Groundwork Laid For Superfast Broadband Over Copper 93
itwbennett writes: Telecom equipment vendor Adtran has developed a technology that will make it easier for operators to roll out broadband speeds close to 500Mbps over copper lines. Adtran's FDV (Frequency Division Vectoring), enhances the capabilities of two technologies — VDSL2 with vectoring and G.fast — by enabling them to better coexist over a single subscriber line, the company said. VDSL2 with vectoring, which improves speeds by reducing noise and can deliver up to 150Mbps, is currently being rolled out by operators, while G.fast, which is capable of 500Mbps, is still under development, with the first deployments coming in mid-2015. FDV will make it easier for operators to roll out G.fast once it's ready and expand where it can be used, according to Adtran.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica has an article about how Verizon is letting its copper network rot in order to passively encourage customers to switch to fiber.
In other news (Score:1)
JC Penny has announced that they intend to start selling reversible underwear in an attempt win back customers who have converted to yoga pants.
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In other news (Score:4, Insightful)
Users can now go through their monthly cap in under ten minutes.
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Nah. AT&T will have customers so over billed and locked down, until the pay for U-Verse too, they'll never a full speed connection.
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Not to mention this technology will likely not fair so well over 50 to 100 year old copper.
Why bother (Score:3, Insightful)
They keep coming up with faster and faster methods to deliver data and the ISPs keep artificially lowering speeds and data limits. As long as Comcast and the like run the show none of this will go to use for the end consumer.
Fibre optic is almost her (Score:1)
Why are we still flogging the dead horse?
FTTH will always outperform copper, without exception, and it's gaining traction quicker than the telco would embrace G.Fast
Fibre optic is almost her (Score:4, Informative)
Because copper is already ubiquitous. It's literally deployed to every home in America. And outside of dense large municipalities (think small to mid-size towns), comprehensive FTTH deployment is not financially feasible. A copper-based broadband solution is the only short-term means to bring universal broadband to most places, and it shouldn't be overlooked.
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If you were starting a new ISP with absolutely no infrastructure, fiber is drastically cheaper for initial cap
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Yeah well, let's see if fiber doesn't develop a serious case of cataract in 20 or 30 years. The stuff is still too sensitive. What was good enough for grandpa, and when you need robust.. and, when you want to transmit power over the same line, you have a hard time beating copper.
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Re:Fibre optic is almost her (Score:4, Insightful)
Because for many, fiber is like hot fusion. It's been right around the corner for decades now.
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What world do you live in? I want some of what you're smoking. Fiber isn't "gaining traction"; major players in the fiber market, such as Verizon, are sitting on their hands, intentionally stopping their deployments. If you don't have Fiber today where you live, don't hold your breath for getting it any time in the future, unless there is a major regulatory upheaval that ousts the lobbyists from having a stranglehold over the organizations in government that are supposed to be regulating them.
Assholes. Veri
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In the long term yes - but the economics are very different short term. A couple of telco engineers could install VDSL2 (or, presumably, G.fast) for a whole wiring cabinet - a hundred or more households - in the time it would take to run fiber to a single one of those premises. Apart from anything else, it seems right now all the engineers a
distance, please (Score:5, Interesting)
ALU's "10 gig copper" technology is something like 10 meters length. that's way out on the tail of the straight line of speed vs distance that's been pretty much unchanged since the days of ADSL 7 meg. if you can't get out of the shadow of the field cabinet, what good is it?
show me 150 mbps at 7000 wire feet, and I will pester my engineers to buy a trainload of it. it's got to be pretty clever to beat what appear to be the laws of physics.
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Re:distance, please (Score:4, Insightful)
But the real solution is FTTN: fiber to the street cabinet, rather than the current status quo of fiber to the Central Office. That will have the effect of moving you to well within a few thousand of feet of a fiber converter.
As Dane has said before, if you're going to the neighborhood you might as well go to the home. The cost difference is minimal and by going to the home it will be easier to upgrade the network later by swapping in better optical equipment. Sonic already has a few FTTH rollouts and collaborated with google before google fiber was ever a thing.
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As Dane has said before, if you're going to the neighborhood you might as well go to the home. The cost difference is minimal
Poppycock.
While FTTN entails a fiber optic cable passed around public easements, coming to the home means setting up appointments for each home within the neighborhood. If it takes only 3x as much to do the houses too, I'd be surprised.
While the equipment involved might still be expensive, the cost of the personnel to install them is nothing to be trifled with.
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Back in '00 or '01 a buddy of mine wired his entire town in northern Sweden with fiber, I think it was covered on /. at the time. It was no more expensive for them to do an entire city population 2300 at the time. And the reason they did it was because none of the ISP's, telcos or cable co's were willing to run a line that far north for broadband. I realize things are slightly different depending on where you are, but it took them under 3 months to do ~1100 houses once they had their private link up.
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Here in America, we give monopolies to companies that provide shitty and expensive service.
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Here in America, we give monopolies to companies that provide shitty and expensive service.
This I know, I have a place in zephyrhills, florida. The only broadband I can get there is from brighthouse. Even though there's a FTTN link at the outside of the complex.
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Rough comparison: cable (or fiber) to the neighborhood from the local station: 2500 feet. Cable from the neighborhood hub to each of 50 homes: 5000 feet. And often the latter has to be underground.
Hint: that's the real "last mile".
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The cost of going from the neighborhood to the home is ANYTHING BUT minimal. It's arguably one of the largest expenses.
Rough comparison: cable (or fiber) to the neighborhood from the local station: 2500 feet. Cable from the neighborhood hub to each of 50 homes: 5000 feet. And often the latter has to be underground.
Hint: that's the real "last mile".
Only when you look at it from an immediate perspective. Yes it's a big investment but doing incremental copper equipment upgrades every few years is too, the small upgrades just allows them to pass the cost onto the customers over a long period of time. Monopolies don't have any incentive to change but it is well worth it for an independent ISP like Sonic to rollout fiber because they are able to disrupt the incumbents' marketshare with a superior product at equal or lesser prices and recoup the costs in a
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Only when you look at it from an immediate perspective. Yes it's a big investment but doing incremental copper equipment upgrades every few years is too, the small upgrades just allows them to pass the cost onto the customers over a long period of time.
No, and this is the crux of the point. What do you consider "every few years"? Cable around here hasn't been upgraded in any significant way for AT LEAST 10 years, and I know damned well that the (big name) ISP has no plans to do it soon.
BECAUSE it costs so much.
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By "every few years" I mean every new docsis/dsl version. Even the worst monopolies have been adopting the latest docsis/dsl protocols over the years albeit at a slow pace. The cost of staying on copper is lots of maintenance and minor upgrades in the future, the cost of switching to fiber is an initial investment and then smooth sailing for a long time because it's more reliable and such a significant jump in speed that you won't need to upgrade equipment for decades.
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By "every few years" I mean every new docsis/dsl version. Even the worst monopolies have been adopting the latest docsis/dsl protocols over the years albeit at a slow pace. The cost of staying on copper is lots of maintenance and minor upgrades in the future, the cost of switching to fiber is an initial investment and then smooth sailing for a long time because it's more reliable and such a significant jump in speed that you won't need to upgrade equipment for decades.
You're talking reason, which doesn't work in this context. They don't want to invest in infrastructure. Instead, they keep traffic slow on purpose, in order to create a fake "shortage" of bandwidth, thereby allowing them to charge more for less service.
It's typical monopolistic bullshit. And they get away with it because they're gigantic corporations that don't really compete in most of the U.S., because they have defined, doled-out territories.
Your argument makes sense in a free-market, business cont
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As Dane has said before, if you're going to the neighborhood you might as well go to the home. The cost difference is minimal
Actually this last part of the run is an incredible cost only worthwhile if remedial work is done on the exiting copper network. Underground anything is expensive. It's incredibly expensive by the meter. The only thing about it is that it scales really well. There's very little difference to pulling one fibre through a trench vs 10 fibres, which means it's very cost effective to run to nodes and insanely expensive to run to the houses.
How expensive? The NBN in Australia asked that question recently on it's
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The expenses are around $20k for a typical customer located between 50 and 100m from the node including all equipment and trenching through the premises.
That price is so outrageous that it has to be trenching to 1 single house that has no others around it and hiring a crew for the 1 time job. That's your first problem, trenching is expensive but hanging wires on existing poles isn't. If your municipality doesn't have poles then they should have underground conduits laid for you to just pull the fiber through. If you have neither poles nor conduits then there are micro-trenchers that can carve out ~1cm of road to lay the fiber in that costs much than digging
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You're assuming poles are still used. Lots of areas have poles and they are slowly being decommissioned. We have poles outside, and our phone line now comes in underground. Unfortunately the conduits put in for phone lines are somewhat full. It's easy enough to pull a cable through a conduit, but almost impossible to get it out again. Hence the incredible cost of trenching.
The true cost of trenching comes down to people being soft, contractors screwing the government, and regulations driving up the cost of
I thought they were evil for avoiding fiber upgrad (Score:5, Insightful)
I learned on Slashdot that Verizon is evil for not investing billions in upgrading their network to fiber. Now you tell me they've already upgraded half of their customers to fiber. Since they ARE upgrading their network to fiber, that's now evil. I'm confused.
I'm sure Verizon is evil of course, but are they evil for upgrading to fiber or for not upgrading to fiber?
Re:I thought they were evil for avoiding fiber upg (Score:5, Informative)
Both. Their evil-ness doesn't stem from whether or not hey've upgraded to fiber. It stems from abusing their monopoly position to slow down upgrades (both fiber and copper) as a cost-cutting measure. If there were a competitor in the market offering DSL/FO/cable service and Verizon dragged their feet on upgrading to fiber or neglecting to maintain their copper, they would hemorrhage customers and lose a lot of money. But in most areas they have a (government-granted) monopoly. They can take their sweet time upgrading to fiber, and there's nothing their customers can do about it. They can let areas with older copper lines rot, and there's nothing their customers can do about it.
Case in point, the city I live in was one of the first which contracted for Verizon to provide FIOS. They rolled it out to half the city, then got into some sort of disagreement with the city and stopped. If there had been a competing cable/fiber service, they would've had a huge incentive to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible and get back to work. But they were the only game in town so they dragged it out. For six years, the houses two blocks down the street had FIOS and I didn't. Then after an election, the city council changed, Verizon got what they wanted, and resumed rolling out FIOS.
Meanwhile, the city I work in has Verizon DSL as the only provider of business Internet. Cable companies provide cable internet to residences, but apparently they're prohibited from providing it to business. So again, Verizon is the only game in town. They have absolutely refused to upgrade or maintain their copper lines. The fastest DSL speed we can get is 3 Mbps down / 768 kbps up. For this "privilege" we pay $100/mo. Most of the phone lines are of such poor quality they can't even get you that speed, and 1.5/512 or 1.5/256 is the best they can do ($50/mo). The service is such a poor value that most companies in the area just get the lowest-tier 1.0/128 service for $40/mo to minimize how much they have to pay for any Internet. Others have signed on to cellular companies' 4G data services and willingly pay per GB for overages - because it beats having to get reamed in the rear by Verizon.
Both are evil.
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Mostly because it's a decade overdue and they seem to be doing their damndest to make sure the fiber doesn't actually benefit the customer.
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Well that's your problem right there, you're a moron. No one learns anything on slashdot, people just come here to make stupid arguments and pretend this is a source of information instead of a chance to pretend you know more than someone else.
lol (Score:2)
Lol . That was funny. Even though you just called me a moron, it was still funny.
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Thanks for explaining why you showed up; but we already knew that.
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Verizon is evil for lobbying to make their FIOS service excluded from the regulations that covered their POTS lines. Trying desperately to force people onto the unregulated FIOS is just the cherry on-top.
regulations! (Score:3)
Interesting, the VOIP service is not regulated as a utility, and consumers have a bit more rights/protections with the copper service.
Thanks Verizon! Attempting to kill off POTS is showing dedication and appreciation for your loyal customers.
How much public money went into wiring up the country with copper anyhow? It's almost as if the telco's will take every single government handout they can get and will revel in their natural monopoly status. But when it comes to providing a basic service that they can't turn quite as much of a profit on? Drop it asap.
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Verizon has a straight path to less regulation. Of course they are going to take it. Less regulation = less overhead, lower legal costs, lower operating costs, etc.
The solution, in this case, appears to be additional regulation, regardless of how the service is provided. Require them to provide a minimum of 14 days guaranteed service during a power outage, if the wire is intact, regardless of how service is provided (this would of course include VOIP modems in homes, a reasonably sized battery could hand
Rot? Copper doesn't rot. It corrodes. (Score:2)
It's all about wanting to get out of the local communications office (CO) business. It's a lot more efficient for them to dump those COs and all the maintenance headaches that go along with it including very expensive lead acid batteries and all the associated real estate that goes along with it. There's also maintaining the phone lines inside your house which can be problematic with rodent damage or house settling. With FIOS based services they drop it off at the house and your wiring inside the house i
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From Merriam-Webster:
1a : to undergo decomposition from the action of bacteria or fungi
b : to become unsound or weak (as from use or chemical action)
2a : to go to ruin : deteriorate
b : to become morally corrupt : degenerate
1b and 2a sound like they fit perfectly what Verizon is doing to their copper infrastructure.
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Same source. More accurate term would be deprecation. 1b, 3a and b seem appropriate.
deprecate
verb \de-pri-kt\
: to criticize or express disapproval of (someone or something)
deprecateddeprecating
Full Definition of DEPRECATE
transitive verb
1
a archaic : to pray against (as an evil)
b : to seek to avert
2
: to express disapproval of
3
a : play down : make little of
b : belittle, disparage
— deprecatingly adverb
— deprecation noun
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Meanwhile, 2b describes the company itself.
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Passively pushed to Fiber? (Score:3)
I'd gladly take fiber, if it were available.
The problem is, it isn't for the vast majority of the population.
Verizon and others are just letting the copper rot. There is no alternative. If you're lucky, you have a cableco co come in and provide a usable service. Luckily, I live in a Comcast territory and have had exactly zero service issues in the last 8 years and a speed increase every other year. Copper? Verizon sold this area to Frontier and you're still lucky if you can break one megabit on their DSL. Please, you wouldn't have to passively encourage me to get fiber if it were available. I'd already be on it.
If the telcos weren't so busy spending every last dime on C-level executives, lawsuits, advertising, and slithering out from underneath their commitments, even good old Verizon could have rolled fiber to everyone in their footprint. Even the ex-GTE areas like mine that had a stellar copper network before Verizon consumed them and left them for dead.
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Luckily, I live in a Comcast territory...
I had to do a double-take at that point.
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You will be thrilled to know that way out in Ephrata, WA they have had gigabit fiber to the home for 14 years, and in gritty Tacoma just south Click! Network sells 100mbps Internet - both through the power utility. But in Seattle, no. Not you. Those power utilities were grandfathered in from before the Qwest/Comcast Protection Act was made a stare law. That is why internet technology in Washington is almost exactly backward: high speed in rural areas, dialup in Seattle and the capital.
Incidentally, I ca
That's good, but... (Score:2)
... what about distance? I can't get DSL due to 20+K ft. distance with COs. Also, the copper phone systems suck even for dial-up (can never get to close to 53K speeds). :(
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You need to call your local Public Utility Commission & complain. It's the only thing that can force a regional monopoly to get off of their ass & do something.
Ars Technia Ranting... (Score:2)
While I'll be the first to complain that FIOS has a hidden 15W+ tax (could be more than $20/year), which Verizon could easily have solved, the Ars Technica rant seems to be almost entirely about their 8 hour backup being insufficient and nobody having a clue how to deal with it.
Verizon's FIOS ONTs operate on 12V batteries for backup, and even HAVE A JACK ON THE SIDE LABELED FOR 12V AUX POWER.
A $25 (5W) solar panel, a diode, some wire and a few brain cells are the ONLY thing you need to give your FIOS servic
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Slashcode decided the first non-ascii character must be where the hyperlink should end. Bah!
http://www.amazon.com/Instapar... [amazon.com]
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The cheap 5 watt panels barely maintain an unloaded battery charge. In most common angles and lighting you're gonna get maybe 2w.
I use an only slight more expensive 15w panel and over a week it will bring my boat battery up from a mildly discharged state to fully charged. Worth the extra $75.
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That's nonsense. I've got a 1.5W panel quite effectively maintaining and even slowly charging a disused car's battery.
I suppose in the depths of winter, far north, that might have some truth.
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I'm way, WAY far north. I'm in Australia.
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And? I'd bet that solar panels work just fine for you.
Most of the southern hemisphere gets pretty good solar insolation, with only very few extreme exceptions, like Cape Horn and Antarctica. This is unlike the north, where large swaths of heavily populated land-area are sun-poor, like the top-half of North America, and nearly all of Europe.
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Also, for an extra $75, you should be getting at least a 50W panel:
http://www.amazon.com/ALEKO-50... [amazon.com]
Or maybe even 75W:
http://www.amazon.com/ALEKO-75... [amazon.com]
What's the point? (Score:2)
I don't get the point in these super-super-fast speeds over copper. In the UK right now we're aiming for FTTC which leads to speeds of 20Mbps - 50Mbps. 50Mbps should be enough for anyone. :-)
Cox (Score:2)
I'm currently working on a project for Cox Communications in which they are chemically dissolving the foam inside of the coaxial cable conduit & then air blowing fiber through the newly created space inside the conduit. Pretty cool stuff. This avoids the costs associated with permitting, digging new trench & burying separate fiber conduit & they can use the DWDM hardware they already have on hand instead of buying new systems like this.
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Interesting, do you have a link or search term that goes into detail about the process? Thanks.
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Oddly enough I wasn't given an actual name for the process & this (Arizona) is apparently the 1st system in the US to try this out on a large scale basis.
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Wow, that is neat. (At first, I misinterpreted that as dis
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It's for both, the distribution to the cabinets will be fiber as well, but not necessarily using existing coax.
Verizon letting its copper network rot (Score:1)