stance from the subscriber to the central office. Basically, one of three methods can be used to connect telephone com- pany subscribers to the serving central office: 1. Subscribers can be directly cabled to the central office. However, this method would be very expensive and is seldom used. 2. Customers can be cabled to a central office by routing subscriber lines to a common location within a neighborhood where they are bundled together for routing via a common path to a central office. While this procedure maintains the integrity of point-to- point routing from subscriber to a central office, it requires only one right-of-way for a majority of the cabling distance. 3. Cabling between subscribers and a central office can also be effected via multiplexing subscriber conversations into applicable time slots at a common location where a digital loop carrier remote terminal (DLC RT) is located. Now that we have an appreciation for the three connection methods, let's look at them and their problems, if any, in some detail. DIRECT CABLE The use of a direct cable connection between a sub- scriber and a central office can support broadband communications in the form of DSL use as long as the subscriber is located close enough to the central office. If the subscriber is located beyond an 18,000-ft radius from the central office, the ability to obtain a high level of transmission capability using DSL becomes problematic. BUNDLING The use of a feeder distribution interface (FDI) involves the bundling of cables from each subscriber at a common point for routing Team-Fly® Fiber in the Neighborhood to the central office. Because subscriber lines are not directly routed to the central office, this adds additional cabling distance and may render some DSL service problematic. In addition, when FDI support is utilized, the higher frequencies used by DSL modems can potentially create interference among the individual twisted-pair wires in the bundle. DSL For reasons already mentioned, the use of a DLC RT network structure is not