Ethernet Over Assorted Materials

saridder writes: "Cisco has demonstrated their latest last mile technology, and not only can you now have 10 MB Ethernet over Cat3, Cat2, Cat1, try lamp power cord, battery jumper terminals, barbed wire, etc. This may have solved the last mile problem, and at 10 MB, it blows DSL out of the water."

5000 ft != MILE

[codepunk]

I think it is just short of a mile, thus the technology is nothing more than hype. It is the last 20 miles that need to be addressed not the last 5000 ft.

This solves nothing

[BillyGoatThree]

Nobody has run Cats 3, 2 or 1 to my house, nor have I got a barbed wire connection to my ISP. The last mile problem is not one of technology--there are millions of technologies that can solve the technical issues.

The problem is money. Nobody wants to spend the dollars necessary to hook us all up with data cable. That's why all the hullabalo about cable ISPs and DSL--they both utilize an existing physical connection.

In other words, the answer will not come from Cisco, it will come from somebody with deep pockets. And the only pockets deep enough in this case belong to the federal government.

It's distance-limited....

[AugstWest]

"By offering Ethernet-like speeds over regular phone wire, at reaches up to 5,000 feet, and co-existing with phone traffic, LRE brings rich, advanced services such as next generation video-on-demand to places it has not gone before."

So, once again, 90% of the population is too far from the CO for this to bring broadband into the home.

The problem isn't the last mile, contrary to the buzzwords... the problem is getting the pipe to run many, many miles to actual end users' homes.

MB or Mb

[s1r_m1xalot]

There is a tendency here on /. to confuse megabits and megabytes...

Which one is this?

Ten megabits blows DSL out of the water but ten megabytes utterly destroys it. For those of you going "huh", a byte is composed of 8 bits. Thus 10 MB would be the same as 80 Mb. Please correct the front page if this turns out to be megabits once the page is reachable again.

Re:This solves nothing

[Lissst]

Ummm.... actually I'm willing to bet that you do have at least Cat1 cabling in your building. Unless you don't have a phone line at all, Cat3 has been the standard cable used for regular phone lines in homes for quite a few years now. So their gist is that they can get high-speed data off regular phone lines.

Re:This solves nothing

[apg]

If you're not going to read the article before you post, at least have the decency to read the /. summary:

...

not only can you now have 10 MB Ethernet over Cat3, Cat2, Cat1, try lamp power cord, battery jumper terminals, barbed wire, etc. [emphasis mine]

The whole point is that Cisco's technology does -- in theory, at least -- take advantage of existing physical connections. Whether this is actually useful for practical implementation, as another poster questions, is a separate issue. If the press release says 5,000 ft., you can probably safely assume that that is the current upper bound.

No it does not solve the last mile problem

[Papa Legba]

This kind of stunt has been used to show of the latest technology many different times. At one trade show novell used a fish tank to transfer token ring signals around on their network. Rusty barbed wire has been used many times. I personally know people who have used electric fences to transfer modem signals over a distance of miles to reach the barn.

This is all smoke and mirrors. What you do not realize is that the cross section of all of these materials is large. That is the real problem of data transfer when you break it down. It is the number of electrons that can be pushed over a data source without the cross section of the wire breaking down (over heating and glowing red is usually the indicator of this). What Cisco does not say in this article is if we can still use the phone lines for what they are intended for, phones, once we use this technology. this is not really an advantage if I have to rewire the building anyways so I can still make phone calls. Might as well have put in the regular cat 5 then making the advantage of this pointless.

The final last mile problem has a third part not adjusted by this technology. this is the ancient switches that this must travel through. The thing that has stopped the broadband revolution is the time and effort necesary to switch over all of the network to be able to use this tech. Phone companies are slow to roll these things out. When I worked for an ISP we once had to wait 6 months to install a dial-up location as the local telco had Lost their back hoe and did not want to rent one. How you loose a back hoe I will never know. SO don't hold your breath, this revolution is still born.

Wire to the home is NOT the problem

[Tsu-na-mi]

What's the point? Cable modem is capable of 2Mb-5Mb or more, but everyone is becoming capped at 128Kb not due to technological reasons, but business decisions. What we need is a cheap super-high-bandwidth solution for the Telcos, so they can open up a fatter pipe to our neighborhoods.

Uhm, ARCNET?

[Jailbrekr]

It was only 1Mb/s, but it could communicate over ANYTHING. Would not take too much to bump the speed up with todays technology.

This isn't new or suprising. This technology has been around for years. God, I remember using ARCNET to communicate thru barbed wire back in 1995 (as a test to prove it could).

This can be useful

[mtnharo]

This will be good for creating an instant network within a building with older infrastructure. Sort of like Phoneline networking, but a bit faster, and apparently with lower standards as to the actual type of wire (See barbed wire, new meaning to electric fence) Could also be useful if combined with dsl. Now the dsl modem/router/Cisco box/filter is located at the point where the phonelines enter your home/office/courrugated box, then the signal is split over all of the phonelines without needing more filters or a pre-existing network for non-internet needs. Great package for the phone companies. Not really a major advance for "last-mile" needs, but it helps for those who don't want to invest in additional networking equipment or rewire their home.

Did anyone read the article?

[Cramer]

Do any of you know what "the last mile" even is?

Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)

This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:

• Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.

You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.

There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)

Too late for att@home

[timecop]

Now if this stuff showed up earlier, they wouldn't be so bankrupt...