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New Look at ADSL2
genrader writes "broadbandreports.com just posted a news article which had an interesting story about the new ADSL2, which should be approved in 2003. They say it should be backward compatible with current hardware. It seems pretty interesting. ISP-Planet has the featured in-depth look at it, so you might want to see if it is of any intrest to you."
Sure, ADSL2 is faster, but how many of us are running our DSL lines at close to the max speed now? I can do 3+ Mb/s on this line, but only get to use 640 Kb/s. New technology that allows me to go faster, yeah that'll come in handy! If it worked at a much longer range it might be useful for some who are out of range now, but it really isn't much of an advance there either. So why should we care, this is like getting excited because Macs are shipping with a gigabit ethernet port when your office is running on a shared 10 mbit hub!
"The real problem is that the guys in charge have so very little motivating them to implement new and better things..."
.. like 15-30 miles from the telco ...
"Why bother?
Do we actually think for a moment that US telcos will adopt anything decent? Please...if it's not a patented US currency printing press or a customer cornholing machine...they won't be interested."
And even better...
"For example, on longer phone lines, ADSL2 will provide a data rate increase of 50 kbps--a significant increase. This data rate increase also produces an increase in reach of about 600 feet, which translates to an increase in coverage area of about six percent, or 2.5 square miles."
Wooohooo...a whopping 50kbps, 600 feet...WOW...totally worthless! In about a zillion years they'll have enough range to reach me at 60,000ft from the nearest CO. Hell, telcos can even measure their copper runs accurate to 600ft. I'm serviced at my office at an actual copper length of 19,200ft...while Verizon originally estimated under 15,000ft.
Wow!
It's good for a total of 8,000 feet! Instead of screwing around with short length technologies, why don't they develope something that has far better range
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
I can't see that this would be all that useful. While a very cool upgrade for the sake of very cool upgrades, how is it all that great?
My DSL connection is very high speed. I feel no net slowdown when listening to Shoutcast Radio on a 128Kbps station; even though I'm eating up 1/4 of my downlink, only rarely does it actually have an effect.
The slowdowns are at the other end. The servers are overloaded; its their T3s that need to be upgraded. Although 500,000 hits in the period of an hour would swamp anything, I suppose.
So while this idea has merit, a whole bunch of other stuff would have to improve too if this is to be particularly useful.
Warning: Poster of this comment is a nerd. Just like everybody else here.
Well this is all well and good, but lets keep in mind that dsl is expensive to roll-out, what is motivating the company I work for to go out and purchase this *new* wonderful equipment which is going to require upgrades at least in the DSLAM's / ATM switches, nothing is just "hook it in and it works", ever.
It's wonderful that they claim these super fast speeds, but what's the point right now? My company already has equipment in place to offer a few megabit to the home user, but we don't currently offer speeds faster then 768/768. Why? Because the demand isn't there, period. A few geeks here and there, or maybe a business or two, but most business that need something faster then 768 symetric are going to go with another dedicated telco soltion such as a T-1, or a DS3.
I'm happy that we have these wonderful systems, that promise super fast bandwidth, and I'm not saying I don't believe the speeds, I'm just skeptical that we're going to see them hitting the market anytime soon because phone companies aren't eager to roll them out, keep in mind they're all still trying to re-coup the costs to roll out the network in the first place.