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."
how exactly does 'creating virtual ones' work? (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone please explain how this works. Is this some bizarre artifact of the signaling protocol, such that the only way to overcome a design flaw is to use some incomprehensible technique treating physical wires as virtual wires? How can that possibly be better than just natively signaling faster on the wires?
4 pairs (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Docsis 3 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:And yet, I'm stuck (Score:1, Interesting)
Yeah it's costing us FORTY THREE BILLION FUCKING DOLLARS.
We have a water crises, housing crises, we are making all our money from a mineral boom in the west which eventually end and then what?
Seriously, fix this housing issue - I don't give a fuck if it's a 'states' problem - this is vastly more important than having fibre internet.
Yes we need to ditch the copper network but do we need to do it right now? for forty three billion dollars?
How much sustainable energy is currently being produced by this country.
Argh - and no before you say it, I'm not a liberal, not even bloody close.
Re:As long as it's Adsl I don't want it (Score:4, Interesting)
I briefly had ADSL and it was crap compared to cable modem. People forget the ASYMMETRIC part of DSL. In my usage I really felt this when using the net. Lots of lags etc. I switched to a cable modem and it was night and day better in my usage. Granted this was many years ago so perhaps it's better now?
Interesting. You'll find that most gamers MUCH prefer DSL over cable, since you're heading into a central hub and get right on to the fiber, rather than sharing a typically oversubscribed local node.
I currently have VDSL, fiber to the VRAD, and it's the best I've ever had for gaming. That kinda surprises me, actually.
Re:400M ? (Score:5, Interesting)
**replying to myself. just ran speedtest.net and got 15 mbit down, and 2.6mbit up. I am on the standard internet plan. 30-40kbit, comeon...lets try to be somewhat accurate on this website please. I can also attest to pulling torrents down at similar speeds, so I do find SpeedTest.net to be an accurate indicator of bandwidth.
I am being accurate. And I ran any number of bandwidth checks, even ran them periodically and logged them so I could try to reason with their tech support people. They wouldn't believe me, claiming it was my problem. Not that it mattered: it was like trying to argue semantics with chimpanzees, but it cost them a good customer when U-Verse rolled around (oh, they screwed with me in other areas as well.) I once asked a tech if I was some kind of a test case to see just how much a customer could or would tolerate. He just shrugged. Actually, their on-site guys were pretty sharp, and always tried to give me what I was paying for. It was the phone support and provisioning people that gave me the most grief.
Not to nitpick... but it's (Score:3, Interesting)
And VDSL2,3,... is the short term future. Any time there's a nasty hack like DSL to cope with delivering over existing lines, at some point, it becomes necessary to replace the old, aging cables with something that is capable of lower noise. When this happens, I hope for your sake that they either replace it with fiber or 8-pair cat-6 (or better). Electrically isolated Ethernet is also a hack, but at least it's a clean hack. There just is no substitute for running a clean, environmentally secure solution like fiber.
For outdoor data requirements, fiber is the ONLY solution. When you stop demanding it, the service providers will start thinking you're happy with their hold-me over hacks.
Missing the point (Score:5, Interesting)
So, while you get 30 up, and when connecting to others on the same provider's network, you're getting 30 up, the provider is simply throttling the overall up at their data center where they host servers for other businesses.
Remember the provider isn't paying for 10 terabit up and 500 gigabit down. They have a large group of switched fibers. They still run much of it over OC-(insert big number here) networks as Sonet is for the time being a hell of a lot easier to load balance and provide redundancy on than using massive Ethernet load balanced trunks.
So, what are they going to do with 9.5 terabits of unused upstream anyway?
Also remember that with the exception of P2P traffic, upstream between providers is becoming less important since Akamai, Google, etc... are distributing content all over the Internet anyway. If you're a provider with so much as 4U of rack space to spare, Google or Akamai will gladly install a caching server that will offload insane amounts of traffic from you. So if you have 100,000 users all watching the same viral video on youtube, after the first time it's viewed on your ISP, the video is probably located on a server at your ISP.
Re:400M ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Though, as a side note I'd like to just say that it upsets me when providers advertise like 20mb/s down but have terrible upload speed, which in the end makes web browsing slow and painful.
Re:400M ? (Score:4, Interesting)
Because running 5km of fibre for you (and 5km of fibre for the other people on your exchange which is presumably in the best location they could afford to put it, so we're talking everyone in a 5km *RADIUS* of the exchange, which means 20-30km + of cabling at least in some sort of web or star configuration) and a handful of people is a extreme loss. It would have to be fibre - we have nothing else that can really go that distance - and it would probably need repeaters for that length.
So they run the cable, dig up, say 20km of road / install 20km of poles / repeaters/ shielding, etc. just to get a fibre into a box somewhere nearer to you in order to do DSL or whatever they need (you to a nearby exchange doesn't matter, because there's no end of cheap, easily available hardware and wiring that can already be used to get you connected to that fibre). If you live in a rural area, say that connects 20,000 or 30,000 people. How much do you think that's actually going to bring in each year versus their outlay, repairs, upgrades, etc? It wouldn't cover the interest on a loan of the amount required to do the work in the first place (so they are theoretically better off by just leaving that money in a bank account, earning interest instead of costing it).
It's not a question of technologies - 5km is a huge distance - over radio for more than a handful of people at the bandwidth you're wanting is ludicrously difficult (and just fills the airwaves for even more miles around, making it harder to do more) or you'd have amateur radio networks doing it all the time at those speeds. Plus, you'd never get a license for it. Over cable, that's a huge amount of digging, burying, pole-installing, raising, repairing, planning, obtaining permission, and an awful expense in copper too (people are stealing copper cables over here for things like that because of its scrap value). Over fibre, you have all the same problems but only get no theft value, almost-infinite upgradability, conversion costs and extreme fragility as differences.
It's mostly quite sensible business reasons - it's ridiculous to expect a company to make a loss unless it's forced to (like some British ISP's are in order to fulfill their telecoms license obligations). That's a governmental problem - to force them. If they *are* forced to, they can't give you the same as everyone else because the technologies don't cover the same distance, and your maintenance / installation costs are ridiculously higher so you'll get slower / more expensive broadband. They won't get any fans by doing it, they'll just get people moaning that it's not as reliable / fast as other people's inner-city service again. Years ago, 56k was the standard, if you didn't have that, you were "deprived". Now it's 2Mb. By the time an installation is settled, it'll be 4Mb or 8Mb or whatever. They wouldn't recoup any money on their investment before they were digging it up again to replace everything.
Don't blame your ISP, or the scientists for not giving you the technology (that amount of combined bandwidth over that wide an area is all but impossible), blame your government for not subsidising what is now seen as an "essential" service. Get it classed as a utility, then it's in the same category as not having running water, or sewerage, or electricity. Until then, there is NO business case to ever do it. Without a business case, no business will do it, and no bank will fund them to do it, and no business that ever does it would ever be shown gratitude. When the government starts subsidising or enforcing it, then you'll have the service they lay down, and probably no more, and it'll be a cost burden on every other ISP user in the country.
It's like demanding that you get access to the city center by vehicle in the same time and same cost that a city-dweller can. Yeah, it can probably be done, but there's zero business case for it at all (in fact, there's almost infinitely more business case for you to get to the city centre in five minutes than for you to get br