Electrical Engineer Ken Kerpez '83 Pioneer in DSL technology

Ken Kerpez '83

Last year, Ken Kerpez '83 (EE) was named a Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers for his noteworthy contributions to digital subscriber line (DSL) technology and standards.

In his nearly two-decade career, Ken Kerpez '83 (EE) has established himself as a pioneer in the establishment, standardization and operation of broadband access systems.

As a senior scientist at Telcordia, a major vendor of telephone company software systems, Ken has earned a well-deserved reputation as a leading researcher on the cutting-edge of broadband access systems and technology. Along the way, he has received three full patents, four provisional patents, published more than 24 journal articles, and authored more than 150 standards contributions. Last year, Ken was named a Fellow by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for his noteworthy contributions to digital subscriber line (DSL) technology and standards.

Ken's interest in electronic communications systems was piqued as an undergraduate at Clarkson when he studied coding and information theory with former faculty member Jack Koplowitz.

"I became fascinated with the interplay between time and frequency signals and with the challenge of creating receivers that extract data from noisy communications," he recalls. He pursued this passion in his graduate studies at Cornell, receiving his Ph.D. and specializing in information theory and coding using advanced mathematics. Even though his research came to be highly theoretical, he has found that "when you're working in industry you spend most of your time using practical engineering. At Clarkson, I learned a lot of very good practical engineering."

"Actually when I look back on it," Ken says, "getting my B.S. degree from Clarkson was my meal ticket, my license to go out and do all kinds of things."

"I always advise engineers going into R&D areas to stick it out," says Ken. "You may be working on something that you believe in and a few people in your group believe in, but everyone else in the industry seems focused on other stuff. But there's always the chance that if you keep working and just give it some time, your project can be the next big thing."

Ken has made full use of that license. When a colleague at Telcordia invented asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL), a new technology that allows more data to be sent over existing copper telephone lines, Ken demonstrated its feasibility. Ken also pioneered the use of forward error correction for eliminating impulse errors on DSL lines, and developed models of crosstalk noise and impulse noise that are staples of DSL analysis.

But the path from research to production was not smooth. When Ken began working on ADSL, the industry was focused on HDSL (high-data-rate DSL), which offered business applications and promised high profit margins. He and his research group were interested instead in the high volume that consumer/residential products require and struggled for funding to get the service into production. Although his team was initially interested in television applications for DSL technology, Ken says that back in 1989, digital TV was perceived as "kind of wacky."

"I guess it's like anything," Ken says. "When you come up with a new idea it's not like you're going to start selling the service and making money right away. It takes a while." Ultimately, ADSL technology found widespread application on the Internet, which Ken says "saved our lives by making it into the high-volume technology it is now."

Today that infant project that garnered little early interest has grown into a network of over 100 million lines in service worldwide.

Now Ken has seen research and technology in his field come full circle. He is once again working on television applications using the Internet protocol (IPTV). Integrating many media services — Internet, telephone and television — over broadband is the wave of the future. Ken believes that their current IPTV project will follow the same trajectory as ADSL. "This project, the next generation of Internet TV, will provide a much more robust service," says Ken. "We're looking at much faster speeds. We've got much more experience under our belts. And the progress in the hardware and video encoding is just phenomenal! This project," notes Ken, "is nothing that we could have imagined 10 or 15 years ago."