Outside the safe office environment, accessing your documents or research materials via the internet can be frustrating. Although many firms now recognise that much legal work can be done from home, the practicalities of linking users with a firm’s data has presented a real hindrance. But with the advent of digital subscriber line (DSL), this should change.
DSL transmits digital information over ordinary copper telephone lines turning them into high-speed data links. Typically, individual connections will provide
from 512 Kbps to two Mbps downstream and about 256 Kbps upstream, enabling customers to download information at between 10 and 20 times the speed of a conventional modem.
The good news for DSL customers is that unlike the ordinary phone system or ISDN, your connection is always on, with no dial-up time. Charging is via a monthly fee of about £50 plus VAT, and there are no additional call charges for calls to the internet.
Using the same connection, customers will be able to make and receive telephone calls or faxes while they are online, although these will be billed at the normal rate.
The system is ideal for lawyers who wish to tap into their firms’ document-creation packages, online know-how databases or to access online dealrooms. It will enhance significantly existing services such as video-conferencing and online education and enable users to download information, images, video clips or graphics almost instantly.
One complaint is that providers will insist that they are used as the customer’s internet service provider (ISP). In other words, it will be necessary to access services by passing briefly through the provider’s portal. BT will, for example, make content available from Reuters, FT.com and Prestel Online. BT also plans to offer legal information from Desktop Lawyer. Other providers will no doubt offer a different range of content.
It will not take long for the system to spread beyond relatively fixed PCs, enabling lawyers to access their materials on the move. In the medium term it will be delivered seamlessly over multiple devices and technologies – providing customers with access to their chosen content and applications through their WAP phone, organiser, laptop or TV.www.openworld.com www.whatis.com
How it works
Traditional phone service (sometimes called ‘plain old telephone service’ or Pots) uses copper wires that are wound around each other and called twisted pairs. Because analogue transmission only uses a small portion of the available amount of information that could be transmitted over copper wires, the maximum amount of data that you can receive using ordinary modems is about 56 Kbps (thousands of bits per second). With ISDN, arguably an early precursor to DSL, you can receive up to 128 Kbps. The ability of your computer to receive information is constrained by the fact that the telephone company filters information that arrives as digital data, puts it into analogue form for your
telephone line and requires your modem to change it back into digital. In other words, the analogue transmission between your home or business and the telecom company creates a bandwidth bottleneck.
DSL assumes digital data does not require change into analogue form and back. Digital data is transmitted to your computer directly and this allows the phone company to use a much wider bandwidth for transmitting to you.
There are a number of versions of DSL: xDSL refers to different variations of DSL such as ADSL; DSLlite; and VDSL. In the UK ADSL (asymmetric digital subscriber line) is the form that will become most familiar to home and small business users. ADSL is generally offered at downstream data rates of 512 Kbts to about 6 Mbts.
ADSL was specifically designed to exploit the one-way nature of most multimedia communication in which large amounts of information flow towards the user, but user requests and responses are small and require little upstream bandwidth. ADSL is asymmetric because it uses most of the channel to transmit downstream to the user and only a small part to receive information from the user.
Other versions of DSL we can expect to see include DSLLite which is slightly slower then ADSL, but requires less equipment at the user end and VDSL, which is a developing technology that promises much higher data rates over shorter distances.
