Ethernet Over Assorted Materials

saridder writes: "Cisco has demonstrated their latest last mile technology, and not only can you now have 10 MB Ethernet over Cat3, Cat2, Cat1, try lamp power cord, battery jumper terminals, barbed wire, etc. This may have solved the last mile problem, and at 10 MB, it blows DSL out of the water."

Comments

5000 ft != MILE

[codepunk]

I think it is just short of a mile, thus the technology is nothing more than hype. It is the last 20 miles that need to be addressed not the last 5000 ft.

This solves nothing

[BillyGoatThree]

Nobody has run Cats 3, 2 or 1 to my house, nor have I got a barbed wire connection to my ISP. The last mile problem is not one of technology--there are millions of technologies that can solve the technical issues.

The problem is money. Nobody wants to spend the dollars necessary to hook us all up with data cable. That's why all the hullabalo about cable ISPs and DSL--they both utilize an existing physical connection.

In other words, the answer will not come from Cisco, it will come from somebody with deep pockets. And the only pockets deep enough in this case belong to the federal government.

Re:This solves nothing

[Lissst]

Ummm.... actually I'm willing to bet that you do have at least Cat1 cabling in your building. Unless you don't have a phone line at all, Cat3 has been the standard cable used for regular phone lines in homes for quite a few years now. So their gist is that they can get high-speed data off regular phone lines.

It's distance-limited....

[AugstWest]

"By offering Ethernet-like speeds over regular phone wire, at reaches up to 5,000 feet, and co-existing with phone traffic, LRE brings rich, advanced services such as next generation video-on-demand to places it has not gone before."

So, once again, 90% of the population is too far from the CO for this to bring broadband into the home.

The problem isn't the last mile, contrary to the buzzwords... the problem is getting the pipe to run many, many miles to actual end users' homes.

Uhm, ARCNET?

[Jailbrekr]

It was only 1Mb/s, but it could communicate over ANYTHING. Would not take too much to bump the speed up with todays technology.

This isn't new or suprising. This technology has been around for years. God, I remember using ARCNET to communicate thru barbed wire back in 1995 (as a test to prove it could).

Did anyone read the article?

[Cramer]

Do any of you know what "the last mile" even is?

Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)

This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:

• Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.

You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.

There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)