'Smart' DSL works with  legacy landlines -- and  WiFi; can deliver gigabit speeds
By Anand Parthasarathy
Bangalore, June 23 2014: He is widely acknowledged to be the "Father"  of DSL or Digital Subscriber Line  -- the family of technologies that provide Internet  access by  sending  digital data over the wires of an ordinary  telephone network.
The author of dozens of patents in the mid 1980s, that made Internet a reality for millions of people worldwide,  Dr John  Cioffi is now Emeritus Professor  at Stanford University and heads a corporation  -- Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment, Inc., better known as ASSIA -- which provides technology solutions to global  broadband  service  companies .
As telecom providers  work with fibre optics and wireless, to  connect the world,  they also have to grapple with  a  challenge:  what  to  do with millions of miles of copper cabling, a throwback to a pre-Internet Age. This is particularly so in India, where state provider BSNL  has a massive  network of legacy landlines.
You can use all  this existing copper and  still deliver what would today seem unbelievable  data speeds,  says Dr Cioffi.   Passing through Delhi, last week, on his way back from delivering a keynote at the CommunicAsia  conference in Singapore,   he     explained  the concept to me,  in a special   telecon.
"I am often  asked if it is possible to deliver broadband access speeds of a gigabit per second to a billion people before the end of this decade. My answer is,  that this is entirely possible with only a modest level of investment, and with only incremental upgrades of the existing infrastructure."

This is how it works: With new avatars of DSL  technology  called Vectored DSL, legacy networks    can  mate with the latest wireless WiFi networks.  And individual WiFi networks each, say,  delivering a hundred megabits per second, can be made to work together to  add their speeds... till one achieved a gigabit per second. 
Helping operators in  developing   markets to make best use of their existing infrastructure and still achieve  world-class Internet  backbones -- that is  Dr Cioffi's  mission today.  
Looks like the Father of DSL  is fathering a whole new way  of  frugal engineering  that Indians can appreciate:  don't waste what you have; build on it, to  play catch-up  with the rest of the world.
How it's done: Find a link to a technical paper on ASSIA's Smart Vectoring solution here