Rate-Adaptive Digital Subscriber Line
Rate-adaptive DSL (RADSL) is a variation of ADSL technology. With RADSL the modem adjusts the upstream speed of the connection depending upon the length and quality of the line between the DCE (Telephone Exchange) and the DTE (Modem), in an attempt to maintain a certain downstream speed.
When the modem connects using RADSL the upstream bandwidth is adjusted to create a greater frequency band for the downstream traffic. Using this technique the line is more tolerant of errors caused by noise and signal loss.
As the frequency is adjusted, the upstream bandwidth may be markedly decreased if there is a large amount of line noise or signal degradation - this may reduce the upstream bandwidth to 64 kbit/s - the same speed as a single ISDN channel.