155Mbs Over Copper Lines

FIGJAM writes: "Actelis, based in Fremont, California, have raised $26 million to enable speeds up to 155Mbs over copper lines by overcoming crosstalk interference with error-correction." The article is unfortunately short on technical details, long on current telecom market financial conditions. There's a bit more information on their website, but be warned, it's nearly as buzzword centric and glib. The speed of fiber over existing copper is still too tantalizing to ignore, though, even if it's not as sexy as actual fiber to the home.

Comments

Re:Fiber to the home will never happen.

[FFFish]

In Canada, the telcos generally lay fiber right to the foundation wall of new homes.

They're laying copper to homes anyway, and the big expense isn't the fiber -- it's cheaper than copper -- but installation. Expensive to dig trenches, lay conduit, and all that shite. Costs damn near nothing to toss a bit of fiber in the pipe at the same time.

So there's a lot of dark fiber out there, just waiting for the profitability point to make it worth it for the telco to turn it on.

You should move to a modern country. We've got ADSL all over the damn place. Can't get away from it these days... :-)


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Roomate's getting nookie

[Graymalkin]

Hmmm, I'd personally rather have fiber. Why would I rather see fiber widely distributed? Because it is multifunction. A single fiber line can carry hundreds of TV channels, tons of voice channels and even data channels for us internet users. Coax could do the same thing if cable companies and telephone companies were allowed to be a little more friendly with one another (ergo, getting higher throughput on copper means it could compete with fiber thus this article is is interasting however this is pushing the limits of copper wiring's data rate while optical fibers still have room left for bandwidth). Using fiber networks wouldn't necessarily destroy the country's backbones either, if anything it would spurn the usage of higher data rate routers and lines. IIRC the fastest backbone in the US is the OC-192 between Chicago and St.Louis owned and operated by MCI. RUnning fiber to homes and businesses is not going to automatically mean they've got an OC-3 in their garage. The owners of the fiber would just allocate data channels (just like on copper lines) and sell them to whoever wanted to use them. Video could be transmitted on channels a-b whilst data/voice is allocated to channels c-d with e-f (the letters obviously represent ranges of individual data channels) reserved for other usage. Wiring inside houses could easily be preserved by connecting it to a small autonomous bridge in a box on your garage. I could envision fiber to homes but this is marred by the reality that cable companies and telephone companies are both pretty stingy and the only real way to get fiber to the home is for the government to do it and control the lines themselves letting others fill them with content.

This brings up an interesting point, should municipalities get into the fiber game? Not for profit but merely to seed the technology's availability, especially since private organizations are not willing to do it. Routine maitenance of sewers, streets, and power grids could be used to lay dark fiber for later illuminating. If the process was tacked onto work already being done it could be made cost effective and it offers greater local competition for service. You'd get the fiber run to your house and opt to either keep your existing copper service to upgrade to fiber. With bridges linking the copper in your house and the fiber outside you wouldn't need to spend several thousand dollars on new equipment right off the bat. I guess I'm warm to the idea because my city has a municipally owned electricity company and is thus fairly exempt from the troubles of the rest of the state's privatized electricity generators.

Re:obligatory

[sharkey]

waittta
shoulda
lotsa

Goodness. Jar-Jar is trolling /.

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Do they need a test bed?

[Klowner]

Because where I live, my connection is the equiv. to a post-nuclear wasteland... I don't know if that made sense..

anyway, 26k dialup is all I can get.

no 56k
no cable
no dsl
no 128k ISDN, but I can get 64k ISDN for $115 a month.. don't think so
wireless, I don't know yet.. probably not, considering I have trees around me
satellite, high latency sucks
tin cans and fishing line, I don't have enough to reach that far

I hate the internet,
Klowner

How clever !

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Cool, people in Fremont will be able to get high speed Internet through their powerlines during blackouts.

Re:Cool...

[Vassily Overveight]

I want my 15meg/sec downloads!

Unfortunately, the link to the home is just one of the bottlenecks. I've had a cable modem for a couple of years now, and speeds still suck. It isn't because of the wire to my house, either; downloads from @Home's newsgroups, which are hosted on their own servers, hit 3-4Mbps. For most downloads from non-@Home servers, it's rare if the speed exceeds 300-400 kbps. The servers themselves and paths on the internet at large are going to have to be improved for high-speed access to really meet its full potential.