Customer Reviews

Understanding Digital Subscriber Line Technology

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Although certainly not perfect, as it is not very well unified, it is one of the best books available on DSL.Even though it appears as if each author wrote their seperate section and it was never well integrated, there is information here on the DSLs that is not available in one place anywhere else. A wonderful reference on modem design, the issues of deploying DSL, and the standards process.

This DSL book was recommended to me by some of the experts in the T1E1.4 DSL standards group. It includes a CD-ROM with 900+ documents including hundreds of the top technical papers presented at T1E1.4 meetings from 1989-1998. One of the papers on the CD-ROM was exactly what I needed to avoid an expensive problem. The book goes into much more detail about DSL technology than ADSL Computer Communications by Gorwalski or ADSL/VDSL Principles by Rauschmayer. The explanations are complete and accurate. The authors have taken the time to explain every aspect of DSL. The text is full of formulas, figures, diagrams, charts, tables, etc. it's great. If you're looking for a DSL book, this is the one I recommend.

Starr and Cioffi's book was enormously valuable as we wrote our own book, DSL, a Wiley Tech Brief. It's not easy going, but this is the primary source. Cioffi developed the DMT standard that is nearly universal in the ADSL world, and Starr has led the leading technical committee. Their knowledge makes a difference. The CD enclosed has thousands of pages of original technical documents.

This is a good introduction to xDSL technologies IF you already are experienced in digital communications. If you aren't versed in topics such as Decision Feedback Equalization, the treatments here are too terse, and you will need a back up reference. On the other hand, if you have some education in the given topic, (QAM, trellis coding...) this book shows nicely how it fits into the DSL picture.

If you come from outside the telecom industry, this book also gives a nice low level explanation of the telephone network and how DSL technologies overcome its impairments to deliver high data raes.

If there were enough books on this technology out there in the market, I'd probably have given this only one star. This book seems like something in between a marketting white paper and an engineering reference. The material is not clearly organized. The author keeps throwing a lot of equations at you without clearly pointing out where they come from and what are their implications. It covers almost all aspects of the DSL technology but doesn't cover anything adequately. The discussion is usually abstruse and ends abruptly. As a DSP design engineer working in this area, I was never able to find much valueable information in this book. Nevertheless, this is the best title I could find from whatever is out there.

A very good book on understanding the DSL technology. The authors give a very detailed and excellent explanations and comments on many detailed aspects of DSL modem design, although I don't always agree on some discussions.

it's usually a good idea to clearly define your target audience, otherwise you might wind up writing a book that suffers from an identity crisis. this book is a good example of when this mistake happens.

don't get me wrong: there's good information in this book. but going from chapter 1 to chapter 6 is a great leap in terms of focus, depth and material. i don't think it's reasonable to start from not knowing what communication theory is and trying to understand Decision-Feedback Equalization. this is a very difficult subject by itself, and trying to waive some theory into this context is not effective.

This book covers the subject of DSL thoroughly and in great depth. It is very up to date. The disks that are included are a valuable set of standards submissions that would be hard to find in most libraries.

Well I bought Three books about DSL , this one was one of them. the other books I bought was "xDSL Architecture" and " ADSL/VDSL Technologies" " the Understanding and ADSL/VDSL both books all the time talks about Technical Data and specifications, have lots of sophisticated equations. I am not saying that they are bad, but the xDSL architecture is the best choice for me, but still if you need very deep information you gotta have one of ther two books. in my case I returned the Book "Understanding ... " to Amazon and I kept the other two books.