In practice this often means the competitor placing a small street cabinet with a DSLAM, next to a telco local copper aggregation cabinet or serving area interface and using a "tie cable" to connect to the last part of the local loop into customers' homes.
The short range brings superior bit-rate performance, compared to normal local loop unbundling (LLU).
In the latter, which was first deployed in the UK in the village of Lyddington by Rutland Telecom, the telco loses remote access to the part of the local loop between the cabinet and the customer's premises unless the SLU Operator allows IP-level access via their DSLAM.
The street cabinet is connected to a point of presence on the national network using long-range wireless or fibre.
Other restrictions are in force to prevent interference with ADSL or ADSL2+ frequencies on the local loop from the serving exchange.