The D50 DSLAM made first by Diamond Lane, then Nokia has nothing particularly praiseworthy about it, but it has firmly secured its place in the history of Wide Area Networks by virtue of being the platform that Covad has deployed across the entire USA-occupied continent. Whether that choice was a wise one or not is now immaterial, and furthermore, even if all Covad xDSL services were shut down tomorrow, the interest in playing with this gear in a lab will not subside one bit, given the amount of emotional investment that has already been made.
Our initial interest was in the unique SDSL/2B1Q flavor served by these DSLAMs, and we have successfully reverse-engineered it back in 2007/2008 without having a test DSLAM of our own: we had started by experimenting with existing CPE devices, and then put some finishing touches by testing on our own live service circuits from Covad. We have now accomplished the goal of cracking Nokia SDSL well enough to build our own CPE for it, and we are using our own SDSL to EIA-530 DSU on our own Covad/UUNet line.
But curiosity only grows stronger, and having already set up a CopperEdge 200 DSLAM in our lab and played with it extensively, we've concluded that it's time for us to have our own D50 as well. This page details the major difficulties with setting up one of these DSLAMs in a play lab.
On our FTP site you can find copies of several versions of D50 node firmware, Weendoze host software and documentation.