Toshiba Corp has gone to Alcatel Alsthom SA to license ADSL core technology, just as PC manufacturers begin to incorporate the fast networking over existing telephone lines technology into the newest generation of PCs. Toshiba will eventually use the technology as the basis for its own asynchronous digital subscriber line chipset, and sell it alongside its existing ATM and RISC chip cores. Advanced Micro Devices Inc signed up a similar deal with Alcatel earlier this year. Toshiba says it plans to launch its first large scale integration chip based on the technology in June 1999. It will subsequently develop additional chips to support ISDN in Europe and time-compression multiplex ISDN in Japan, and plans to support the ITU G.Lite 1.5 megabit per second downstream standard in the future. Struggling modem supplier Hayes Corp is another customer. Meanwhile, Texas Instruments Inc is working with 3Com Corp on ADSL modems, while Compaq Computer Corp has turned to Lucent Technologies Inc for the chipsets used in the 1.5Mbps MAX Digital DSL modems, included within its new range of Presario 5100c Internet PCs. Beyond ADSL, Toshiba has said it is looking to support VDSL, or Very high bit-rate Digital Subscriber Loop, which squeezes even higher transfer rates from old-fashioned copper telephone wire. VDSL provides much faster transmission speeds than its ADSL cousin – 52 Mbps downstream and 1.6 to 2.3Mbps upstream, compared to ADSL’s 8Mbps downstream and 1.5Mbps upstream.
