Can you explain what components you provide?
Genesis will provide the Home Gateway (HGW) and Convergence Node (CN) devices. The HGW sits in the Network Interface Demarcation (NID or Master Socket) point in the home. The Convergence Node sits in the pedestal (or DP – the little box on the street corner).

What does a Home gateway look like?
It looks like a small DSL modem, smaller than a home router.

What does a convergence node look like?
It looks like a circuit board with a telecom punch block on the back.

What happens if operators only have a single copper pair to each house from their last cable access point?
Most telcos have been installing multiple pairs (some as many as eight per house) for decades to support services such as fax and second lines. However, Genesis recognises that there may be some who only have a single pair and a second line will need to be installed. The cost of installing a second copper line would still be a fraction of the cost of installing fibre from the Central Office (or Exchange) to the neighbourhood.

How will neighbours be prevented from seeing each other’s data?
There are three different security features that are inherent in DSL Rings:

1. Encrypted data: the data is encrypted from the Home Gateway (HGW) to the Convergence Node (CN), perhaps further into the network. This means that even if a neighbour had the technical know-how to be able to see your data, they wouldn’t be able to decipher it.
2. The two inherent paths from the HGW to the CN. Each data session is only likely to travel in one direction depending on traffic loading in each direction. Generally the data will take the shortest path to the CN but this is not guaranteed by any means. That said, it will only go in one, not both directions to the CN. Therefore only part of the data on the ring at any one time passes each neighbour.
3. If the data coming from the network back to your house goes clockwise around the ring to your house, it is taken off the ring once it reaches your house. This enables the bandwidth that it was occupying to be freed up for the people in the houses further along in that clockwise direction to use that bandwidth in that direction at that time.

Where are Genesis Home Gateway and Convergence Node products being developed?
The Home Gateway and Convergence Node are currently being designed and developed in Cambridge, UK.

Are the homes in the ring reliant upon one another? For example, What happens if power is lost in one of the homes?
Not only is the ring is resilient to a single failure, the Genesis solution also provides protection against modems being unplugged or power losses in individual homes. A passive switch at the Convergence Node in the pedestal (or DP) allows the system to bypass each house individually if necessary. There is also the WiFi interface that will be able to link houses together to allow for adjacent rings to share bandwidth, or provide emergency service if the phone lines are cut for some reason.

What happens if one of the houses burns down?
The passive switch at the Convergence Node will skip that house so that service to the rest of the houses will not be affected.

What happens when all the houses are using the Internet at the same time? Will the Internet slow down?
This is one scenario where the benefits of the ring are realised. Consider that:

1. There are 2 paths around the ring and there is generally a lot of bandwidth available on each path.
2. If some users are using a lot of bandwidth on one or both paths there is Quality of Service (QoS) that prioritizes the traffic of each type or for each customer, depending on the Service Level Agreement (SLA) that the telco sells you. In general all the high revenue traffic (for example, Prioritized VoIP, Streaming High Definition Video, Gaming services, Business Services, etc.) will get the available bandwidth before the web surfing & email traffic. If those heavy users are using a lot of low priority traffic, it will not affect the higher priority traffic of the other users on the system. Essentially you get what you pay for.

Is such high speed bandwidth really needed? Operators are finding means of deferring the need to invest in high speed Broadband. E.g. through use of rate adaptive IPTV.
Throughout the history of the Internet, users have always found a way to use whatever amount of bandwidth they have available to them. Utilising Rate Adaptive IPTV just means that more channels will be able and supported simultaneously on a DSL Ring.