The demonstration facility consists of an eight home network as can be seen on the blue shelves below. The laptops represent homes and the boards on the narrow shelves are Home Gateways. The Convergence Node is in the grey cabinet, as is the backhaul and the DSLAM for the central office.

Genesis is located in the Venture Centre because it provides flexible accommodation and allows us to expand and acquire additional office space as needed.

Our strong, six-person development team can now work in a better environment with an improved demonstration facility to accommodate the growing flow of visitors. Further expansion can occur at this location as needed after we complete the next round of funding.

Pressac are providing resources for engineering, mechanical design, procurement and manufacturing of the DSL Rings® solution.  They are working to produce hardware product suitable for field trials by Q2 2012 with the software following soon after.

“This is a great partnership which brings together our respective strengths and skills to accelerate delivery of the Genesis solution for high speed broadband,“ said Garry Kelman, CEO, Genesis Technical Systems. “We now have both the technology and the manufacturing capability.”

Pressac Communications is located in Nottingham about 50 miles from the Genesis office in Coventry.

Garry Kelman, CEO Genesis Technical Systems and Peter Burbidge, Managing Director, Pressac Communications sign the Genesis/Pressac investment partnership agreement.

Pressac is a privately owned, UK based company with a fifty year history of doing state of the art design and manufacture of mechanical and electronic products.  Pressac has an £8 million turnover; UK and offshore manufacturing facilities; a proven track record; and a worldwide customer base with many ‘blue chip’ clients.

Pressac has a solid relationship with BT and BT Redcare, for whom they provide a range of services from mechanical and electronic design, plastic injection moulding, and regulatory approvals through to mass volume manufacture. Our partnership with Pressac has already been helpful in our discussions with BT.

Harbour met Ian MacKenzie, Genesis UK Chairman, at the Genesis offices at the University of Warwick Science Park.

Harbour, a keen supporter of technology businesses, was impressed with DSLRings technology and was supportive of the work Genesis is doing in Europe.

Harbour is a member of the European Conservatives and Reformists Group in Europe, as well as a member of the Conservative Party (UK). He is the chair of the Committee on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection and was the Governor, for the European Internet Foundation (2003-2004). He has worked closely with those involved in European internet technology strategies including UK Minister for culture media and sport Jeremy Hunt MP.

Genesis shared with Harbour the news about the recent Patent issuance and agreed to keep Harbour informed of our progress in Europe.

Malcolm Harbour MEP
Ian Mackenzie, Genesis UK Chairman

The successful award of these patents is a significant milestone for DSL Rings and safeguard of our intellectual property.

We have four more pending patent applications that will be greatly helped by the issuance of the first application

Pending Patents.

• Bonded Interconnection of Local Networks
  • (rural, daisy-chained DSL Rings)
• Synchronization of Communication Equipment
  • (Femtocells on DSL Rings)
• Dynamic, Asymmetric Rings
  • (the ability to dynamically re-configure DSL Rings)
• Remote Powering of DSL ADMs
  • (Remote powering of DSL Add/Drop Multiplexers)

This is just the start for the Genesis IP portfolio as we anticipate many more patents to come in this area. Keep up to date with our IP journey via Twitter at www.twitter.com/genesistechsys and Facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/genesistechsys.

BT’s Williams added that simplification and acceleration of the BDUK process and availability of further public spending would help keep the government on track with its 2015 goals. The scheme aims to deliver superfast broadband connections to 95 percent of UK premises by 2015, and an absolute minimum of 2Mbps to all premises within the same timeframe. William’s comments were made at a Westminster e-forum last week.

“The growing recognition of copper’s role in delivery of next generation broadband is good news for Genesis”, said Stephen Cooke, Genesis President and CTO. “DSL Rings is not the only copper solution, but it does have some very significant advantages over others, namely the ability to deliver very high speed broadband of up to 400 Mb/s, and the ability to be used as a next generation wireless deployment platform in rural areas.”

Genesis recently applied for Eurostars grant to fund a full scale field trial with an Eastern European Telco partner. The funding announcement is expected by mid December.

Genesis provides very high Internet bandwidth over the existing copper infrastructure (often described as the Telco’s taxpayer paid-for trillion dollar asset) at very low cost, relative to fibre-based alternatives.  This in itself is huge, but it is not the only opportunity.  Here are a few others:

Fast installation – we estimate that a single technician can do a single neighbourhood in a single day – not the months needed to lay new fibre cabling

Demand-based deployment – a Telco doesn’t have to risk their precious capital installing fibre and hoping that their customers will then agree to buy services over the new infrastructure at a higher cost.  They can deploy DSL Rings only when consumers in a given area have agreed to pay for the capabilities that DSL Rings provides Very high-speed Internet for rural areas – we are targeting this niche as our initial deployment scenario, from which we will expand into urban deployments

Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) – can be the basis for National Utilities efficiency improvements, meaning that demand peaks can be shifted so that countries can be less dependent on foreign sources of various commodities

Another huge opportunity for DSL Rings is as a 4G (fourth generation, or LTE - Long Term Evolution) wireless deployment platform.  4G wireless has the potential to provide 100 Mb/s to a mobile handset, whereas the existing macrocell network (the 3G network that we mostly use today) cannot . The solution is to provide femtocells (really small mobile phone “cells”) in homes.

Femtocells use a home’s Internet connection to off-load the traffic from the macrocell network.  This increases the useful lifetime of that network while simultaneously increasing network coverage into wireless ‘not-spots’.  There are several technical reasons why current DSL-based networks are very poor deployment platforms for 4G, but most apparent is that if even a few mobile handsets (i.e.: customers in an area) are using 100 Mb/s, there is no current DSL network technology that can provide that bandwidth. And DSL Rings can.  DSL Rings also solves other femtocell technical challenges in a very elegant fashion.

One aspect of our Eurostars grant application is to provide Genesis’ DSL Rings technology for a country-wide 4G rollout plan that will enable coverage, even in rural areas, for a much lower cost than replacing the whole macrocell network.

Our story has only just begun.  There are many more exciting developments on the way!

Our Eurostars application was submitted on the 15th September and we expect to hear whether we have been successful by mid December

Following a successful full scale field trial we will move into the full commercialisation phase. This is a very significant event in the history of Genesis.

The EU look at applications against a range of criteria using the acronym P E S T E L S

• Political
• Economic
• Societal
• Technological
• Economic
• Legislative
• Scale

(Click image to enlarge)

Br0kenTeleph0n3 has been looking for cheap alternatives for rural broadband, given that B4RN is looking at more than £1400 per home for fibre to the home (FTTH).

True, B4RN’s customers are going to receive 1Gbps symmetrical for £30/month, which may well tempt a move up north,. But then more by luck than good judgement we ran across a link to DSL Ring technology, which appears to offer some 400Mbps over copper, i.e. for free, or at least no extra cost, and for a claimed 1% of the cost of FTTH.

The xDSL attenuation problem

Source: Infineon: “Future Proof Telecommunications Networks with VDSL2” by Stephan Wimoesterer, Product Marketing Manager, VDSL2; July 2005.

It is well worth watching the video, especially for the graph (above) that shows that BT’s 80Mbps VDSL fibre to the cabinet service, to be introduced next year, suffers from severe attenuation problems. This means anyone living more than 1500 metres from the cabinet will get speeds equivalent to a brokeback donkey on Valium.

Also, DSL Rings doesn’t work on the BT network. Not for any technical reason, just that it is not yet approved for local access,

It is a mystery why BT CEO Ian Livingston hasn’t either licensed the technology or bought the company, if only to keep it off the market until it thinks we are capable of handling 400Mbps over the phone lines.

At any rate our curiosity was sufficiently piqued to ask the Canadian inventors, Genesis Technical Systems,  a couple of questions, the answers to which are below.

What is the present status of talks to get DSL Rings on to the UK ANFP (access network frequency plan)?

Genesis is a member of the NICC’s DSL Working Group and is submitting a proposal to the Carrier Steering Group to have work on DSL Rings-specific functionality included in the next work item.  Work items lead to a new issue of the ANFP.  Genesis has participated in drafting version 4i of the ANFP which is currently out for review.

Where in the world is DSL Rings being used in pilots or even commercial applications?

Genesis has done entry lab demonstrations with both an Eastern and a Western European Telco.  Genesis is now planning further lab demonstrations and a field trial with a European Telco in the first half of 2012. Genesis anticipates commercialisation in the second half of 2012.

What is the average cost per household of providing up to 400Mbps access?

This is commercially sensitive information which is also highly volume-dependent. However, we estimate that the costs are less than 5% than that of FTTH deployments in urban areas, and less than 1% the cost of FTTH deployment in rural areas.

How well will this work in rural areas, where the distance between houses in often more than 150m?

Genesis’ DSL Rings is an excellent rural solution that provides Telcos with a much needed opportunity to provide very low cost ultra-high bandwidth to their rural customers over distances even beyond 7 km from the exchange. The Genesis DSL Rings rural solution is specifically configured for networks with large distances between houses and a distance of more than 150 m does not generally affect its operation. The Genesis DSL Rings solution can provide rural Telco customers with greater than 200m, and up-to 400 megabits/sec, over the Telco’s existing copper phone lines at less than 1% of the cost of fibre (NB: Actual speeds depend on the availability of Telco lines and equipment.)

What patents protect the technology?

To-date Genesis has filed five patents covering various aspects of  its DSL Rings technology.