Solutions for the In-Building Market

October 2000
Troy Gau
Chief Engineer
ZyXEL Communications Corp.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.1

Executive Summary
The demand for broadband access for the in-building market is growing by leaps and bounds,
and there is no end in sight. For the more densely populated areas of the world, for instance,
South East Asia, the potential is especially promising.
There are many alternatives to address the in-building market; this paper will first enumerate the
alternatives and list the technical pros and cons of the different approaches. Following that, we
will discuss the solutions from the service requirement point of view, and the value-added
services that are possible in the in-building market.
The available trunk interface varies from locale to locale and thus is beyond the scope of the
paper. We will discuss the trunk interface in a separate paper.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.2

Market Overview
The in-building market can be categorized into three segments: multiple tenant unit (MTU,
commercial), multiple dwelling unit (MDU, residential) and multiple hospitality unit (MHU,
hotel/motel).
All three market segments share a common set of requirements, for instance, low cost, ease of
use, etc. However, some requirements may have a more significant impact on certain segments,
for instance, symmetrical service is a much more desirable feature for the business subscribers.

The Candidates
Ethernet
Ethernet is probably the earliest technology adopted for the in-building use. It is fast, and the
equipment is readily available and cheap. However, Ethernet has the following strikes against it:

Ethernet cannot run over the existing telephone lines. The cost of rewiring of category 5
cables is in most cases prohibitive.

Ethernet is a shared medium, which means the there is no isolation among the subscribers.
This poses a significant security problem in the age of e-commerce.

There are few service providers currently deploying Ethernet for in-building use; it is included
here only as a reference.
Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.3

HomePNA 1.0
As the name indicates, HomePNA (Home Phoneline Networking Alliance) was developed for
networking the computers within a single home. However, it has been adopted for in-building
use to connect the subscriber equipment to the concentrator. HomePNA 1.0 is currently the
most widely deployed solution for MTU. The reasons for its success are as follows:

Its currently the lowest cost solution.

It runs on the existing phone lines.

It coexists with POTS service.

It is relatively fast, compared to analog modem, at 1 Mbps for Internet access.

It is basically plug-n-play, which makes deployment relatively easy.

However,

HomePNA emulates Ethernet. This means that the whole building becomes a giant LAN,
and everyone can see everyone elses shared resources (no, being able to print on your
neighbors laser printer is not a good excuse.) To be secure, a particular HomePNA
implementation must have VLAN (Virtual LAN) support.

Because HomePNA transmits and receives on the same frequency band, the crosstalk
between adjacent wires is potentially a problem. Though this may not pose a threat for inhome application, it can be significant when the unshielded telephone wires are closely
bundled inside a wiring conduit in a high-rise. When wiring for HomePNA, the wires to the
individual subscribers should be kept as far apart as practically possible.

HomePNA 2.0
HomePNA 2.0 has recently been approved by the alliance. It increases the speed by an order
of magnitude, from 1 Mbps to 10 Mbps, and doubles the service distance from 150 to 300
meters. However, as of this writing, no major vendors have products available for MDU
application.
IDSL
IDSL (ISDN Digital Subscriber Line) uses the same physical layer as the familiar ISDN. The
advantages are

ISDN is a matured technology. As a consequence, the equipment cost is low and is readily
available and interoperability should not be an issue.

It has the longest reach among the competing technologies at over 5000 meters.

The disadvantages of IDSL are

It is relatively slow. The throughput of 128 Kbps can hardly be called broadband.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.4

It cannot coexist with POTS on the same line. If a building does not have spare phone lines,
the cost advantage vanishes.

ADSL
ADSL is short for Asymmetrical DSL, where the downstream (from the network to the
subscriber) speed is greater than that in the upstream direction. ADSL is ideally suited for the
individual users because generally a great deal more data comes from the server than going
back from a user. ADSL has the following going for it:

The speed of the full rate ADSL is high enough for video service (but not high enough for
HDTV.)

There exists an international standard for ADSL; thus a service provider can procure the
equipment from multiple vendors.

The reach is long enough for the vast majority of installations.

Coexisting with POTS is designed in.

Adjustable rate allows for service differentiation.

However,

ADSL is still more expensive than the competing technologies for individual users.

The only transport over ADSL is ATM, thus you must pay the cell tax, even though the
ADSL circuit is only between the subscriber and the concentrator.

SDSL
SDSL (Symmetrical DSL) provides the same speed in both directions, thus it is more suitable
for the business users since they are more likely to send large amount of data, e.g., when they
have a web server on premise. The advantages are

It has symmetrical downstream and upstream speed.

Adjustable rate allows for service differentiation.

It supports voice over DSL.

The disadvantages are

It cannot coexist with POTS service.

2B1Q line code that SDSL uses may be outlawed in the future.

VDSL
Very few vendors offer VDSL (Very-high-bit-rate DSL) products as of this writing. However,
it is a promising new technology that offers

Very high speed (52 Mbps) over short distance (300 m). This speed is good for even the
most demanding applications in the foreseeable future.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.5

Adjustable rate for service differentiation.

Likely low cost.

However,

VDSL is relatively new and there are no standards yet. As a consequence,

q

The DMT and CAP line code camps are fighting it out. Only the market will sort it out
as to who the winner is.

The available VDSL chips by different vendors are incompatible even within the same
camp.

It uses the same framing as Ethernet, and thus demands the same VLAN remedy as
HomePNA.

Service Requirement Considerations

We will next look at the technologies from a service requirement point of view.
Cost
From the equipment cost point of view, Ethernet is the lowest, followed by HomePNA, IDSL,
VDSL, ADSL and SDSL. When the cost of wiring is figured in, Ethernet is not an inexpensive
solutions by any means. As for IDSL, unless a building has spare phone lines, it is not cheap,
either.
Speed & Reach
For fixed speed, IDSL is slowest in the bunch at 128 Kbps but offers a relatively long reach at
about 5 Km. HomePNA 1.0 runs at 1 Mbps at the link level for up to 150 m, however,
crosstalk can significantly cuts down the overall throughput to a fraction of that.
For the rest in the DSL family, the speed decreases rapidly as distance goes up. However, the
distances at which maximum speed is achievable are above the limit of typical in-building
installation, thus reach should not be an issue in the majority of cases.
The maximum speeds are 50, 6 and 2.3 Mbps for VDSL, ADSL and SDSL, respectively. The
adjust rate feature offered by these technologies makes it possible to offer differentiated services.
Voice Support
Coexistence with POTS on the same line is important from the cost point of view since no new
wiring is required. In this regard, Ethernet and IDSL are clearly at a disadvantage. SDSL
suffers from the same fate when it comes to coexistence with POTS, however, since it is
primarily for the business users, it is not as much a handicap as IDSL for residential users.
On the other hand, voice over DSL (VoDSL) is supported on SDSL. For the business users, it
is possible to implement multiple voice channels with IAD (Integrated Access Device) on a

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.6

single phone line. This approach is likely to be more economical than multiple analog phone
lines.
The same technique can be applied to VDSL, except the voice is transported over IP using a
device that is similar to IAD.
Security
No amount of security is high enough in this age of e-commerce. HomePNA and VDSL both
use framing similar to Ethernet that connects all the machines attached to a switch into a giant
LAN. Without an isolation scheme, a user will be able to see the shared resources (disks and
printers) of the neighbors. To overcome this security hole, the switches deployed must have
VLAN (Virtual LAN) capability that isolates each subscriber from each other. Furthermore,
port-based VLAN is preferable over the tagged variety because the latter inserts a 4-byte tag
that reduces the maximum frame size.
IDSL, ADSL and SDSL are point-to-point connections that belong to separate broadcast
domain, thus avoiding the pitfall of Ethernet-based framing.
Concentrator Requirements
Besides the common IP (Internet Protocol) functionalities, there are some key features that a
concentrator should have.
NAT
To conserve IP addresses, NAT (Network Address Translation) is essential for multiple
subscribers to share one IP address. The concept of NAT is quite simple by itself; however,
some applications embed the addressing information in the data stream (network games and
multimedia applications are the worst offenders), turning the simple process of address
translation into an endless battle.
Not all NAT implementations are created equal. Some implementations are inadequate in that
they support only the basic NAT-unfriendly applications, e.g., FTP.
It is critical for a good NAT implementation to support the multimedia applications and network
games because your customers will demand it. It should also support debugging tools such as
ping and traceroute, which use protocols that do not have port numbers. In addition, if there
are both business and residential subscribers in the same building (common in Asia) with mixed
public and private IP addresses, then the capability to support multiple IP address mappings
becomes essential.
QoS
It is desirable to have centralized QoS (Quality of Service) control on the concentrator as
opposed to allowing the subscribers to set the QoS parameters, so that misbehaving
applications will not affect other subscribers.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.7

Some traffic, e.g., packetized voice and other real-time applications, demands more stringent
QoS than others. A concentrator should have facilities, e.g., policy routing and the various
queueing disciplines, to support traffic prioritization based on who the subscriber is, where s/he
is connecting to, what the application is, etc. The configuration of the rules must be simple, also.
For the business subscribers who need a guaranteed minimum bandwidth during period of
congestion, the concentrator should allow you to set such parameters on a per subscriber basis.
This capability also presents a revenue opportunity for you to offer premium service.
Furthermore, to ensure fairness and to prevent any one user from monopolizing the shared trunk
bandwidth, a concentrator should provide traffic shaping capabilities that allow you to set the
bandwidth ceiling during peak hours.
Remote Management
Remote management capabilities are essential in minimizing your operating cost. For instance,
you should be able to activate/deactivate a port or to gather the statistics of a box, etc., from a
remote management station.
To minimize the training cost of the operators, the management facility should be based on open
standards, e.g., SNMP and telnet, rather than the proprietary NMS (Network Management
System) approach taken by conventional telephone equipment makers. With SNMP, for
instance, your operator will be able to monitor equipment from different vendors using single
management software with familiar user interface.

Value-Added Services
The in-building market presents a unique opportunity for a service provider to offer value-added,
revenue-generating services to the tenants.
Voice Service
ADSL, SDSL and VDSL provide enough bandwidth to support multiple voice channels. Thus
it is possible for you to offer bundled voice and data service to the business customers. VoDSL
(Voice over DSL) uses different transport depending on the link type, e.g., SDSL/ADSL use
voice over ATM, or AAL2 (ATM Adaptation Layer 2), as the transport, while VDSL will
likely use VoIP (Voice over IP).
ATM-based IAD (Integrated Access Device) are readily available from many vendors, and
many operators offer VoDSL gateways to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network).
Integrated IP-based CPE (Customer Premise Equipment) is still difficult to come by, however,
the situation should improve as soon as VDSL is widely deployed.
On the other hand, residential customers rely on a single telephone line for emergency services,
e.g., fire and ambulance. VoDSL simply cannot guarantee the same availability as conventional
POTS for a host of reasons; the most obvious one is that VoDSL will not work during power

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.8

outage. Because of the life-line support issue, VoDSL for the residential customers is not
advisable.
Video on Demand
With high enough bandwidth, you can offer video on demand to your residential customers and
hotel guests. Both VDSL and ADSL are fast enough for such service. If the trunk bandwidth is
limited, you should install the video server on-premise so that video traffic does not go over the
trunk line; otherwise, several sites can share a video server located in your switching office.
Community Services
As a service provider, there are a few services that you can offer to win the affinity of your
customers.
q

Community/Local Information Service

With the right equipment, it is relatively easy to offer community/local information with a web
server. You can provide things such as community bulletin, yellow page, etc. The web site also
provides an opportunity to generate advertising revenue.
q

Surveillance/Security Service

You can install network-enabled surveillance cameras around the premise to enhance the
security of a property. This is especially valuable in the urban area, and the tenants will no
doubt appreciate it.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.9

Summary
The following table summarizes the primary features of the technologies for in-building
applications. The distances are measured at 24 AWG (0.5 mm diameter) wiring. These reach
numbers are approximates because the distance depends on the actual implementation.

Technology

Speed @ distance

Wiring

Cost

Coexisting
with POTS

Ethernet

10/100 Mbps @ 100 m

Cat. 5

Low not counting

wiring

No

HomePNA 1.0

1 Mbps @ 150 m

1 pair

Low

Yes

HomePNA 2.0

10 Mbps @ 300 m

1 pair

Yes

IDSL

128 Kbps @ 5000 m

1 pair

Low if spare phone

lines available

No

SDSL

2.3 Mbps @ 3000 m

1 pair

High

No

1 pair

High

Yes

1 pair

Likely low

Yes

192 kbps @ 7000 m

ADSL

6 Mbps @ 3700 m
1.5 Mbps @ 5500 m

VDSL

50 Mbps @ 300 m
13 Mbps @ 1500 m

Last but not least, there are many revenue-generating opportunities in the in-building market.
Solutions abound that will enhance the value of a property and keep your customers happy.
With the right equipment and a dash of ingenuity, you should be able to offer superior services
at a minimum cost and in a timely manner.

Copyright 2000, ZyXEL Communications, Corp. All rights Reserved.

P.10