At the CeBIT exhibition in Hannover, Germany, Orckit and Bosch unveiled their first co-operative venture, already secretly underway for the past year, for the development and supply of a product, first of its kind, that combines both SDH and HDSL technologies. The product was commissioned by Deutsche Telekom, which imposed the condition of secrecy, in order not to unveil prematurely a product that will secure it an advantage in the domestic communications field in Germany.
SDH is a state-of-the-art technology in which an entire town or large urban centre is encircled by a fibre-optic ring, which serves as a data communications backbone for organisations hooked up to it. A national SDH backbone can also be set up in ring form, providing back-up in case of disconnection. SDH facilitates wide bandwidth data communication, accommodating rapid data transmission, voice and video broadcasts.
HDSL is an access technology that opens up the customer-to-exchange bottleneck and increases bandwidth for data transmission on copper wires in the last (or first) four kilometres of the line, to a level of 2 Mbps.
Using this unprecedented combination of the two technologies, the telecom company can offer broad bandwidth data communications from one terminal to another on its regular infrastructure, with no need for special lines. Transmission will commence with HDSL, switch to the SDH backbone and reach its destination, in the last kilometres, using HDSL.
Published by Israel's Business Arena March 22, 1999