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.
[2][3] EtherLoop was initially developed by Elastic Networks in the 1990s, to allow high-speed data communication access to residential customers over standard twisted-pair telephone lines.
The technology development effort had been started by Jack Terry of 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] The telco EtherLoop design adopted the basic concepts of digital subscriber line (DSL) communications technology plus Ethernet local area network technology to facilitate the combination of voice and data transmission on legacy physical infrastructure of standard twisted-pair telephone lines, or plain old telephone service (POTS).
[1]: 5, 28 The initial EtherLoop implementation in 1999 used a half-duplex/bi-directional communication approach—but in only a single direction at a time, not simultaneously—plus burst packet delivery to mitigate several of the serious side effects of the legacy high-speed DSL offerings of the late 1990s.