Closing In On 1Gbps Using DSL 230
angry tapir writes "DSL vendors are using a variety of methods, such as bonding several copper lines, creating virtual ones, and using advanced noise cancellation to increase broadband over copper to several hundred megabits per second. At the Broadband World Forum in Paris, Nokia Siemens Networks became the latest vendor to brag about its copper prowess. It can now transmit speeds of up to 825M bps over a distance of 400 meters."
400M ? (Score:5, Insightful)
Um. great, how many people are within 2 city blocks of the local wire center?
They need to be working on extending the speeds out past 15,000 feet (5,000M) if they want folks to get excited.
And yet, I'm stuck (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately, I still find myself with a 2 Mbps download speed tops. This technology needs to be actually utilized! It's killing me to read this stuff and then never see it in action.
As long as it's Adsl I don't want it (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:4 pairs (Score:3, Insightful)
They are using 4 pairs to achieve that 825 Mbps speed.
Note that 1000BASE-T also uses 4 pairs to achieve 1000Mbit over a shorter 100 meters. I'm curious what maximum range 1000BASE-T will actually work at (100m is guaranteed), and if it were to work at 400m, what the bandwidth would be.
Yes they're using 4 pairs but it's not the same thing. You're forgetting that they are working with cat 3 copper cabling not cat 5 or 6.
Re:As long as it's Adsl I don't want it (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Docsis 3 (Score:2, Insightful)
It seems that.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Telcos are trying to speed up their bandwidth to provide what cable the company already provides - video. Cable companies are trying to decrease the bandwidth needed to provide video so they can provide faster internet. Either way, I would prefer an internet connection over video service. Whatever technology is in place, I don't think it will be very long before TVs get content from a Cat-5 (or 6, or whatnot) connection over a coax one.
Re:400M ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Not necessiarly (Score:3, Insightful)
For gaming, all that matters is ping. You need little bandwdith by today's standards. I've yet to see any evidence that DSL is reliably lower ping than cable. I know it can be much high ping, I've had that myself. When I was with Speakeasy, they actually switched the connection up to Seattle before the first hop. There are DSL switches, just like Ethernet, and Covad switched it up there for them. A low ping to a site for me was 150ms with that connection. Compare that to my current cable connection which pings like 24ms to Google.
Also oversubscription isn't such a problem these days. Cable companies have built fiber out quite far, and as such can segment down the network a whole lot. Plus the new equipment can operate on multiple channels (DOCSIS 3 is actually done through channel bonding). So you can have multiple frequencies that different customers are on, which of course don't share bandwidth.
Finally there's always oversubscrtiption at various levels, even with DSL, even with big lines like DS-3s. It is just a question of doing a good job with it. A good or a bad job can be done with any technology. DSL doesn't mean no problems. It could be more or less as big a problem as cable when they do it wrong. Peopel have connections to a DSLAM, which is in a non-fiber area and just has a couple DS-1s or a DS-3 back to the central office. They've got too many people, the backhaul gets overloaded, speeds are slow. Seen it happen with Qwest more than a few times.
It is not a matter of DSL vs cable, it is a matter of implementation. Implement either poorly and you'll have problems. Implement either well and it can be good.
Re:4 pairs (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise we are gonna end up with another IPV4 situation where by the time we realize we need to get on the ball everything is gonna be so far behind it'll cost 20 times more and be a giant mess.
I don't see how not upgrading older lines is going to make things any worse down the line. In fact, it seems more likely that it'll make future upgrading cheaper. Consider this: If we upgraded the entire communication infrastructure of the U.S. every time we thought of something faster, how much more money would've been spent on it?
That's not to say that it doesn't suck for people who can't get cable/fiber, but it's not like some day in the future we'll all be wishing we had upgraded our old phone lines sooner.
All those connections is worth a hell of a lot more than just for watching youtube. There is eCommerce, new markets and new businesses, eLearning and a thousand other uses.
And how fast do you really need that connection to be for e-things? I have a fairly fast connection, and the main reasons I think it's worth what I pay are (in order):
1. Watching Hulu.
2. Downloading packages/source code.
3. Uploading files to my webserver (remember, this is Slashdot, most people don't do this).
Everything else I do (Slashdot, blogs, web comics, shopping) are perfectly usable on much slower connections. If I had a slower connection, I probably wouldn't watch TV online, and downloading things would be annoying, but I don't see how it would be so terrible.
But to compete we are gonna have to step up to the plate and realize something this big needs actual planning and execution, not just hoping AT&T or one of the other providers will actually build all this for us.
Hope you realize what country you're in. If our government says it'll roll out national broadband, what it means is that Comcast or Qwest or someone will get a huge paycheck with very few strings and we'll never see the result.