Problems

1. How ADSL increases its bandwidth in compare to Modems while they adopt the LECs’s facilities.

Answer

1. ADSL and Modems.

Although Modems and ADSL adopt the same facilities from telephone companies, they have different
capability on bandwidth; Modems provides internet service with 56 Kbps, while their kinsman ADSL
could support more than 10Mbps service. The differences come from their configurations.

a. Modems.

Figure 1. The configuration of Modems.

When a computer wishes to send digital signals through a dial-up line, the data must first be converted
to analog form by a modem. These analog signals then transmitted through local hop to codec in which
they will be reconverted to digital form, fig. 1.

As telephone was invented to carry human voice, which meaningful frequency varies from 300Hz to
3400Hz, the entire system has been optimized for this purpose. At the point each local loop meets the
end office, the wire run through a filter that attenuates all frequencies below 300Hz and above 3400Hz.
The cutoff is 3dB, we the bandwidth is quoted 4000Hz.

As Nyquist theory, fsample = 4 KHz * 2 = 8Khz.

The number of bits per sample in the US and the worldwide is 8, in which 7 bits are for data, the rest 1
bit is for control. Therefore, its bit rate is 7*8000 = 56000bps. In case of Europe, all 8 bits are available
for data, its bit rate is 8*8000 = 64000bps.

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b. ADSL

Figure 2. The configuration of ADSL.

The differences come from the local hop, fig. 2. The line from modem is connected to different kind of
switch, one that does not have a filter; therefore, making the entire capacity of the local hops available.
It is not the artificial 3100Hz bandwidth, but it own physical capability, which could be up to 50 MHz in
case of 3 UTP.

Figure 3. Discrete multitone modulation on ADSL.

Initial ADSL provide 1.1 MHz bandwidth, for example, on Fig. 3, the entire bandwidth is divided to 256
independence channels of 4312.5Hz each. Channel 0 is used for POTS for telephone service; channels 1-
5 are not employed. The remaining 250 channels are used for upstream and downstream purpose.

The actual data would be sent with QAM modulation, with up to 15 bits per baud. Therefore, with 4000
baud, we get the final bit rate for upstream and downstream:

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 15*(256-1-5)*4000 = 15000000 bps = 15 Mbps.

The limitation of Modem comes from the existing 4 KHz filter of telephone system, while the capability
of ADSL is up to its own physical capability bandwidth.