The Hi-FOCuS system is designed to enable the co-existence of different transmission technologies, such as ADSL,
ADSL lite and VDSL, within a single platform, enabling France Telecom to broaden the variety of services it offers to customers.
ADSL technology is used as its initial access transmission medium, but the system is also designed to support
ADSL Lite, SDSL, HDSL, and VDSL transmission technologies.
In order to compare transmission speeds, one needs to know that regular dial-tone phone lines are capable of delivering speeds of up to 56 kilobits per second (downstream(*)), that satellite dishes can deliver from 12 megabits per second to 100 megabits per second, that
ADSL Lite can deliver up to 1.2 megabits per second and that regular cable modems can deliver up to two megabits per second.
The "x" in xDSL stands for the various (and growing) kinds of digital subscriber line technologies including: ADSL/RADSL (asymmetric & rate adaptive digital subscriber line),
ADSL Lite, HDSL (high bit rate DSL), SDSL (single pair DSL) and VDSL (very high bit rate DSL).
Recently, a stripped-down solution called
ADSL Lite has surfaced at the urging of computer companies.
