on long loop lenths.

More importantly perhaps is the question of who exactly will deploy this technology in a U.S. market where most telcos have frozen network upgrade ambitions. Most of these DSL technologies require replacing line cards or DSLAMs, something a cash-strapped telco dealing with eroding landline revenues isn't going to do -- lest they upset investors only interested in immediate returns. Given the lack of competition in many markets, many telcos are instead just pretending they're cutting edge -- but in reality have every intention of leaving millions of DSL customers on last-generation DSL for many, many years.