Etherloop information

Etherloop is a hybrid technology combining aspects of Ethernet with other technologies to achieve a result not possible with either technology alone. EtherLoop was originally developed in the 1990s to allow high-speed data communication access to residential customers over standard twisted-pair telephone lines, also known as plain old telephone service or POTS. The technology development effort was begun at Northern Telecom in order to allow telephone companies to compete with the high-speed local data access then beginning to be offered by cable TV providers.^[1]: 5

Etherloop is also a communications architecture with much broader applications. Technically, the initial EtherLoop adopted the protocol concepts of an Ethernet short-distance physical network with Digital subscriber line (DSL) technology to facilitate the combination of voice and data transmission on legacy physical infrastructure of standard phone lines over distances of several kilometers. The project goal was to overcome the limitations of ADSL and HDSL while maintaining high-quality and high-speed data transmission. By combining features of Ethernet and DSL, and using digital signal processors (DSP) to enable the "maximum possible bandwidth out of any twisted pair copper pipe," EtherLoop became an architecture able to address a much wider variety of data networking requirements than the original 1990s-2000s application of data over POTS lines.^{[1]: 5, 28}

Other technologies termed "etherloop" have been developed, including use for automotive intra-vehicle communication in the 2020s, where a gigabit Ethernet physical network has been used with a proprietary time-sliced, network protocol for near real-time, redundant control and feedback of motor vehicle subsystems.^[2]