The market for interactive home video services via x.DSL and Cable offer consumers a variety of opportunities over a high-speed connection. Each service, with its own advantages, share one important factor that consumers value most; high quality service at relatively low costs. Although, currently both technologies are in competition with each other, eventually one will prevail creating a standard for interactive home video.The first service to be analyzed is x.DSL or Digital Subscriber Line. DSL is a technology for bringing high-bandwidth information to homes and small businesses over ordinary copper telephone lines. xDSL refers to different variations of DSL, such as ADSL, HDSL, and RADSL. Assuming your home is close enough to a telephone company central office that offers DSL service, you would be eligible to receive data at rates up to 6.1 megabits per second, enabling continuous transmission of motion video, audio, and even 3-D effects. It is most likely that individual connections will provide from 1.544 Mbps to 512 Kbps downstream and about 128 Kbps upstream. DSL assumes digital data does not require change into analog form and back. Thus a huge bottleneck is prevented which is normally the issue with analog transmission from local phone companies. Digital data is transmitted to your computer directly as digital data and this allows the phone company to use a much wider bandwidth for transmitting it to you. A DSL line can carry both data and voice signals and the data part of the line is continuously connected. Compaq, Intel, and Microsoft working with telephone companies, have developed a standard and easier-to-install form of ADSL called G.Lite that is expected to accelerate deployment. DSL has pretty much replaced ISDN in many areas. Dataquest, a market research firm, forecasts 5.8 million lines installed by the end of the century. Installation of DSL requires that a signal splitter be installed at the home. This requ...
