Broadcom announced a new impulse noise protection technology that enables carriers and OEMs to dramatically improve voice, data and video services to their customers. The new impulse protection solution, marketed as Broadcom PhyR (pronounced "Fire") technology, incorporates Broadcom's industry leading ADSL2+/VDSL2 firmware and provides a significant improvement in residual bit error rate as well as resistance against impulsive noise, resulting in a vastly improved user experience for subscribers of telecommunications triple-play services. Broadcom's new PhyR technology will be demonstrated at next week's NXTComm 2007 show in Chicago, Illinois.

Video services, provisioned over traditional copper loops, are susceptible to noise sources in the ambient environment that limit the coverage area over which services can be made available, or may even reduce video quality by inducing "macro-blocking." Today's IPTV deployments require carriers to provide a certain acceptable level of impulse noise protection and margin settings, which in turn, determine an achievable data rate and the loop length over which voice, video and data or IPTV services will be delivered. Increasing noise protection in current IPTV deployments has an improved effect on residual errors, but has an adverse effect on the serviceable reach and data rate, thereby limiting the service coverage area. Broadcom's PhyR technology significantly improves noise protection without inducing limitations of reach, rate, margin or latency, providing operators with a valuable tool that significantly reduces errors and improves the service coverage area, reliability and achievable revenue for IPTV investments.

In contrast to previous impulse noise protection techniques, Broadcom's PhyR technology provides a number of key advantages:

• As much as a ten times higher impulse noise resilience
• Significantly lower residual BER or packet-loss
• An extended network service area (higher rate, longer reach, lowerdelay)
• Simplified network provisioning (no per user "tuning")
• Firmware upgrade to central office and customer premise equipment
• Transparency to network and upper layer applications (significantly reduces the burden on networks that use higher layer retransmission schemes for improving network efficiency)

All new and previously deployed Broadcom central office and consumer premise equipment silicon solutions are firmware upgradeable to the innovative PhyR firmware. As a result, service providers will be able to offer IPTV and other ultra-high bandwidth applications utilizing simplified provisioning with quality levels comparable to Ethernet, while leveraging their existing copper plant infrastructure.

PhyR field trials and system demonstrations are currently underway as a means to validate the robustness of the technology and its ability to address "real-world" issues. At present, live field data demonstrates a ten-fold reduction of error lines resulting in a vastly improved video experience. The field trials also show 3dB of equivalent coding gain that enables a dramatic extension of IPTV services or even data-only service reach.

"We are very pleased with how our PhyR technology is addressing real field issues with a greatly simplified provisioning model, better reach and a significant improvement in residual BER under heavy impulsive noise conditions," said Greg Fischer, Vice President & General Manager of Broadcom's Carrier Access line of business. "The beauty of PhyR technology is that it enables our customers with greatly improved ADSL2+ and VDSL2-based video or data services, and enables new IP services in a way that vastly improves performance, while reducing service provisioning complexity and scalability issues."

Broadcom's PhyR impulse noise protection and retransmission technology has been broadly discussed by a number of industry-standards bodies, and is currently being considered for DSL standardization.