ITU Standardizes 1Gbps Over Copper, But Services Won't Come Until 2015

alphadogg writes "The ITU has taken a big step in the standardization of G.fast, a broadband technology capable of achieving download speeds of up to 1Gbps over copper telephone wire. The death of copper and the ascent of fiber has long been discussed. However, the cost of rolling out fiber is still too high for many operators that instead want to upgrade their existing copper networks. So there is still a need for technologies that can complement fiber, including VDSL2 and G.fast. Higher speeds are needed for applications such as 4K streaming, IPTV, cloud-based storage, and communication via HD video, ITU said." Meanwhile, I'm hoping Google Fiber, FIOS, and other fast optical options scare more ISPs into action along both price and speed axes.

As long as you can math your way out of a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

no one will hardware their way out of a problem. Lowest cost possible, with the savings passed on to the customer. Yeah right.

Re:What ISPs?

[Mr D from 63]

These limitations might keep the others from getting too scared;

"The drawback with G.fast is that it will only work over short distances, so 1Gbps will only be possible at distances of up to about 100 meters. The technology is being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, though transmission speed is slower at that distace. "

Re:Go ALL THE WAY OUT!

[amorsen]

How? It has been a long time since there was any significant improvement in performance when the wires are longer than 1 km. ADSL2+, VDSL1, and VDSL2 perform about equally badly beyond that distance. You can go faster by doing G.SHDSL over multiple line pairs, but that is generally not economical.

1 Gbps for 100m only

[timeOday]

The drawback with G.fast is that it will only work over short distances, so 1Gbps will only be possible at distances of up to about 100 meters. The technology is being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, though transmission speed is slower at that distace.

OK. So long as G.fast is an improvement over what they're using now, that's a good thing. But until/unless I can get 1 gbps at my desktop, I don't think they should be allowed to advertise it as "Gigabit Internet."

This is the typical phone company thing... "buy Internet service from us!" How fast will it be at my house? "Um, we have no idea!"

Re:Go ALL THE WAY OUT!

[Anonymous Coward]

Sonic.net has found it rather easy to deploy fiber. They hang it up on telephone poles, like everything else. Google does this, too. It's actually cheaper to deploy fiber than copper, because copper metal is actually quite expensive these days.

Copper is cheaper only because it's _already_ deployed. But Sonic's amortized cost per household is something like $200, excluding termination equipment. Not that bad for deploying brand new infrastructure to existing households.

Re:Still won't fix monopolies

[SirCowMan]

It's not a deal, just switched to dsl from this. There is a $3-400 setup charge, contracts run typically 3 years, and it's $25/mo or so penalty to break early. Which probably would be okay if you saw those speeds. Have a look at their throttling policy, after 55mb you'll see about 3% of this for the next few hours. Also, many things are blocked or effectively blocked until 2 or 3 am ... Such as Apple authentication servers. If you have say, an Apple TV it won't be able to access iTunes libraries on your Mac due to this. That latency... For something like Slashdot, not an issue, but ads or media streams like Facebook will open hundreds of connections to CDNs to get images etc., which compounds the effect of delay, particularly where multiple DNS resolutions are required. I used an aggressive squid proxy and dnsmasq, both setup with ad filtering to make it useable. The service would be alright for those who live rurally and understand the limits of satellite, but the throttling and filtering of services makes it a viable option only for the most remote and desperate.