Reconfigurable Broadband ISDN Access Platform

As interest in the National Information Infrastructure continues to gain momentum, telephone, and cable-television service providers continue to work on ways for increasing data bandwidth into the home and office. The service providers' goal is to provide sufficient bandwidth to support both existing services and novel applications such as on-demand video. For economic reasons, service providers will retain as much of their existing network infrastructure as possible. As such, a single pipe carrying digital voice, video, and data into the home and office is expected; an access device will be required to interface existing user-equipment to the incoming data stream. We propose an easily reconfigurable, low cost broadband-ISDN access device that uses credit-card-size replaceable modules to provide access to different physical connections and physical-layer protocols. The physical-layer adapter will forward digital data to a variety of interface adapters that provide functions, such as video transmission to televisions, voice transmission to telephones, and data routing to local area networks and personal computers. The proposed Phase I research will determine the feasibility of developing a general-purpose broadband-ISDN access device using commercially available microprocessor and bus technologies.