Video on phone lines: Technology and applications

This paper reviews the telephone loop plant characteristics, current DSL (digital subscriber line) technologies, recent efforts in video coding standards, and the interrelationship between DSL technologies and visual communications over subscriber lines. In overview of the loop plant characteristics we examine its physical makeup and transmission properties, where for the latter we discuss frequency and time responses of wire-pair lines and the impairments of echo, crosstalk, impulse noise, and radio frequency intelference. We trace the historical development of various DSL technologies and comment on possible future evolution. Transmis-sion technologies used in the ISDN basic-access DSL, the high bit-rate DSL, and the asymmetric DSL are portrayed. And the issue of spectrum compatibility among different transmission systems is explained. Several important video coding standards are briefly described, including ITU-T’s H.261 and ISO’s JPEG and MFE