150 Mbit/s DSL.

surstrmming writes "German company Infineon have released their new QAM VDSL Plus chips, providing 150 Mbit/s data rates over ordinary copper wire." Note that that kinda throughput is at the 1000 feet mark... but the chip can still serve up 4mbps even at 13,000 feet.

Comments

Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Traa]

I used to drool over the 'next-generation-is-just-around-the-corner' stories, but
lately I have been having second thoughts.

I live in the middle of Silicon Valley and they can't even serve me DSL better then
190Kbits/sec. No cable modem in my area eiter. It is so painfull, I almost posted this
anonymous ;-)

No really...when will last generations broadband stuff truly be available to the masses
here in the US? Who and how will they fix the last-mile problem if the governament isn't
stimulating this issue?

Same with the phone network. 3G you ask? HAHAHA, not in the mother-of-all-technology
countries, nosir.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Take a look at the terms-of-service for and cable-modem service.

These are cable TV people. They view multiple hosts behind NAT as theft-of-service; the functional equivalent of illegal secondary cable-boxes!

I don't care if it's 10x speed at .5 price...

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

Quit bitching...I can't get faster than 56k dial up at home. I want first generation broadband!

BTW...screw Verizon and Comcast, I have been phoning them for over 2 years now with little or no progress. "Soon" they say.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

Adelphia's cable modem TOS states that multiple hosts behind a NAT is fine but they'll only support up to the NAT. THat's a perfectly fine stance in my book.

Now, to pare down my $130 a month cable bill...

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

hey you should come to Canada.
I get 400kBYTES/sec download and 80kBYTES/sec upload at home on my DSL.
That means i download 2gig svcd's in around 2 to 3 hours if bittorrent is giving me full speed (happens most of the time).

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Ex-MislTech]

www.starband.com

www.direcway.com

Little pricey, but it is bi-directional satellite access .

Latency sucks if you try to do online games or streaming
anything , but it is good for downloading , and hits around
500Kbps optimally .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[schalliol]

Man that is slow. Where are you? I'm in the Rose Garden area of Willow Glen within San Jose (near Campbell) and I get 1500Kbps down and 256kbps up with SBC [Yahoo] DSL for $44.95/month. That's what they quote and I get the top end of the range. If I paid for this and got your speed they would come out and fix it by adjusting length from the F2 or something along those lines. If you're too far from your CO you'll have to be forced to go slower, but you should not be that low!

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cox does not view multiple hosts behind a NAT as theft of service. They have a FAQ on NAT setup on their website. They also have a NAT setup service (for those of you who don't know how to set one up). I also get 3Mbit (max) down (384 up) for $40...

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

No really...when will last generations broadband stuff truly be available to the masses
here in the US? Who and how will they fix the last-mile problem if the governament isn't
stimulating this issue?

Heh, firstly, quit whining about 190k/sec. I just went to Bellsouth ADSL from Charter cable, a 384kb/s -> 1500kb/s jump (and man it feels good).

Secondly, the government isn't stimulating this issue (and neither are the states), because the country has serious economic problems. Living with "just" 190k/sec would be heaven to anyone living in a rural area. If you're really more desperate for bandwidth, invest in a T1/T3/OC3/OC48.

Remember the story about the municipalities running fiber? How about instead of complaining about 190k/sec you try to get that jump started in the technology hub of America? Who would be more receptive than that bunch of people?

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, but you still live in Canada.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[bogie]

That would depend on the provider, my provider doensn't do that and neither do any of my friends providers although I guess maybe some do. Personally I couldn't imagine having to go back to 640/128.

I'll take my 10x speed and .5 price thank you.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Jucius Maximus]

"Living with "just" 190k/sec would be heaven to anyone living in a rural area. If you're really more desperate for bandwidth, invest in a T1/T3/OC3/OC48."

Hell yeah. Where I live, I am lucky to get 28.8. People down the road are lucky of they get a 21.6 conection. There is no ADSL or cable. Satellite, even 2-way satellite, is terrible since for the 2-way servie you are limited in the number of outbound conncetions. For deluxe packages you get something like 35 connections. I use more than that for a single bittorrent downlaod.

To combat this problem I am considering starting a business and getting a large pipe (ATM, T3, etc) pulled in and selling broadband via wireless technology to the people in my area.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

The local cable "service" has a TOS agreement that forbits NAT, and any form of tunnel or VPN - enforced with active filtering. Ouch.

I get 1.5Mbps down, 768Mbps up on DSL, plus Speakeasy are generally cool folks. Run their own RPM-find mirror. Now, all they need are .debs!

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

And Asscroft doesn't! It's win-win!

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[deadsaijinx*]

hmmm, i'd sure as hell like 10x speed at .5 price, especially since my provider doesnt give a rats ass about NATing, they even told me how to do it. after all, cable modems are designed to serve up a big network, and sometimes you need to nat the damn thing.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[be-fan]

Hmm, this is irritating. You're mixing kilobits and kilobytes. Traditionally, the distinction is as such:

190k/sec = 190 kilobytes per second
384kb/s = 384 kilobytes per second
1500kbps = 1500 kilo*bits* per second.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[neobuddhist]

which state are you in? You can always contact your public service commission in whatever state you are in and they will push Verizon to help you out.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Traa]

Well, I moved from Cupertino (1500Kbps cable) to North Valley San Jose (190Kbps DSL, no cable option). Seems that I am simply 'out of luck' for an unknown reason. They tested the hell out of my DSL line and don't know why our neighbourhood is this slow. I'm not that far from my local CO either. I'm not convinced they gave it all the effor it deserves given the amount of people in my area that seem to be effected.

Lesson: Check broadband availability before you buy the house. Because if you rely on it (my wife runs her business from home) you could be in for a surprise.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

You might want to learn about those acronyms before you start a business. A T3 and ATM are not in the same genus, let alone species.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

Canada's probably great.....
unless you have to drive somewhere.
Wonderful regressive gas tax you guys have there.

"It's not fair that the rich are the only ones who can afford health insurance, so let's raise taxes on the poor so they can afford it."

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[theLOUDroom]

"Secondly, the government isn't stimulating this issue (and neither are the states), because the country has serious economic problems."

Yeah, like having decent infrastructure is somehow bad for the economy. [/sarcasm]

The gov't is acting in the best interests of local monopolies/campaign contributors, not the people.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[p0rnking]

And I do believe that the Canadian Gov. (Or maybe it was just Alberta) has made it a "necessity" to have broadband, which means that companies like sympatico have to (or will have to) setup it up so that people in those hard to reach places can get access.
But then again, we (Sympatico users) get capped at $8/Gig over 10Gigs per moth of total transfer ... and Rogers will be capping very soon (they've already got it setup to do so).

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[spike hay]

190k/sec = 190 kilobytes per second
384kb/s = 384 kilobytes per second
1500kbps = 1500 kilo*bits* per second.

Actually, it's all kilobits. With bytes, the "B" is capitalized, as in "kBps" instead of "kbps." Internet connection speed is always given in bits per second.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

That's awesome man, I say do it grassroots style. Send out flyers explaining your situation. Tell them what it would cost based on the number of people signed up.

Prepare yourself for lots of questions, prepare to make this your fulltime job (and charge accordingly, you'll get 1000 "I can't check my email" "Why won't msn.com come up" questions).

However, wireless technology is very crappy during storms and weather. Latency is terrible. This means you'll get lots of complaints from gamers, because their pings will suffer terribly if they don't have a straight shot to the wireless access point.

You could also petition your local telecom to put a CO within distance of your residence(s). If you get enough signatures they will take notice, and make sure you get that list to those who matter.

Good luck.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[digitalmonkey2k1]

"No really...when will last generations broadband stuff truly be available to the masses here in the US?" Try in Germany, its horrible there. I went from my lovely cable speeds in New Jersey of 400-600k all the way down to 50-75k when I'm luky on this "DSL" from Deutsche Telekom. I guess this is what you get w/o a diverse market for broadband net service.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[michrech]

Except for Drecway's FAP. Download what they feel is too much and you get knocked down to modem speeds for however long they feel (The newsgroups lare littered with people who are slowed down for anywhere from an hour to several hours).

Starband? HA! They are *just* getting over the MAJOR CRC failures in the download stream (meaning, that shiney new linux .iso (or any other file) you downloaded will have CRC errors all over it). Not to mention the fact that they are still in in Chapter7 or 11.. I forget which.. Starband was, and will always be, a joke.

Not to mention that with either of those options you have HUGE startup costs. Yea, they finally broke it down so that you can pay the install fee over the period of a year, but it is still HUGE. The other day Starband wrote me to tell me they'd buy my equipment back for $95. THE STUFF WAS USED FOR THREE MONTHS! It sat in it's boxes the rest of the time. $399 for the equpment and they are going to give me $95? Hell no.. Seeing that I wasn't going to get much for it, I sold it to a local dealer up here that was more than happy to pay $150 for it. I probably could have gotten slightly more if I had advertised it in the paper or put it on ebay or something..

Oh.. no I'm rambling... Bah...

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[jeeryg_flashaccess]

I'm in Washington State. Thanks for the tip on contacting the public service commission! Oh and to the poster above...the only reason I have rejected satellite is because of the latency. I do a lot of terminal sessions (unix/windows) and gaming. My only saving grace is working for a technology company that knows enough to install lots of bandwidth :)

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Easier translation:

before: 40k/sec

after: 160k/sec

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[evilviper]

when will last generations broadband stuff truly be available to the masses
here in the US? Who and how will they fix the last-mile problem if the governament isn't
stimulating this issue?

On my DSL line, I always get better than 600Kb, and when the traffic is low, I get very near to the theoretical maximum of DSL... Besides that fact, I am not near the telco office (I'd estimate I'm about 5 miles away), and the lines here are over 15 years old.

If you are getting 190Kb, I would suggest you get a new DSL service. THAT is what the government has done to "stimulate this issue"... They have forced telcos to share their lines, and allow other ISPs to compete.

Since the FCC allows cable operators to monopolize their lines, the best I was getting with my cablemodem was just over 256K, and that was while I was paying just about the same price.

Besides that, I'm sure you could get a T-1 installed... ;-)

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Jucius Maximus]

"I say do it grassroots style. Send out flyers explaining your situation. Tell them what it would cost based on the number of people signed up."

Absolutely. This is already in my plan. I was talking about this to my manager at my last job and she suggested a campaign of this type too and I agree with her.

"Prepare yourself for lots of questions, prepare to make this your fulltime job (and charge accordingly, you'll get 1000 "I can't check my email" "Why won't msn.com come up" questions)."

I've been doing tech support type jobs on and off since I was 14 so I am well prepared for user stupidity ;-) But it will definitely be a full time job. I am a student at the moment and I plan to run it full time on my next co-op work term as long as I can sell it to the co-op office and the School of Engineering. When September comes I'm gonna send out some feelers to see if other ENGG students are willing to make it a joint venture.

"However, wireless technology is very crappy during storms and weather. Latency is terrible. This means you'll get lots of complaints from gamers, because their pings will suffer terribly if they don't have a straight shot to the wireless access point."

True enough, although I am looking into 900 MHz technology. These are more resistant to signal problems associated with trees, buildings, etc and the range is better than 802.11x. This is important since I live in a rural area and sometimes houses on a road are 1 km apart and in the middle of thick sections of coniferous (pine) trees. There are some mature solutions already in existance.

"You could also petition your local telecom to put a CO within distance of your residence(s). If you get enough signatures they will take notice, and make sure you get that list to those who matter."

Bell Canada? Ha! They are pompous and arrogant, and have no reason to listen to their customers because they have a monopoly on local service. Reminds me of MSFT. Bell will never extend service to where I live because the population density is too low for them to make money from it. I would prefer to compete with them.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Uber Banker]

$8 GB?!?!?!

Are you for real?!

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Ex-MislTech]

Did not know that Direcway and Starband were such a
bad experience, guess the ppl I know got lucky .

They prolly did not download massive amounts .

As for starband and CRC errors , you may have just
have got some bad gear from them .

Satellite is DEFINITELY not a first choice, but
for those that have none otherwise it is about all
the can do other than start a Wi-Fi Co-op.

Can't say I will be making too many visits to your
handle attached URL there again , lol .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

You get what you pay for. I presume your wife's business isn't that big or you'd go from using a "best effort" service like dsl for $60/mo to a guaranteed availability service like a T1 for $600/mo. If it were vital that it stay up you'd have 2 T1s with alternate wire serving centers.
It always amazes me how people can actually look at a $600/mo T1 and a $60/mo DSL, choose to go with the DSL and then complain that it's not as good/fast/reliable as the T1 (usually with an added "but my friends dsl/cable is!" - great for them, your friend got lucky and you didn't :P).
The advances everyone can see will come when these are made cheap enough, small enough and low power enough to deploy in a manner similar to t1 repeaters at a price similar to load coils and a competitor starts running wires and deploying them. You need that last bit, because no matter how much the LECs are forced to sell their lines to competitors at "cost" they still get to choose what "cost" is. They're perfectly happy to keep the cost high because they know your cable company, or any other potential competitor has to hit the public phone network somewhere, and when they do they pay big for all the capacity they're selling to the consumers for so little.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Zork the Almighty]

I think that was a mistake. Some providers try to cap users to 8-10 gigs per month. Of course, with that amount, you can't do much more than heavy web surfing - one big DUH as far as I'm concerned. I have ADSL through Telus (BC, Alberta phone company), it's 1500kbit down, 560kbit up, and they don't seem to care if I transfer 40 gigs a month.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

I live in the middle of Silicon Valley and they can't even serve me DSL better then 190Kbits/sec. No cable modem in my area eiter.

So move out of the sticks. If that's the best you can get then you must be in the slums of Silicon Valley. I'm in Cleveland, Ohio for crying out loud and I have 1500/768Kbit/s ADSL at my house and it's just dandy. Sure beats ISDN.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[tx_mgm]

SBC used to be like this too with their DSL service. A few years back I was talking to a representative from them on my former college's campus about getting service to my apartment and made an offhand comment about setting up a router and such and he told me about it. He told me that "officially" I was not allowed to, but as long as I kept it to myself it would be fine. Eventually that part of the TOS was removed, AFAIK. I think the cable companies probably take the same stance and will eventually "grow up".

the whole converstion with the SBC rep. was pretty funny though.

me: yeah, ill probably set up a couple of machines and let my roommate use it too. Do you guys provide routers?
him: WOAH! I did NOT just hear that! You're just going to hook it up to your ONE machine and that's all, right?
me: um...no....I said I was going to-
him: No! you said you were just going to hook it up to your ONE machine and that is all, right? ::mischevious wink::
me: ah, yes! thats what I said. Silly me. So its 300kbps, right?
him: yes, just sign right here.....

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

A number of Road Runner systems are capping at 15GB with $5/GB after that. At 150Mbit/s you could hit your cap in 15 minutes!

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[laskeblask]

i live in *.se and they sell vdsl to everyone living 1000m from the telestation. it cost 35$ a mounth and the speed is 26mbit/s.. :)

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Tripster]

He's serious and that's CHEAP in Canada.

For example, Bell ExpressVu DirecPC service, one-way satellite connection, you get 4GB/month and anything over that is $100/GB!! Yes, ONE HUNDRED DOLLARS per GB!

I'm in a rural area, I have no landline broadband options available (f'in cable is 1 mile away from my house though!), so my only choice right now is satellite. Needless to say, I refuse to use Bell for that rate so I've signed up with c-band.net.

That being said, cband.net have a rather scary TOS as well, you get 400kb/s down (one way connection), but, if you download between 500MB-1000MB they can cut your speed next month to 300kb/s (small bits btw), 1000-1500MB 200kb/s next month, etc.

Meaning, they expect you to only download about 17MB/day with their service, but here's the kicker, at full speed that takes 5 minutes.

Luckily, they only seem to enforce the TOS for the hogs right now, I downloaded over 1500MB last month and this month I'm still at full speed, mind you I hardly hook it up right now as if you are just surfing the net then 56K works just as fast or faster if the cband.net proxy servers are too busy.

Chances are I'll dump the satellite connection anyway, with the restrictions it's almost useless for much of anything, I'd be better off buying off cheapbytes or waiting the 2 days it takes my 56K to grab a Linux ISO.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that was a mistake.

It wasn't. The strange thing is that it doesn't apply to dialup (the FAQ explicitly says that) - I transfer ~15 GB a month on my $23 Sympatico dialup account. That would cost me $40 (5 GB overlimit x $8) on top of the basic fee if I was on Sympatico DSL.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Zebbers]

we have no cable or dsl

56k is all

consider yourself relatively lucky

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[laskeblask]

www.bostream.com www.bredbandsbolaget.se :)

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[laskeblask]

i have 26mbit/s vdsl in 1mounth from now and most other people in sweden aswell www.bostream.com www.bredbandsbolaget.se ah sweden the land of true liberty and justice ;D

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Uber Banker]

Damn that's tough. I'm in the UK, althought I only get 500kbps down amd 250 kbps up (regular low spec ADSL) I'll leave the computer on overnight and must get 30GB/month total - my ISP (only my, given the flak in the press recently about ISPs limiting to 1GB/day - I can do 2 easily some days) seem pretty happy with this usage pattern (note - this is 'off peak', if i did this peak i'd have my arse thrown at the wall no doubt).

Sometimes I think what they pay on the wholesale market for this, but as long as they let me get away with it and still make a profit yours must be making a KILLING (I seriously doubt 'last mile' costs are big (in the broader scheme of what they charge) in most cases)!

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Bell Canada? Ha! They are pompous and arrogant, >and have no reason to listen to their customers >because they have a monopoly on local service.

hmm... duno about that.. Bell seems to be doing better then most. The have DSL in many small towns around my area.. Basically anything >5000 people, the only problem is distance from the CO and poor copper, even then, when it didn't work because of bad copper they found the problem and fixed it, had my DSL hooked up on time and has worked great since, easily getting 3Mbps now.

Bell will probably have DSL to us long before the three local Wi-Fi companies get there act together, it's a shame that the WiFi people can't get their act together and start acting like real companies bringing real service. The only one that's working right now has hodge podge service and extremly poor customer service, it's like they don't even want to try.

it's a shame

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[michrech]

As for starband and CRC errors , you may have just have got some bad gear from them

Nope. It was system-wide. Just go to alt.satellite.starband (a.s.s as it was known in Starband's starband.general internal group). Look back through the last year (or more). It's littered with people (mostly hateful little trolls) that were experiencing it. I didn't have it *nearly* as bad as some did.... Depended on what cluster/subcluster you were on..

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[StarTux]

Says Linux is not supported yet.

But found this:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/direcpc

Only problem, I like online games...

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[alienw]

It's slow, dude. 500Kbps is the best-case scenario, the upload is only about 56K best case, they impose strict caps on downloads, and it costs ~$700 to get the system installed. I don't see any reason to get that unless you are in the middle of nowhere.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[mobets]

Does Sprint have digital service in your area? They have a PCMCIA card that you can get that gets you unlimited data at 128kb. They do run pictures through a chacheing / file shrinking server, but it is better than 56k. The card is ~$150 and service is ~$50/ month.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Reziac]

I'd be so happy to get 190Kbps I couldn't stand it... my only option here being dialup that maxes out just over 10% of that. :(

So.. if this tech can get 4Mbps at 13,000 feet, what's the chance that it would get even as good as 200Kbps at somewhat greater distances? What's the max range where it would have any positive effect?

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[GrandCow]

Just so you know, StarBand was disowned by DishNetwork a while ago. The current customers are getting access, but they're not accepting anyone anymore. It's a dying technology. The sucessor to it is in the works though... Expect it to be HUGE (big bandwidth anywhere in the US since it's sattelite delivered, 2 way, so you'll get a huge upload speed too). I won't say much more since I don't want to jeopardize my job... but look for it in 2-3 years

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple things you can do to possibly improve DSL!

Call your DSL company and have them look for faults on the lines and possible bottlenecks. Such as slight to moderate grounds or shorts, unbalances, cross battery, etc., in you phone wires. i.e. If there is a 30 year old single pair phone wire from the telephone pole to the house, that maybe a possible bottleneck. You may also benefit from a new twist pair cat 3 run and a new phone jack. These are all possibilities but nothing is going to work if the speeds are low at the neighborhood junction box to begin with.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Scott Hale]

Try being about 50,000 feet from the nearest town and about 50 miles from the nearest place that has DSL or cable. You may be wanting "last generation broadband," but I would love to have 190 Kb/s. I'm not trying for sympathy or anything here, rather would like to point out the fact that some people are still sitting here that are happy when they can get 40 Kb/s dial-up.

Its great that people can now get 150 Mb/s over their phone lines, but wouldn't resources be better spent on trying to develop a cheap, long distance last-mile solution? Oh yea, thats just a pipe dream.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Anonymous Coward]

hey your should come to Sweden.
I get 1.2 MBYTES/sec download and 1.2 MBYTES/sec upload at home on my ethernet connection.
That means i download 2gig svcd's in a little bit less than 30 minutes if my friends are giving me full speed (happens most of the time).

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[be-fan]

Hmm. I haven't seen the kB and kb distinction very often. At least the places I see (look at any of the computer hardware sites online) the distinguishing method is the ps vs /sec. For example, harddrive speeds are measured in MB/sec, while Firewire and USB2 speeds are measured in mbps.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[amorsen]

It must be annoying to write "USB2 has an advertised speed of 480000000000 mbps"

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Sethb]

Here in Cedar Falls, Iowa, our city runs its own cable company, complete with cable modem service. If you want to pay for it, you can get some great bandwidth. I'm on their business class service with a static IP, 10Mbps down/1.5Mbps up for only about $90/month. Basic service starts at $35/month, which has forced Mediacom to lower their rates in this area to match.

Ain't competition great?

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Sethb]

I have a Sprint phone with USB cable for my laptop. My secret to avoid their stupid little picture mangling server is to run everything through a VPN back to my employer, I had to do this because they were blocking the secure IMAP port for some reason, and discovered that it actually made the web look "good" again. :)

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

Absolutely! It's stories like that which keep my faith in the grassroots internet movement (whatever that may be, exactly).

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Ex-MislTech]

Damn, that sucks, but I guess it is not suprising .

Even gates had plans for a satellite access network .

www.teledesic.com but it never materialized .

The ppl at www.21stcenturyairships.com look to have
the best idea with the stratellites and Wi-Fi .

Hope that wireless net access rolls out fully nationwide .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[Obiwan Kenobi]

What the hell? How is that -1 Troll? The guy didn't know what the real world speed was. I specified. +1 Informative anyone? Bueller?

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[benna]

I do 60 gigs UPLOAD every month. My ISP (roadrunner ) couldn't care less. God knows how much I dowload. Man I had know idea how lucky I am.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[spike hay]

It must be annoying to write "USB2 has an advertised speed of 480000000000 mbps"

WOW!! That's really fast. I knew USB2 was fast. But 480 billion megabits per second, or 480 petabits. That could transmit the entire kazaa network in less than a second!!

Anyway, you must have misunderstood me somehow. It's almost always given in bits per second (768 kilobit dsl, 56 kilobit modem) but of course you have prefixes.

Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?

[amorsen]

m is the prefix for milli.

Polarized data

[winston_pr]

What about between 1.000 and 13.000. Skip the extremes, I need more than the 1.5 I get today!

Re:Polarized data

[NecroPuppy]

I don't know... probably somewhere between 4 and 150? It's just a guess, you understand, but I can't see the speed going up between those two distances...

Re:Polarized data

[winston_pr]

Sure, but its not a reversed linear relationship. Look at the characterisics of Annex A,B and C. Speed by Distance curves differ between them three.

Re:Polarized data

[NecroPuppy]

Well, you have been given 2 data points, and from extrapolation a bunch of others (the under 1000 feet >= 150 MBit part).

Given that signal degradation is usually either a logarithmic or squared dropoff (depending on how your professor explained it/what scale you use), you should be able to plug some numbers in and maybe even get close.

I doubt it, tho. There just isn't enough (read: any) data on the midrange response.

Re:Polarized data

[Anonymous Coward]

Skip the extremes, I need more than the 1.5 I get today!

No you don't really. You're just spoiled by what you have now. Go back to a modem for a few months and you'll be kissing your 1.5Mbit/s broadband. It's really night and day. With my DSL I can download 300-600 meg ISO images off the net in about an hour. That's more than fast enough for anything I could comprehend needing it for in the future. It's not like the modem days when going from 14.4k to 28.8k made a huge different in downloading a 5 meg file. So I wait another hour for 1.2 gigs to download.. so what? Unless you're using it for widescale piracy it doesn't matter.

Re:Polarized data

[shaitand]

The web will be fast enough when all transfers seem local, and local is virtually instant. When GUI designers never give thought to designing an hour glass cursor.

Pretty cool, but...

[ShwAsasin]

Thats pretty awesome, however with some people > 5Km from their CO, they may not get a proper sync rate. I'm, thankfully, very close to my CO, and have a 3mbps line now. Downloading at 350kb/sec is awesome, but after a while the cool-factor wears off. It's handy when Red Hat and other distros of interest are released but otherwise it's an expensive (70 Canuckles a month)toy.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[cbreaker]

When I lived in NYC I paid $200/mo for a 8400Kbit/1000kbit DSL. I was less then a thousand feet from the CO. It was amazingly good. $200 was a bargain for the amount of bandwidth I got; not to mention as many IP's that I needed, and always full speed. I used the bandwidth. If you don't, then you don't really need it I guess..

Now that I live in RI again, I can't get DSL. I'm 12,000 feet from the CO. 128/128 dsl does not compare to my Cablemodem, even though my cablemodem is heavily nerfed (blocked ports, capped speeds, etc..)

Something like this could allow me to once again use DSL and choose my ISP. Something like this would also open up DSL to a lot more subscribers, and perhaps the cost would start to come down.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[afidel]

I can't believe any ISP can offer that kind of DSL without bandwidth limits, it's about 1/4th the cost of a T-1 with about 5.5X the DL bandwdith and 3/4 the UL bandwidth. Also at 12K feet you should be able to get at least 768/128 service although you would need a clean pair.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[cbreaker]

Well, it depends. My DSL in NYC had no limits, the line speed was the limit. It was a "7 megabit" DSL, but it synced at 8400 since I was so close to the CO (It was across the street.) Upstream was still less then T1 (1mbit.)

T1 lines are also regulated. The ISP must have the bandwidth to support their T1 line customers. A DSL is not guarenteed bandwidth; I was lucky enough to get an ISP that just happened to always give me all the bandwidth I could use.

I'm willing to pay for the bandwidth, if I can get the line to the house. And I was figuring the 4Mbit version, not the 150Mbit version.

As far as DSL to my house right NOW, 768/128 is still less then half of my cablemodem, which is 3Mbit/300kbit. And the DSL would be twice as expensive. I'd love to have my port 80 back (as well as 21, 25, 53udp....) but 128kbit is useless.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[Guspaz]

I get the same line, which is 3.5mbit downstream and 800kbit upstream, for 49.95$ canadian a month.

My ISP is http://www.istop.com and they serve everywhere Sympatico does.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[Jardine]

Too bad Sympatico seems to have stopped the "every exchange in Ontario and Quebec will be upgraded by the end of the year" plan. I expect DSL to come to my area at about the time frozen pigs fly in hell.

By the road, I'm 700 metres from the Bell building with all the phone equipment in it.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[Guspaz]

And despite the fact that they still have tons of customers who aren't on the new Alacatel DSLAMs (for 3.5mbit service), and way more people who can't even get DSL, their current upgrade of the 1.2/160 service to 1.7/384 seems stupid.

You might consider cable, if you live in Quebec. I know, I know, Videotron is evil, but 3.0/160 isn't so bad for cable internet. And their Extreme speed cable internet goes up to 4.0/640

But I'm happy with my 3.5/800 DSL :)

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[CrazyDuke]

You are lucky. I live in a city here in the USA and I have the cheapest broadband access in town. 46 USians a month for 256/128kbit cable (that in ADSL is $68 a month). I found out from one of the local government agencies that their 256 fractional T1 is costing them around $480 a month from the local baby bell.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[Jardine]

I'm in Ontario on Rogers cable. With most businesses, you expect service should improve. With Rogers, they raise the price and cut the speed in half. And because Sympatico isn't upgrading exchanges too quickly, there is no competition in many areas.

Considering the size of the place I live in (very small town), I should probably be happy anything more than dialup is available.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[Tarqwak]

> I'm, thankfully, very close to my CO, and have a 3mbps line now. Downloading at 350kb/sec
> is awesome, but after a while the cool-factor wears off.

Yeah I can imagine how getting 350 kilobits out of 3 millibit line would be awesome but it aint much to write home about, trust me.

Re:Pretty cool, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Close to your CO? I actually live in CO! But why is Colorado so special, anyway?

My Provider...

[mschoolbus]

I get nowhere close to what they say I should for my business class DSL, my max download rate is sitting at like 80Kb/s. It use to be quite a bit faster...

Re:My Provider...

[Ex-MislTech]

The usual reason it slows down is because their local data
line to your local CO is over sold .

They hook up more ppl than they should to the line to
maximize their profits, it is the same thing AOL did
back in the mid 90's just at a DSL scale vs. dial up .

The whole shared bandwidth argument touted by DSL providers
against the cable modem ppl , is just a viable against
the DSL providers .

If you abuse the network and over sell it, it is going to
slow down for ppl .

You might try another DSL modem, NIC, and PC on the connection,
but if they are the same slower speed then your problem
most likely lies with them over selling the lines .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:My Provider...

[Shdwdrgn]

Most likely that is 80K BYTES /s, which roughly translates to 640K BITS /s. What was the advertised speed of your DSL connection? They usually list it by the bps, however many software programs will report transfer speeds as Bps (note the upper/lower case 'B'), which can cause a lot of confusion for anyone who is not familiar with the differences.

Re:My Provider...

[Methlin]

640kbps assuming no headers, no framing, no errors, no error checking, no inter-frame gap, and 8 bits/byte, IOW not going to happen in the real world. 80kBps, on a file transfer, would be more like a really clean 768kbps line, or a mediocre 960kbps line.

Dividing kbits by 8 to get kbytes, as seen by file transfers, is just plain wrong. A better rule of thumb when it comes to broadband (dsl/cable) is to divide by 10, that'll be much closer to your actual maximum transfer rate.

simpsons reference...

[s0rbix]

Maybe HE can provide faster nudity...

Re:simpsons reference...

[deadsaijinx*]

I've been working on a program to download porno 1 million times faster.

Does anyone need that much porno?

mmmmm... one million times ....

(i know i butchered the quote, get over it, i have a life outside of tv)

Re:simpsons reference...

[Anonymous Coward]

i have a life outside of tv

Says a slashdot subscriber...

Re:simpsons reference...

[Anonymous Coward]

My apologies. The * made me think you were a subscriber. I looked back and saw the error of my ways.

Re:simpsons reference...

[Anonymous Coward]

i'm not a subscirber, the * is part of my name, and has been so long before they invented the subscriber mark

Re:simpsons reference...

[ergo98]

Good reference, but lazy. How long would it take to plug a couple of phrases into google against snpp.com? In about 7 seconds I found this page, which clarifies the section as:

Oh, Captain Janeway... Lace -- the final brassiere!
-- Comic Book Guy downloads porn, "Das Bus"

% Despite having found what he wants, his modem is very slow and he's
% impatient.

Ugh, this high-speed modem is intolerably slow!
-- Comic Book Guy, "Das Bus"

% The picture slowly appears, line by line, but as soon as it gets to the
% cleavage, an ad for "Internet King" (Homer) appears and covers any nudity
% on the screen.

What the-- the Internet King... I wonder if he can provide faster nudity.
-- Comic Book Guy sees one of Homer's ads on a porn site, "Das Bus"

close, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Rats... my house is at 13005 feet!

Re:close, but...

[Mindwarp]

That's easy - just run a cable from your house to the 13,000 feet marker and hook the extension up there. Voila! Faster DSL!

Sprint Ion

[ender_wiggins]

I had sprint ion and i got 5mbit at 12222 feet. Fastest pipe ever!

Re:Sprint Ion

[i_am_nitrogen]

I have Sprint wireless and I get 7mbit at 158400 feet! Too bad my upload's only 160 kbit.

My cable

[shibbydude]

gets 2 Mbits per second downstream and about half a megabit upstream. I run a server from that and have heavy traffic. Given that faster is better, how much are you willing to pay for the *possibility* that your connection will be faster? SBC is the only telco that offers dsl in my area and they are not too keen on progress. I could see them using this hardware and then still regulating traffic to 300kb/s.

Yes .. but can it ..

[D4rkSt4lker]

Yes, but can it survive the /. effect? The web site sure can't.

Next on Slashdot...

[Realistic_Dragon]

Why the RIAA will be asking for $30 tax/day/user for this new technology from congress.

heh

[Anonymous Coward]

To Infineon and Beyond!

Space

[winston_pr]

150Mbit ?! They'd better bundle the modems with 200Gb harddrives.

Re:Space

[deadsaijinx*]

mmmm, 200Gb of porn..... i might never leave the house! .... not that I ever do ... i'm going to go drink away the pain, and maybe watch another porn ...

By the way, 200Gb is small time when youu have that kinda speed, and, most providers wont pump it out that fast, so you wont be getting much advatnage out of it. After all, i rarely download over 150kbs, even though i've been able to acheive well over 200kbs (the provider is just as important in this equation)

Re:Space

[Jucius Maximus]

" 150Mbit ?! They'd better bundle the modems with 200Gb harddrives."

I'd prefer that they bundled it with a gigabit ethernet card.

Re:Space

[jonfromspace]

I read alot of folks talking about 150-300KB/sec Down... and I can't help but wonder... I have Cable from Shaw in Calgary, and I often get 650KB(byte, not bit)/sec downloads... You poor bastards with ~150K down... how do you live with it???

That being said, the up is like 60-70KB/sec

Re:Space

[wo1verin3]

I used to have that type of speed when I was on Shaw 'The Wave'... but since Shaw went west, crappy Rogers limited us 150KB down and 40KB (they say 40, we see 20) up...

BLEH.... even if they capped Rogers now, it's doubtful we could hit the 10GB cap in an entire month of downloading.

Re:Space

[jonfromspace]

Hmmm... where you at? Toronto?

The speed here in Calgary has always been decent, but it USED to be more like 1.2-1.6MB Downstream... Back in the day...

Re:Space

[timmyf2371]

Interesting point. You would also need a gigabit router to run a network to the full capabilities of this system.

Re:Space

[wo1verin3]

>> Toronto?

yep.

useful for intranet too

[u19925]

many intranet connections are less than 1000 ft from the router. so now the chip could be used for intranet connections too. since most people have office phone, they can share the same line for data too and no need to worry about laying lots of ethernet cable. can i get one of those at decent price for my home networking? i have telephone connections in all rooms but no ethernet wires.

Re:useful for intranet too

[cdrudge]

Of course you would have to have a DSLAM at one end of the phone wire and a DSL modem at the other end, which would probably be considerably more then just running cat5 to all the computers.

Re:useful for intranet too

[malfunct]

I think the point he was making is there might be opportunity to create a home office solution from this technology. I am sure he assumed that someone would need to develop a low cost and easy to install solution before it would be useful.

I don't know but I think you might be better off with GigE over copper and run those extra wires.

Re:useful for intranet too

[Jucius Maximus]

"many intranet connections are less than 1000 ft from the router. so now the chip could be used for intranet connections too. since most people have office phone, they can share the same line for data too and no need to worry about laying lots of ethernet cable."

Sounds like a job for VoIP. (Voice over IP.)

I am at work at the moment and there is a single cat5e cable coming from the jack up onto my desk which plugs into a Cisco 7910 IP Phone. Another cat5e runs from the phone to the computer. I think that that's a more efficient use of resources than actually having to have a copper line for every phone.

Re:useful for intranet too

[SonicBurst]

You don't necessarily need a dslam. I know there are a few dsl modem models (ADC megabit modems come to mind) that can run back-to-back, so you just need one for each end.

Also, both Cisco and SMC and others I'm sure make a product called extended ethernet which is designed for just this scenario. Granted, it IS essentially a dslam, it just looks more like an ethernet switch, but you patch it and a filter/splitter into the phone lines. Also, they don't run at 150 mbit, but with this chip, they could.

Re:useful for intranet too

[silas_moeckel]

So far all the lets run things over legacy wiring have failed. There is a 100bt spec for running over cat3 TX I beleive but may be wrong. That gear would be a lot cheaper than some short range DSL. Someday companies will figure out to pull multi strand bundles once. 2 Peices of cat 6 or 7 2 fibers and 2 cat 6 with per existing cat5 patch works out well. There are three costs to installing wires one for the wire thats cheap, another per pull and finialy terminiation costs. Realy the cost is how many end points they need to pull to and how many cables need to be terminated especaly with fiber.

What I realy would like to see is a shared medium fiber for platic fiber with good DB loss numbers so you can use cheap termination and stll work. Thik of it this way if you could fusion Y splice plastic in the ground or on the pole that does lets say a gigabit half duplex on a shared medium with range numbers that are up in the 30km max that would work well enough. You could use cheap light sources on the close in people and and more and mroe expensive light sources as you get further out. Now that just a fantasy copper is just that much cheaper right now.

Re:useful for intranet too

[photon317]

Yeah but you can also just run some (cheap these days) fiber between floors/buildings/campuses). I'm pretty use Gig-E longwave longhaul stuff goes like 10km.

Re:useful for intranet too

[cdrudge]

They work, but you could only have two in the network I beleive. I don't beleive that you can have multiple connections like you would with a powerline network. So you would have to have a homerun per outlet going back to a central location, with another modem for each line there...in essence a dslam there. If you only wanted 2 nodes, then what my parent said could work.

Re:useful for intranet too

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that that's a more efficient use of resources

I think that that's a really inefficient use of the english language. Sorry to pick on you, but it was in the news post for the story and no one picked it up :D

Impressive

[sahonen]

But unfortunately, useless for me, as my home network is only 10 mbps.

Re:Impressive

[deadsaijinx*]

might be time to upgrade. i mean 10/100mbs technology has been dirt cheap for some time now

just a dream

[SeederGOD]

such speed will, probably, never be given for home usage , imagine how big should be backbone for local loops with 150Mb/s ...

Re:just a dream

[Kiev()]

all question of time with current shipping technology (1.6+ Terabits/second over a single fiber is availible)

Re:just a dream

[SeederGOD]

heh, and how routers for this looks like ? AFAIR we don't have any opticbased routers at all , and routers with opic-electric convertion should be realy tin bottleneck for that tech.

Re:just a dream

[Ex-MislTech]

Optical Routers have been available for SOME time,
they are just priced so high no one is willing to touch them .

DWDM has been around for years, just not widely implemented
except in long haul applications .

DWDM between metroplexes , Sonet/ATM in the metro,
and your choice for the short haul .

Here is one Cisco's answer for Optical Routing .

@ 160 Tera-Bits per second it can provide "quite"
enough bandwidth for most cities . ( big grin )

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/optical/p s2 019/index.html

The short time I got to work for Cisco was an illuminating
experience .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:just a dream

[SeederGOD]

i know that optical routers exist , but this routes are useing electrical convertion to check packets, we need routers without that conversion , which will check packets as they are still light, and buffer them also in light, not as electricity...

Re:just a dream

[Ex-MislTech]

Well that is what the DWDM routers can do, they
can route based on the frequency spectrum of the light .

In other words a certain color range and be routed to
one city while a slight shift in wavelength routes to
a different city .

All happening with zero routing latency .

DWDM would support 80 channels like this last time
I read about it, with plans for more channels when
spectrum resolution was made more finite .

One strand of fiber, optical splitting, then different
frequencies routed nearly instantaneously .

Once the frequency split light is received in its
final metroplex it is then determined the internal
data type and the Sonet or ATM packets are read .

DWDM routing is optical routing , no packets are read .

http://www.ssgrr.it/en/education/catalogo_en_200 2/ photon.asp

Excerpt:

optical routing and all-optical networks
integration of WDM and SDH networks

DWDM is the way they need to go, they are just reluctant to
spend the big bucks . The Inc.'s just need to listen to the
geeks this time and realize the technology works and will
allow 80 times the data down the same strand of fiber with
zero routing latency over the long haul network .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

150 Mbit/s ...

[MMaestro]

Wow, thats a lot of pr0n in a short time.

Re:150 Mbit/s ...

[jinglecat]

With 150Mbit/s, I can finally finish my Goatse pr0n collection....

New, Fast DSL

[Anonymous Coward]

Great, now with my fast new DSL, I can have an extra long annoying signature..

--

From anonymous: "

All I Want To Do
Is Be Close To You,

All I Want To Say
Is Thank You For The Way,

You Love Me,
You Love Me,

All I Want To Do
Is Be Close To You,

All I Want To Say
Is Thank You For The Way,

You Love Me,
You Love Me,

You Are Faithful,
To All That You Have Promised And,

Loving in all your ways,

And still with all of my failings,
You Love Me, You Love Me, You Love Me.

Fast is great but...

[Anonymous Coward]

when will they develop the technology to get my phone to stop screaming at me when I'm on the AOL?

Profit!

[56ksucks]

Step 1: Move within 2000 feet of DSL provider

Step 2: ???

Step 3: Profit!

Re:Profit!

[Mr. Sketch]

Why the ??? for step 2? We all know that the only reason for moving that close to make a profit would be to provide high bandwith pr0n for the masses.

Re:Profit!

[Anonymous Coward]

Step 2 looks to be "Move 1000 feet closer" (read the atricle...)

Re:Profit!

[deadsaijinx*]

high bandwidth pr0n? hmmm, i'm not much of a techie, so i'm going to have to figure this out logically...

high, not as in wasted, more as in a lot right? okay, bandwidth .... hmmmmm, okay, so band, as in waste band, so, width of the waste, a lot of waste width... ok. Pron could be a misspelling of prawns ... I could go for some fat prawns, yum. but they don't wear pants, so they wouldnt have a waste band. therefore, pron must me a misspelling of porn, which nerds like. porn with fat women in it.

so, you say he wants to make money selling porn of fat girls? well, that's not my taste, but if there is money to be made, go for it. Though i don't think you have to be that close to the provider to get fat chick porn.

viable alternative to cable?

[Anonymous Coward]

I eagerly await this technology's arrival in the U.S. I have been using Roadrunner (Time Warner Cable) in upstate NY and Optimum Online (Cablevision) in NJ.

Roadrunner would go down for hours at a time, about once a month. It also varied between being very fast (2.5mbps) to very slow with a lot of lost packets.

Optimum Online goes down for hours at a time, about once a week. This week it's been down three times for at least 3 hours at a time. It's much faster, though (up to 7mbps).

I value speed, but I would like to see a choice where I can get fast downloads but without sacrificing reliability.

Re:viable alternative to cable?

[Ex-MislTech]

Setup a 802.11g neighborhood Co-op .

Have several ppl use Mesh AP's www.locustworld.com

All of you use different providers as allowed .

If one provider goes down, the others will be your
route to the net . You'll see slow down but never
go down, and when they are all working , you can
get combined bandwidth .

As long as you are all not leeching at the same
time and do not duplicate downloads, ie. large filez .

You will get a better bandwidth experience .

I am setting up on of these in a rural town .

The scary part can be getting to know all the
ppl around you , lol .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:viable alternative to cable?

[FireBreathingDog]

What a cool idea! I hope you write-up your experiences once it's fully deployed...if the Slashdot editors are in a good mood, I'm sure they'll post it. I'd like to read it anyway...

Uh.... thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that that kinda throughput is at the 1000 feet mark

so why bother posting it?

oh right you like regugitating advertisng

Re:Uh.... thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

Not surprising.. CmdrTaco was blathering on IRC yesteday on how he would do reviews of stuff for companies that send him free equipment

Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Richard Dale]

These speeds aren't that impressive when considering the normal density of telephone exchanges and typical copper cable runs. It seems that the DSL bandwidth over 2 copper wires has reached the point of not being able to significantly increase the capacity at anything approaching Moore's law. When will we have carriers that value the importance of running fibre to the home and developing high capacity switches to cater for this level of bandwidth? Here in Australia, there is serious consideration for the Natural Gas utilities to provide fibre-in-the-gas-pipe-infrastructure.

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Cramer]

That's ingenious! Let someone "backhoe" that fiber. Muhuhaha.

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[MadCow42]

>>Natural Gas utilities to provide fibre-in-the-gas-pipe-infrastructure.

Cool... until you turn the shutoff valve! q:]

"No! Don't turn off the gas!"

"But sir, your house is on fire?"

"You'll kill my broadband!"

"............(muttering) f$%#ing geeks...."

MadCow.

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Ex-MislTech]

Fiber to the neighborhood highpoint , then
2x mode 802.11g or 802.16 pushing around 22 Mbps .

They say it is 55 Mbps, but that is not the actual throughput .

Water towers in the rural US already host celluar array
panels for this reason, a similar arrangement can be
made for high bandwidth Wi-Fi .

Proxim 802.11a in 2x mode toutes 108 Mbps, but gets
NO WHERE near it .

Fiber to the home costs a huge amount to make it happen .

The splicing, termination ,routing and switching gear
are the killer costs .

The fibre itself in bulk is not "that" bad, and the connectors
in bulk for termination if plastic is used is not that bad .

Some US cities have rolled out fibre to the curb ( FTTC ).

Most have not and will not do to the cost .

Perhaps a Co-op could be started to run Fiber to the curb,
but it would take skilled ppl, and the demand to do it .

There is alot of disallusionment with tech these days ,
ppl have turned there back on the internet dream .

I'd personally still love to see it happen .

Well enough rambling .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Shalda]

Fiber to the neighborhood is sufficient. For the cost of running about 200 fiber drops, the local phone company could provide 10+Mbit service to everyone in my metro area (Richmond, VA). See, fiber is a real bitch to work with, while any fool with a pocket knife can splice copper. That makes fiber to the door rather unrealistic, but fiber to the neighborhood real easy. As it is, I'm stuck with a cable modem. It's plenty fast, even for my needs, but I can't get a static IP and it's over priced. DSL, where available around here, is about half the price. ($60 vs $35).

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[KalvinB]

"It seems that the DSL bandwidth over 2 copper wires has reached the point of not being able to significantly increase the capacity at anything approaching Moore's law"

What they need to do is send all the bits equal to 1 on one line and all the bits equal to 0 on the other.

The amount they could compress the data would be astounding.

Ben

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Ex-MislTech]

Bizarre, it is backwards of that here .

Decent DSL is $65 a month, and fast cable is $39 .

I imagine it is different everywhere .

When cable modems were first here, they did
not turn on the QoS on the upstream and we
saw 70KB/sec upstream for a few years !!!

DSL got here over a year after cable modems .

It is capped now though, 20 - 30 KB at best .

Downstream still cooks at speeds up to 550KB/sec .

FTTN is a great idea, and some ppl think that
Wi-Fi for that last leg is a good natural addition
to that , but who knows how it will all pan out .

Industry big wigs will make that choice , and it
will most likely be profit not quality driven .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[gbjbaanb]

you probably wouldn't want it. Here in the UK Milton Keynes (a new town) was outfitted with the latest cables - fibre to all the houses. Guess what. No-one can get DSL, and other BB tech to use the fibre are either non-existent, or prohibitively expensive.
So. BT are laying copper cabling to the houses now so people can get DSL.

http://www.adslguide.org/newsarchive.asp?item=11 51

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Anonymous Coward]

>Some US cities have rolled out fibre to the curb ( FTTC ).

Some have started deploying fiber to the home:
Chelan, WA: http://www.gofiber.org/index.cfm
Bristol, VA: http://www.bvu-optinet.com

It's coming!

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Anonymous Coward]

synchronization would be a problem, especially over great distances

Re:Typeical Cable Runs + Fibre

[Ilvatar]

We have those here in Belgium (Telenet) though right now only for companies. Home users get a coax link to the fibre backbone. In Holland (I think in Amsterdam anyway) the city is going to build a mega fibre network that will allow everybody to hook up directly to it.

Interesting...

[jdh-22]

Although this is a nice breakthrough, it still doesn't fix the last mile problem. Other countries, smaller countries have a big advantage in implementing high bandwidth networks. Others like the United States and Canada are still having trouble getting to the last mile.

Rather than keep seeing high bandwidth broadband in (rather) short distances, why not develop a network with decent speeds 500kb/s+ that can go long distances. Wireless helps, but is not quiet there. There have been discussions about internet over power lines, but no standards have been made.

Re:Interesting...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can someone please explain what the 'last mile' problem is exactly?

Re:Interesting...

[deadsaijinx*]

agreed! But at the same time, i'm outside of city and getting 1.6 Mbits from my cable modem, so I'm not really complaining.

Re:Interesting...

[deadsaijinx*]

www.tcomschool.ohiou.edu/its_pgs/nab.html

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

1000 feet = 300 Metres
13000 feet = 4km.

Re:slashdotted! article text:

[sahrss]

Troll alert:
Search the parent's 'pasted' text for "Rob Malda had".

Also, who would mod up such a horrible formatting, even if they didn't realize it was a troll?

Displayed in a pleasant manner...

[Anonymous Coward]

Joint news release of Infineon and Metalink

Munich, Germany and Yakum, Israel â" June 11, 2003 â" Addressing the market demand for ever greater reach for VDSL and ever greater bandwidth over a single pair, Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) and Metalink (Nasdaq: MTLK), today announced they are each developing VDSLPlus, which introduces a fifth-band extension of standard VDSL technology. VDSLPlus will enable service providers to offer scalable DSL services ranging from short range applications at data rates up to 150 Megabits per second (Mbps), to long reach applications that allow for more than 4Mbps rates over distances of 4km (13,200 ft) using the same line-card and Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) designs.

VDSLPlus will use a new frequency âoebandâ above the current 12 MHz limit, as defined by international VDSL standards, to achieve the highest speeds ever reached in data transmission over standard twisted-pair copper wire. The benefits of the extended QAM VDSL technology include:

• • Delivery of over 150 Mbps aggregated bandwidth over single-pair copper
    wire - at more than 300m (1000 feet).
  • Reach of over 4km (13,200 feet) at speeds exceeding 4 Mbps.
  • Compliance with all relevant VDSL standardsâ(TM) requirements including:
    Band Plan 998, 997, and those defined by the Chinese CTSI as well as any
    proprietary band plans.
  • Spectral compatibility and co-existence with narrowband and legacy DSL
    services including POTS, EuroISDN, TCM-ISDN and ADSL.
  • Support for both Ethernet and ATM over VDSL.

"Infineon and Metalink continuously work to extend the capabilities of QAM VDSL, each making great strides in advancing the technology. As Service Providers and Carriers have mass deployed and gotten familiar with QAM VDSL over the four years it has been in the market, their demands have grown for increased VDSL bandwidth and reach, while they want QAM to maintain its highly cost effective, scalable deployment model. Metalink and Infineon are committed to collaborating with other industry leaders in extending the open QAM VDSL specifications and definitions to continuously meet this demand while preserving strict compliance to international standards," said Tzvika Shukhman, Chairman and CEO of Metalink.

Metalink and Infineon continue to be committed to teaming with other QAM PHY and system companies to promote VDSLPlus standardization in the various standar-dization bodies and to extend the companiesâ(TM) already proven interoperability to the new technology. The two companies are the only suppliers to have demonstrated fully interoperable, commercially available VDSL products.

" The accelerated market demand for enhanced VDSL drives the cooperation between Metalink and Infineon, especially in Asia Pacific and Japan where QAM VDSL is a huge ongoing success. VDSLPlus is an extension to field-proven QAM-VDSL technology, incorporating enhanced integration levels, higher bandwidth capacity, and greater reach capabilities. With more than two million QAM VDSL lines in service generating revenue for Operators and more than a hundred system vendors who already offer QAM-based VDSL platforms, QAM is accepted as the de-facto line code for VDSL,â said Christian Wolff, Vice President of Infineon's Communications Business Group and General Manager of the Access Business Unit.

QAM VDSL chipsets and systems, supporting the ITU, ETSI, Chinese, and ANSI band allocation plans, provide very high speed data transmission rates over robust, noise-immune QAM links enabling simultaneous video, data, and voice services over single-pair copper wires. The inherent simplicity of the QAM line code is demon-strated in superior cost and power advantages over competing VDSL line codes, yet with QAMâ(TM)s sophisticated features and benefits.

For most, won't matter.

[Tyler Eaves]

As the subject says, 99.9% of the the people out there are limited not by the capability of the line, but by the limits imposed by the service provider.

Re:For most, won't matter.

[gad_zuki!]

Actually this will matter significantly in the arena of cable vs DSL service. In DSL distance is everything and in my neighborhood the best you can hope for via DSL is a 384k link with a 128k guarantee from the DSL company while the cable company happily offers you a 1.44 mbs down connection in every location they serve.

Now consider areas where there aren't competing cable companies, people who live too far from the CO to even get service, etc and it will be a godsend to DSL providers. I doubt your 99.9% estimation is has much to do with the reality of the situation.

DSL upgrades in my area? Yeah, nice dream.. lol

[Honest Man]

I'd love it if this kind of speed was anywhere near me; however, since my only Broadband provider option is SBC/Pacbell (which in my area is lousy as they drop connections on dsl about as bad a dialup line - crappy for a server of any kind) and with the lovely new laws permitting phone companies to 'not' have to share their lines for competitors to use, IF this were released in my area it would be of great benefit to SBC but the benefit would never hit the end user.

DSL needs shot in the arm

[Saganaga]

Most people I know who have a choice between DSL and cable modem have gone with cable (myself included). This mostly comes down to the speed difference (although in my case it also had to do with a maddening disconnect problem that Qwest DSL could not seem to solve for me).

If DSL could truly start offering service that is MUCH faster than cable, they might be able to reverse the trend towards cable (67% for cable vs. 28% for DSL according to a recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study.)

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, here in the Netherlands it's the other way around.
Cable around here MAXES at 180kB/s .. but there are lots of regions where the speeds drop as low as 10kb/s
Mostly thanks to our crappy provider, UPC.

ADSL however is available here at high enough speeds.
I myself can reach up to 810kB/s _stable_ download speed, for E99 a month.
Pretty good deal imo

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Fly Ricky - The Wine]

Yo brother (or sister), you should look into your MTU setting because I had a horrible time with disconnects (and almost flipped out) because of it. It's a fairly obscure setting, but worth looking into. Maybe it will help you. Yes yes, I know this isn't a technical support forum :)

Fly Ricky

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Gadreel]

That's also because a good cable modem is cheaper than a good dsl router. DSL for the most part runs on DMT technologies. DMT is composed of 256 different sounds strung over a particular frequency range. Cable on the other part... is much simpler. About the speed difference. DSL is not shared (except for the idea of your ISP overselling like msn and aol does). The biggest problem dsl has is with the stupid CO's and having crappy cards that they don't want to replace when you call in with a problem. (gg qwest) so I sympathise with you on that qwest problem. purty l4m3 I say.

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Saganaga]

In my case there was something wrong with the line, I think. I was using a Cisco 675 router, and they tried swapping that out without success. They also swapped out the DSLAM card on their end. That still didn't fix the problem, which was that every couple of days or so the Cisco would lock up, and would have to be manually power cycled.

I basically got to the point where Qwest didn't have any other ideas, and since Roadrunner cable access was available, I jumped ship.

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Gadreel]

You were probobly getting hit with code red. Qwest should have thought about that at least... did they have you reconfig your router to set web dissable? that's probobly why your router would lock. (I work for an isp so I deal with this a lot :P)

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Saganaga]

That was the first thing they had me do (update the Cisco's firmware and change a bunch of settings, including disabling the web interface...can't remember all of it, it was almost 2 years ago). But even with all of the appropriate Code Red fixes the problem kept on happening.

Thanks for the ideas!

Re:DSL needs shot in the arm

[Gadreel]

hmmm. This cought me off guard. Usually qwest doesn't do anything besides blame the isp. :P. It's possible they could have had a PVC conflict. (you and someone else witht he same vpi/vci on their circuit... that's happened a few times.) But that's quite interesting that qwest actually did something.

Non-troll slashdotted text

[Anonymous Coward]

News

VDSL Leaders Announce VDSLPlus: Data Rates Up to 150Mbps and Extended Reach Exceeding 4 KM Using Robust QAM Technology
2003-06-11

Joint news release of Infineon and Metalink

Munich, Germany and Yakum, Israel â" June 11, 2003 â" Addressing the market demand for ever greater reach for VDSL and ever greater bandwidth over a single pair, Infineon Technologies (FSE/NYSE: IFX) and Metalink (Nasdaq: MTLK), today announced they are each developing VDSLPlus, which introduces a fifth-band extension of standard VDSL technology. VDSLPlus will enable service providers to offer scalable DSL services ranging from short range applications at data rates up to 150 Megabits per second (Mbps), to long reach applications that allow for more than 4Mbps rates over distances of 4km (13,200 ft) using the same line-card and Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) designs.

VDSLPlus will use a new frequency âoebandâ above the current 12 MHz limit, as defined by international VDSL standards, to achieve the highest speeds ever reached in data transmission over standard twisted-pair copper wire. The benefits of the extended QAM VDSL technology include:

• Delivery of over 150 Mbps aggregated bandwidth over single-pair copper wire - at more than 300m (1000 feet).
• Reach of over 4km (13,200 feet) at speeds exceeding 4 Mbps.
• Compliance with all relevant VDSL standardsâ(TM) requirements including: Band Plan 998, 997, and those defined by the Chinese CTSI as well as any proprietary band plans.
• Spectral compatibility and co-existence with narrowband and legacy DSL services including POTS, EuroISDN, TCM-ISDN and ADSL.
• Support for both Ethernet and ATM over VDSL.

"Infineon and Metalink continuously work to extend the capabilities of QAM VDSL, each making great strides in advancing the technology. As Service Providers and Carriers have mass deployed and gotten familiar with QAM VDSL over the four years it has been in the market, their demands have grown for increased VDSL bandwidth and reach, while they want QAM to maintain its highly cost effective, scalable deployment model. Metalink and Infineon are committed to collaborating with other industry leaders in extending the open QAM VDSL specifications and definitions to continuously meet this demand while preserving strict compliance to international standards," said Tzvika Shukhman, Chairman and CEO of Metalink.

Metalink and Infineon continue to be committed to teaming with other QAM PHY and system companies to promote VDSLPlus standardization in the various standar-dization bodies and to extend the companiesâ(TM) already proven interoperability to the new technology. The two companies are the only suppliers to have demonstrated fully interoperable, commercially available VDSL products.

" The accelerated market demand for enhanced VDSL drives the cooperation between Metalink and Infineon, especially in Asia Pacific and Japan where QAM VDSL is a huge ongoing success. VDSLPlus is an extension to field-proven QAM-VDSL technology, incorporating enhanced integration levels, higher bandwidth capacity, and greater reach capabilities. With more than two million QAM VDSL lines in service generating revenue for Operators and more than a hundred system vendors who already offer QAM-based VDSL platforms, QAM is accepted as the de-facto line code for VDSL,â said Christian Wolff, Vice President of Infineon's Communications Business Group and General Manager of the Access Business Unit.

QAM VDSL chipsets and systems, supporting the ITU, ETSI, Chinese, and ANSI band allocation plans, provide very high speed data transmission rates over robust, noise-immune QAM links enabling simultaneous video, data, and voice services over single-pair copper wires. The inherent simplicity of the QAM line code is demon-strated in superior cost and power advantages over competing VDSL line codes, yet with QAMâ(TM)s sophisticated features and benefits. These advantages are f

Ho-hum

[falsification]

Ho-hum. Kind of been expecting this for a while. *Yawn*. Tell me when we get to 150 Gbps. Then I'll be interested.

Re:Ho-hum

[Honest Man]

Yeah, maybe the Government will see that kind of speed this decade. Dont worry though, you can finally be impressed with the speeds around 2030 when its available to the average consumer for only 3 pints of blood a day.

Re:Ho-hum

[maxume]

I'd sell your blood first! Probably good for what, like 3 or 4 days?

That's fast but,

[xeaxes]

Would it ever come to America? With only the few major companies controlling most of the broadband access, and the FCC making it harder for the little guys to survive, innovations like this get conveniently left behind for larger profit margins.

I now have broadband from a small, independent company (that is slowly going under cause of SWB), but I get 4 Mbit down and 500 Kbit up for about half the price of SWB's 1.5 Mbit down w/ 16 Kbit up. I routinely have 350 - 450 KB/s downloads, and they have great service. They would most likely hop on a technology like this so they can keep ahead of the big companies, but they are going under.

Without the little companies, there will never be incentive for the big companies to invest in techonology like this or any other technologies that would improve our online experience.

Re:That's fast but,

[Alpha_Nerd]

I think you mean 16KByte up... That woul be 128kbps which is what many DSL users get. 16kbit would mean less than 2KByte/sec...

Re:That's fast but,

[rbb]

I get 4 Mbit down and 500 Kbit up for about half the price of SWB's 1.5 Mbit down w/ 16 Kbit up.

For about $150 a month here in Norway, we're enjoying 12.5Mbit down and 6.25Mbit up. Okay, we have to live within 500 metres from our nearest phonecentral, but given that we live in central Oslo that is not really an issue - had our place been further away from a phonecentral, then we would have to live with 5Mbit/5Mbit (ofcourse a lot cheaper) - big deal.

16Kbit upstream just can't be an acceptable alternative. Most people can walk faster that that ;-)

Re:That's fast but,

[Anonymous Coward]

I now have broadband from a small, independent company (that is slowly going under cause of SWB), but I get 4 Mbit down and 500 Kbit up for about half the price of SWB's 1.5 Mbit down w/ 16 Kbit up.

Umm... no offense, but are you sure they aren't going under because they just aren't charging enough? If they offer far more for far less, then I doubt they are losing customers to SWB - what is this - "we might lose money on each sale, but we'll make it up in bulk?"

Re:That's fast but,

[stoops]

I think you mean 16KByte up... That woul be 128kbps which is what many DSL users get. 16kbit would mean less than 2KByte/sec...

i think he means 160 kbit up... which is a much more common DSL upload speed that 128 kbit for some reason.

Re:That's fast but,

[anakin876]

all right......another Aqua Teen Hunger Force fan Now we jsut need frylock's computer

Re:That's fast but,

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's because of the 15% ATM overhead. (160 - overhead) is closer to 128 Kb/sec than (128 - overhead).
Cable doesn't have ATM overhead, so 1500 Kb/sec on cable is better than 1500 Kb/sec on DSL.

Old technology

[bigjnsa500]

Why use this old technology when they can invest in newer technology like fiber to the house and/or Internet2 connectivity?

Re:Old technology

[CdaveC]

Actually xDSL is newer technology than fiber. The reason most telcos use DLS is because itâ(TM)s VERY expensive to lay fiber (especially if you've already got infrastructure in place, i.e. copper).

I would like telcos to step up and start offering consumer grade DSL with synchronous transfers and faster speeds, how about 5Mbps, or 3Mbps even!! We can talk faster after that!

Re:Old technology

[bigjnsa500]

I just look at fiber as the means to transport all we are used to over wires, from cable TV to Internet. I hate having to dig up my carpet in my house to run Cat5 and coax to every room. Now if it was all fiber I could run one small wire to every room.

Re:Old technology

[sweetooth]

You can get SDSL now. However it's expensive as heck. I get 1.1Mbit SDSL for a whopping $200 per month. The tech is there and there are companies willing to provide it however most "consumers" aren't willing to pay for the speed they want.

Re:Old technology

[Anonymous Coward]

They use this "old technology" because it is a hell-of-alot cheaper to just use existing infrastructure rather than digging up the ground and running fiber in alot of cases, especially when the speed for a single copper line can achieve real LAN speeds.

Re:Old technology

[GPB]

You'll never get Internet2 connectivity, unless you are a research institution (or related to one in some capacity). Read about the purpose of Internet2 here.

Basically Internet2 is a big playground for Universities and research institutions. The idea is that on this playground they will develop new technologies that will someday get folded back into the good old commodity Internet.

-Brian

Re:Old technology

[StarTux]

You said the word invest. Think its on their list to be ignored....

Wish and hope they will invest, but...

Re:Old technology

[bigjnsa500]

As a matter of fact, I have several Internet2 connections that I use for Access Grid and grid computing. My hope is later on that Internet2 will become more open the way the original Internet did.

As if it will matter...

[Nicholas Schumacher]

Who cares if it can do 150 Mbit?

Nobody is going to run that kind of pipe out to the CO.

Re:As if it will matter...

[runderwo]

How is parent insightful? As a business owner with two locations, I would benefit from this product's availability immensely. No more dealing with the hassles of long-range wireless or paying $1000's to get fiber laid in order to have a decent pipe from location to location for our VPN operations and fault tolerant co-location.

DSL Consumers, look elsewhere. For people with mission-critical bandwidth needs, this will be a godsend.

Re:As if it will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. DSL isn't just for the consumer; businesses would greatly benefit from this sort of technology.

Re:As if it will matter...

[snubber1]

Did I just hear the words 'mission-critical' and 'DSL' in the same sentence? I have yet to see a DSL line, business or otherwise, that won't go down like a two-dollar whore at a moments notice.

That's what your paying for with a leased line, quality of service. Every time I took the T1 down at work I got a call within a minute or two from the telco wanting to recify the situation.

Re:As if it will matter...

[Troed]

I've just signed up for 26Mbit VDSL.

Sweden.

You're welcome ;)

Re:As if it will matter...

[talon77]

Its just as easy to monitor when a DSL line goes down as it is to monitor when a frame or point-to-point line goes down. (nagios)

Don't confuse good customer service with technology.

Re:As if it will matter...

[snubber1]

My point is, the telco *cares* when your frame relay goes down. For some reason they don't seem to give a rats ass when DSL goes down, and it seems to be more succesptable to doing such.

I'm merly pointing out that the quality of service is just not there yet for DSL, so using it for mission-critical applications seems a bit like a joke.

Re:As if it will matter...

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason? How's cost for a reason. The provider doesn't want to lose leased line business because they are paying out the ass. DSL doesn't cost as much, so ...

Re:As if it will matter...

[runderwo]

Did I just hear the words 'mission-critical' and 'DSL' in the same sentence? I have yet to see a DSL line, business or otherwise, that won't go down like a two-dollar whore at a moments notice.

I think you're talking about DSL service from a telco. I'm talking about point-to-point DSL. The only thing the telco does in this case is provide the copper pair for us to run our own DSL over.

Re:As if it will matter...

[Per Wigren]

Yeah, I heard about that also.. Bostream are providing 26/26 Mbps, 13/13 Mbps or 8/1 Mbps (down/up) depending on how far you are from the closest "station" (word?) for $40/month..
26/26 if you are closer than 300m, 13/13 if you are 300-1km and 8/1 if you are 1km+ away.. I called Bostream and they said my new apartment (which I'm moving to 2nd july) is about 1.3km away so I will only get 8/1 Mbps... But it's still better than the only (=next best) alternative in that house.. Sucky UPC with 1.5Mbps/738Kbps for the same price, so I ordered Bostream anyway! ;)

Re:As if it will matter...

[Troed]

BBB will give you 10/9 SDSL at 1200m - you might want to look into if that could be extended to 1300 or if it's possible the actual distance might be a bit less than 1.3km .. :)

Re:slashdotted! article text:

[BlueJay465]

It's called karma whoring

you must have missed this story:

[Erris]

It's not a technical problem.

Re:you must have missed this story:

[brave1]

Actually, I believe that the days of the baby bells dragging their feet (as the previous Slashdot post mentioned) on High Speed Internet Access are over. I believe that Cable currently accounts for 7 or 8 out of every 10 new broadband users. With the erosion of the residential phone line customer base due to cell phones, the "Bells" are looking for ways to keep customers from switching. (It has been shown that customers that have more than one service are less likely to switch.) Both Verizon and SBC have begun to aggressively price DSL to try and regain some market share.

Re:you must have missed this story:

[CrazyDuke]

On that note, now that I use cable modem based internet access, I am thinking of dropping my $31 a month "$22 a month" basic phone line that I almost never use for a $19.99 a month stripped down cell phone plan (400 minutes).

Re:you must have missed this story:

[gad_zuki!]

Not to mention there's always VoIP. I've been a vonage subscriber for a month now and the sound quality is excellent. Voicemail is a little flakey, but I prefer answering machines anyway.

Re:you must have missed this story:

[scottj]

Of course it's not a technical problem. There are far too many people who live "in the middle of Silicon Valley" without decent broadband for this to be a technical problem. That's why it's such a problem. The technical issues of broadband are easy.

QAM?

[Xunker]

If I may karma whore for a bit, what is this "QAM" busniess?

QAM stands for "Quadrature Amplitude Modulation" which is a fancy name for a simple concept. Also called "I/Q modulation" it's a way to transmit two data streams over the same carrier signal.

The streams are combined in such a way that they can be separated at the other end by using the two most elegant mathematical theorems of man, sine and cosine. What happens, in basic terms, the streams are at "right angles" to each other in the signal.

Being able to have two carriers worth of data can provide a geometric increase in capacity; this was also the technology that was going to be behind "Stereo AM" radio, but that never made it off the ground (Stero AM would have been cool since it would only have to use one frequency for both left and right channels unlike our current analogue sterophonic FM that uses 2 channels).

Re:QAM?

[gouldtj]

Just another tag onto that:

QAM is the modulation that they use for digital cable also. Most networks are QAM 64 today, going to QAM 256 in the future, sometime.

Re:QAM?

[caluml]

I/Q modulation

I think I've heard of that. Isn't that where the stupid people talk loudly, and make a fool of themselves, much like Slashdot? :)

Re:QAM?

[rcw-work]

Being able to have two carriers worth of data can provide a geometric increase in capacity

No, it can't.

For a given signal-to-noise ratio, double the bitrate still requires double the bandwidth. Improvement in modulation techniques can only serve to more closely approximate the theoretical.

Re:QAM?

[PetiePooo]

I considered moderating this as overrated, but thought it would be better to explain why I thought so.

Being able to have two carriers worth of data can provide a geometric increase in capacity; ...

The post makes it sound like it can double almost any existing signal, when in fact QAM (or other techniques combining amplitude with either phase or frequency such as OFDM) has existed in most modulation methods for a long time. Its a rare exception where data is being modulated strictly through AM or FM.

... it would only have to use one frequency for both left and right channels unlike our current analogue sterophonic FM that uses 2 channels).

Stereo FM doesn't use two separate frequencies. They modulate R+L as mono on the on the baseband. Then they modulate R-L above that. Then the modulate the baseband carrier using standard FM. A mono receiver works as normal, since it just cuts off the IF frequencies above a certain threshold. However, a stereo receiver regenerates the stereo separation by recovering those additional higher frequencies. Here's an explanation with graphics.

Re:QAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Previous usable frequency: 95.9
Radio Station: 96.1
Next Usable frequency: 96.3

Looks like two bloody points to me, doesn't it to you?

Re:QAM?

[WhiplashII]

Quadrature Amplitude Modulation is where you transmit some bits in the amplitude of the signal, and some bits in the phase (delay) of the signal. Basically it is a way to get more bits from the same bandwidth by trading sensitivity to phase noise. Most electronic transmissions use QAM.

Re:QAM?

[BuckaBooBob]

I think youu confused with a specific application. QAM has nothign to do with multiple signals... Its just a form of modulation that uses keys... QAM 16 is just less than 1/4 as good as QAM 64 and QAM 256 realy Is just marginally better than QAM 64 as the symbols are starting to get really close and confused so there is a fairly high signaling error rate. But thats another topic totally... QAM is just a more advanced form of QPSK.

What about the remote users?

[unfortunateson]

I'm currently about 5KM or so from my CO. No ADSL available, only Comcast cable modem with their usual bandwidth throttling.

SBC did offer to sell me SDSL: twice the price of their standard ADSL ($80/mo) at 128K (bleah).

How about some devices to make it easy to relay the DSL signals to the edges of the CO's area?
If a chip can give you those great speeds at 4KM, can we at least get reasonable service beyond that?

Re:What about the remote users?

[jchernia]

This is a good point. Telcos want to keep their bandwidth costs down and their prices up. Providing near-in customers (who likely have the option of cable) with superfast connections is not the way to do this.

My previous apartment I was 24K wire feet from the CO and I couldn't get a cable modem. I paid the $80/mo for IDSL and was happy to have it.

It seems to me they should spend more time developing DSL technologies for long-loops and noisy lines. Most of these customers won't have cable and would love a reliable 384K or 768K service.

They'll serve more customers, especially ones with no other option, and these customers less likely to use huge amounts of bandwidth.

Re:What about the remote users?

[Anonymous Coward]

At 5km, RADSL will work fine, giving you 512 down, 64-256 up (in lumps of 32) depending on the attenuation of your line and how it passes the woosh test.

I'm 5.1km and get 512/256 at 55dB and it's steady as a rock.

There's another flavour which is slower, about 128/64, which should be good up to 8km.

The reason they are not selling it to you is not technical as much as social/financial. They think they can make more money by not selling you the service you want, but something more expensive.

Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[Agent Green]

This is great...but seriously out of reach of most subscribers to even be cost-effective to implement.

Then there are the people like me who live in fiber-fed areas. It doesn't matter how close I am to the CO, but because my copper terminates in a SLIC hut and not on a CO's MDF, I'm SOL.

People in my shoes traditionally have had to use either IDSL-based services (DSL over ISDN carrier for 144k), or get a T1.

I wish I had the coin for a T1, though.

Re:Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[Craig Maloney]

I'm one of those people. I get a straight 28.8K connection out of my modem. I'm also unfortunate to live in an area not supplied by a cable company. My only options are Satellite (expensive) or ISDN (expensive and difficult). DSL is great, but I'm waiting for the next big thing where I can actually take advantage of it. :)

Re:Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[Boing]

Yikes. I'd better stop reading this discussion; That was ten percent less than a lethal dose of acronyms.

Re:Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[Cramer]

ISDN is simply expensive (unless you live in TN.) It's not at all difficult. There are a few extra steps beyond "plug in line", but really, how hard is it to enter the switch type and SPIDs provided by the telco? (If you can get ISDN, you can get IDSL... where I work, we have IDSL lines in SC terminated on a DSLAM back in Raleigh, NC. As long as you are withing 50,000ft of an ISDN capable CO, the line can be terminated anywhere.)

Satellite is a pain in the ass for what you get out of it. You cannot install it yourself (legally) -- and most of the people paid to install it aren't very good at it.

I have ISDN. Yes, it's twice the cost of a cable modem and ~1.5x the cost of IDSL. However, I've had this line longer than either cable modems or DSL have existed. Aside from the CO crashing once, I've had no problems with it.

Re:Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[Anonymous Coward]

you've obviously never worked at the place with an e in the middle of your nick then.

Re:Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[trentfoley]

I probably should not have read it twice, then.

Re:Fiber-Fed Neighborhood

[Boing]

Yay for reference recognition. I wish I could claim that line as my own.

Re:slashdotted! article text:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ya, because AC's really need to improve their karma.

Well, it's neat and all...

[NanoGator]

..but for the home user it's impractical until the internet catches up to it. I wonder what'll come along where 150mb becomes a must have?

Anybody read up on the Internet 2? If memory serves, they've been dishing out 100mbs or so. I can't remember what they were doing with that bandwidth, though.

I'm not asking from a cynical perspective. I'm really curious what happens when 150mbs can be served up. The first thing that pops into my mind is setting up a server at home (assuming 150 up as well as down. I can dream!) and remotely accessing it anywhere. Fun stuff. Wish I was more imaginitive tho.

Re:Well, it's neat and all...

[Sycraft-fu]

Internet 2 is just a research network. Indiana University runs it. It's a backbone, currently almost all 10gig, that runs to a number of places in the country. Then, a bunch of universities and research instutions connect to it. Makes for a high speed link dedicated to them, seperate from the normal Internet. At this point it is mainly just extra bandwidth for communication between members, but it does feature some special things like IP multicast across the whole network, at least for some things.

Doesn't help

[mrphrtq]

That's all well and good, but what about us poor folk with FITL and Adelphia cable and other atrocities against getting broadband. It makes me cry everytime I hear about advances in broadband I cannot get.

I...I have to be alone now.

*sob*

Great News for ISPs

[Waffle Iron]

This is great news for ISPs! After the user has exhausted his 1 GB monthly bandwidth allocation, he can now choose to purchase more extra bandwidth to enhance revenue.

If extra bandwidth is only 10 cents per megabyte, a single user on a 150mbit line could choose to purchase up to $4,860,000.00 per month (plus $324,432.46 federal excise tax and $127,368.32 universal service fee) of additional data services! If only a few percent of all users decide to puchase this much data, there would be a huge potential for revenue growth.

Re:Great News for ISPs

[bricriu]

Yeah, but if anyone resells DSL in violation of TOS, just think of the lawsuit costs.... *eep*

Re:Great News for ISPs

[thebigmacd]

The revenue increase that was spoken of relates to the ISP, not the end user.

Re:Great News for ISPs

[darkpixel2k]

You gotta admit though--surfing the web at the speed of "Right The F*ck Now" would so be worth it... ;)

Re:i was..

[malocchio]

HEH, offtopic?

can't you infer the palpable meaning into my post, that technology such as this is exciting?

sometimes, not saying exactly what you mean says more than you are ever capable of saying.

4mbps! oh really?

[displague]

4 millibits per second!!!

Outstanding!

At that rate, this 122 Byte comment would take 67 hours 45 minutes to transfer!

Re:4mbps! oh really?

[KFK - Wildcat]

I just checked, and your comment is infact 124 bytes...
Close though :)

(yeah, we both have way too much time on our hands!)

Re:4mbps! oh really?

[Alsee]

The slashdot SIG limit is 120 bytes alone, 66 hours and 40 minutes. Plus 1 hour and 7 minutes for the 2 byte comment saying 'HI'.

-

Useful top end?

[peatbakke]

Well, it's great that it can pull down 150Mb/s ... but you've gotta have an empty OC3 to feed it. And if you've got an OC3, might as well kick out the extra cash to run in the extra 300 meters.

The 4km @ 4Mb/s is pretty nice, though.

Re:Useful top end?

[NearlyHeadless]

Well, it's great that it can pull down 150Mb/s ... but you've gotta have an empty OC3 to feed it. And if you've got an OC3, might as well kick out the extra cash to run in the extra 300 meters.

A friend of mine bought a house a couple of years ago. It's in a new neighborhood and Bellsouth has fiber down to the neighborhood level, then copper to each house. When the realtor was showing them the house, he noticed the fiber connection was in the backyard (a little air-conditioned box, dunno what you call it). His DSL line runs less than 50 feet to that. He gets great throughput.

Re:Useful top end?

[y0bhgu0d]

the technology you speak of is called DFITIL. 8-)
There's a version called IFITIL, which is fibre to the house, then it turns to copper. what was that about an 18000ft limit again? lol

Re:Useful top end?

[RollingThunder]

So how many times did Bellsouth tell him he was out of local loop range before they hooked him up? :)

Re:Useful top end?

[nadim]

Don't get ./'d - site mirroring, web hosting, and more! [bigbluebang.com]

I will never use bigbluebang.com because I will never get ./'d. KTHX! Nobody has heard of the so called "./" effect unless it is a new site you are trying to promote or something :)

Re:Useful top end?

[Ex-MislTech]

Well, the point is that the fiber can carry DWDM
compressed Sonet, ATM or another type .

If the carriers will shell out for DWDM gear
for local CO's though .

The Sonet rings around DC used to be oc-192's
and have since been upped to oc-768's

OC-192 roughly 10 Gbps
OC-768 roughly 40 Gbps

A single strand of fiber can carry ALOT more data
than most carriers are willing to buy gear to
push it .

All the long haul single mode uses DWDM these days,
unless they are just too tight to shell out for it .

This high end service, just like VDSL will be sold
for a VERY high cost, and not many ppl will be willing
to pay for it .

VDSL has been here in the states for quite awhile, and
only businesses are running it to my knowledge .

They are just rolling this out in phases , making
money in multiple dips instead of shooting straight
at FTTC ( fiber to the curb ) .

Fiber to the Curb is still too high to deploy right now
for most cities, though some have done it anyways in the US .

Fiber is the ultimate solution, zero latency optical routing
to each metro, then open the packets to read headers and
route and switch it to its local destination .

Cisco has been trying to sell this idea for some time .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Fuggetaboutit

[TerryAtWork]

It's all going to be swept away by Digital Spread Spectrum.

The Net will be in the air, encrypted, ubiquitous, undetectable, unstoppable and free.

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[God'sAwayOnBusiness]

Yeah, I'm sure that's why the experts on the 802.16 MAN standards groups chose to use OFDM, QAM64, QAM16 and QPSK.

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[evilviper]

The Net will be in the air

No wireless, high-speed connections can go for very long distances. (Although I'll be the first to jump at it when there is a technological leap that makes it possible)

Since long-hauls are everywhere, there's no chance that wireless alone is going to form an international network. In fact, many countries have very very long hauls, which means even wireless national networks aren't possible in many places.

encrypted,

Any encryption used will be poor... IPSec is nice and everything, but you don't want to waste that much CPU power, and delay, just to visit slashdot. Chances are, it'll stick with the current model. Normal communications will be either plain-text or poorly obfusticated, and only the sites that need serious security will use strong encryption, and they will use that for as little as possible.

ubiquitous,

Like I said, not until there is a technological breakthrough.

undetectable,

There's a funny one... Yes, I'm sure everyone will just assume your computer naturally gives off hundreds of times the ammount of electromagnetic energy of a cell phone. Not really undetectable...

unstoppable

Not really, perhaps in theory though. Create enough interference on the frequency range it uses, and you can stop it.

and free.

Free as in, without limits? As in, your electric bill?

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[shepd]

>No wireless, high-speed connections can go for very long distances.

I dunno, but DirecWay wouldn't agree... Then again, the absolute maximum throughput (if you owned the satellite) is about 1 Gbit.

Just saying, it is possible if you aren't moving a bunch, but mobile high speed, that is a long way off.

>IPSec is nice and everything, but you don't want to waste that much CPU power, and delay, just to visit slashdot.

I dunno, I once had satellite internet that ran with IPSec (in the speedy mode the opinionated freeSWAN operator refused to support) and it was fine for using slashdot on, but useless for games (all that time delay and all... ;-)

>Not really, perhaps in theory though. Create enough interference on the frequency range it uses, and you can stop it.

Agreed. I have a DSS portable phone, and whenever I'm near the (somewhat leaky) microwave, it breaks up horribly. I suppose it would work fine at like 10 baud or something...

Then again, that microwave is pretty good at killing DVB-T television reception as well. At least I'm not turning green yet...

>Free as in, without limits? As in, your electric bill?

I suppose he means that if it covered the entire earth, and everyone was altruistic, a free version of the internet could be created. Imagine how long it would take a packet to traverse across the earth with such a setup, though... 24 hours? ;-)

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[TerryAtWork]

Read and grow wise

http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/05/Hackin gt hedigitalbattlefi.shtml

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[Alsee]

You're one of those people that like to go to elementry school yards and tell the kids there's no Santa Claus, aren't you? :D

-

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[amorsen]

IPSec is nice and everything, but you don't want to waste that much CPU power, and delay, just to visit slashdot.

I do. The PPro-200 server that is my gateway to the Internet easily handles IPSEC at 5.5Mbps, and my wireless connection cannot go faster than that. As to delay, my gateway is 2.5ms away via IPSEC over 802.11b. Without IPSEC (admittedly via IPv6, I would have to take IPSEC down to test IPv4 without IPSEC) my gateway is 2.2ms away. If getting the next /. story 0.3ms faster is that important, you can always subscribe.

Re:Fuggetaboutit

[evilviper]

but DirecWay wouldn't agree...

I didn't mean my original statement to be applied quite a broadly. Yes, if you own a sattelite, you can communicate anywhere. Also, if you setup cell towers everywhere, you could accomplish the same thing. I was really talking about using only low-cost, consumer-level equipment (or however you would like to clasify the technologies within the reach of consumers, and don't require large fees for setup and/or maintenance).

Hey, that's not very fast

[tomzyk]

...providing 150 Mbit/s data rates over ordinary copper wire... at the 1000 feet mark... but the chip can still serve up 4mbps even at 13,000 feet.

[According to what I learned in highschool about the metric system] 150 Mega-bits per second compared to 4 milli-bits per second is an astronomically large difference!

Re:Hey, that's not very fast

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that's something, people are frequently writing crap like 56KBps for modem rates. 56 Kelvin-bytes per second, or 56 kilobits per second? Case matters!

Except it's not slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

The linked article is not slashdotted and has been coming up normally since this appeared. Please stop spamming us with these things.

Re:slashdotted! article text:

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are a fuckhead.

This is getting really annoying

[RhettLivingston]

DSL has been in the works for around 10 years now and still doesn't come close to its goal of providing one video bandwidth channel which is short of the goal it should have. The problem here is that it takes forever to roll out a new infrastructure. Its time the leaders of the industry realize it and make sure that the next infrastructure rollout has the latent capacity (if not the electronics at the nodes) to carry the petabaud traffic that we'll be wanting in 50 years (that's about how often we can afford to do this crap). Spending any more time and resources on copper is wasting time.

There is a market today for multiple on demand video channels, voice, and internet over a single service. As a consumer, I'd pay double just for the pleasure of dropping SBC on their !@#. Plan for that, meet that, and don't even waste a breath on anything short of that.

To reiterate, the minimum bandwidth requirement for any new deployments should be enough to serve at least three unshared video channels, 3 voice lines, and very high bandwidth internet service simultaneously with room in the medium for growth into the dedicated petabaud range over the next 50 years. Anything less is causing a delay in progress while filling fatcats pockets with the proceeds from rolling out already obsolete services.

Re:This is getting really annoying

[Guspaz]

If those are the only requirements, you can do that with currently available DSL technologies.

g.dmt (or was it g.lite? I always confuse the two) supports roughly 7mbit downstream. Assuming 1mbit is enough for one mpeg4 television stream (and it is if you don't get silly with the resolution), and that 32kbit is enough for voice (32kbit is WAY more than is needed to provide voice quality audio using Ogg Vorbis), that is a total non-data use of 3168kbit. Now, assuming 20% overhead (my 3.5mbit line does 2.8mbit) that still leaves you with 2.5mbit actual bandwidth available for internet.

On the upstream side of things, the connection is 800kbit upstream, or about 640kbit after overhead. The three voice lines would leave 544kbit upstream available.

In other words, what you describe can already be done with CURRENTLY deployed DSL technologies, with an internet connectivity of 2.5/0.5 to go with it.

Future DSL developments will only serve to increase the speed of the internet connection that goes with the service, or perhaps to load more TV streams in.

-----

Anyhow, all this aside, VDSL is useless. After all, what use is 150Mbit DSL when ISPs still won't give their subscribers the full 7mbit they can currently provide?

Re:This is getting really annoying

[RhettLivingston]

You're sadly misinformed. True rate ADSL as it was originally planned was capable of 7 MBaud downstream. This was designed specifically to hold a television channel with the compression capabilities of the mid 90s. The lite version that was deployed has less power, supposedly to eliminate the need for trips to the premises to install filters, is only capable of 1.5 MBaud. Supposedly, they didn't find out until after they started deploying that the real world would still require the filters. So, we got stuck with a crippled version for no reason other than perhaps to reduce the electric bill of the switch by about 60%. Furthermore, only the people closest to a switch get that. Though in a major metropolitan area, my DSL connection is limited to about 768KB. The only reason I keep it versus cable is that my provider is very good about actually giving me the whole 768KB unlike some which would bottleneck you to modem speeds at their routers during peak traffic loads.

So, a very few might be able to get 1MBaud. I can't. I've tried to view 300KBaud streams and the quality/resolution is so little as to be worthless.

Also, I think 1MB of mpeg4 falls a bit short of what I'd expect to see on an IP based video stream. Chances are I'm going to be watching that on my computer display at times and it has 2048x1536 resolution. I at least expect HDTV signal resolution with good quality. Certainly anything being thought of now and thus not fully deployed until years down the road has to at a minimum target HDTV.

So, I'd like to see a minimum of about 30MBaud guaranteed bandwidth at the worst case distance. But that is just when thinking of current day consumer side technology. There are a lot of hardware advances in the labs now (and some even out of the labs) that could make good use of far more bandwidth than that. There are even production 3D displays available today.

So, my point is that someone looking at what to deploy today and looking at lifetimes in the range of 20-50 years before the deployment cost is paid off as many of these companies are doing, needs to be planning to provide a bandwidth that will be able to grow at a rate of at least 2X every 2 years if not 18 months. We are a long ways today from the 300baud modems of the early 80s and by the early 20s, we should plan to be just as far from 1.5MBaud. That would put us at about 4GB in the 2023 time frame and over 100 PBaud in the 2043 time frame (those that are saying now that there is no way you'd ever use that must not have lived through the 64K, 640K and other barriers of the past that were more than we'd ever need). Thus there is definitely a need for high quality (not plastic) fiber to the curve to be laid by any projects wanting to compete in the long term.

Come on Everybody...

[billimad]

>I run a server from that and have heavy traffic.

we'll just see about some heavy traffic.

my bad ;-)

Be carefull... Note "Aggregated Bandwidth"

[Anonymous Coward]

They say 150Mbps bandwidth, but notice the word "aggregated". That means total bandwidth up and downstream combined. This does not mean you are going to get 150Mbps downstream folks. I work for a small startup company that sells VDSL systems in Korea. Our current VDSL technology supports almost 100Mbps aggregated bandwidth.

peace

999 feet...

[irving47]

Bah. 1000 feet is nearly useless. You lose 999 feet in the Central Office half the time. I'll take the 4Mb at home, though. It's nice to see DSL is still competitive with cable's downstream.

I don't mean to troll, but

[vidnet]

What's with the people going "yeah whatever, we won't get it here in the US anyways"! I don't mean to troll, but there is much, much more to the world than the USA.

If your own commercialism stops innovation from reaching consumers, vote democratic. Don't oppose taxes. Write letters to your local representatives.

Whining gets you nowhere, and it's just annoying for those of us who actually have a shot at using this technology.

Re:I don't mean to troll, but

[SomeOtherGuy]

It is hard to see all the cool gadgets and technologies...and not be able to take part. We are after all "hunters and gatherers" here in the US. (And we have cash to burn on cool stuff) Yet by the time we seperate what actually makes it to the local Circuit City or Best Buy VS. what we see as "coming soon..." on /., it becomes a bit of a let down.

Re:I don't mean to troll, but

[FireBreathingDog]

Yeah, that's right...nothing helps innovation like taxing the hell out of the private sector so that every fleabitten leftist special interest gets to suck at the government teat...

Re:I don't mean to troll, but

[jo_ham]

At least we can't be thrown into prison without probable cause and without access to a lawyer, denied phonecalls and contact with other people under a warrant that no one is allowed to see.

Welcome to the Free World.

Re:I don't mean to troll, but

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats what you think untill they'll get you, reminds me of 1984, if someone upstairs really hates your guts....

Re:I don't mean to troll, but

[vidnet]

Exactly. Nothing helps innovation like the ability to conduct research knowing that with success or not, you still won't starve to death tomorrow. If you get half electrocuted during an experiment, you still get to keep your car after two weeks in a hospital. If you produce amazing breakthroughs in your field which won't lead to an actual product in 20 years, you can still call it a success.

feh

[jpellino]

Well, Herr Speedy-Hosen, for 1000 feet, I could just hire Michael Johnson to run across campus in - erm - 30 seconds with - let's see - 700 MB per cd... 150 mbit per sec... um..... (click click click) 1,400 cds on his back and get the same throughput! SO TH... What? Ah. OK - maybe this IS a breakthrough after all. Never mind.

Re:feh

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, I get 1.24 cds

Re:feh

[BuckaBooBob]

The latency wouldn't be that great for gaming though :)

13000 feet?

[ShadyG]

Note that that kinda throughput is at the 1000 feet mark... but the chip can still serve up 4mbps even at 13,000 feet.

Who lives at that kind of altitude? I'd guess most of us will get the full data rate, while a few in the Rockies will get slightly less.

-- ShadyG

Other Infinion story - instant-boot chip

[prostoalex]

Infineon seems to be all over the news today. Besides this release here's another one:

New chip boots up computers like a light

International Business Machines Corp. and German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG said they have made an important step toward developing a new kind of memory that could enable computers to boot up instantaneously. IBM said that the magnetic random access memory technology, or MRAM, could replace existing forms of dynamic random access memory, or DRAM -- which is the most popular form of computer memory -- as early as 2005.

Re:Other Infinion story - instant-boot chip

[Llurien]

Yes, I also read it. I've been following the technology since Infineon and IBM first announced their partnership back in 2000. They appear to be running a bit behind schedule, because their original goal was to have mass-production in 2004. Motorola would seem to be slightly ahead in the race.
But still, even if it is late, this kind of technology could take the world by storm. There is only one condition they would need to fulfill: the MRAM would have to be about as cheap as conventional flash RAM. The other characteristics of the MRAM are fenomenal compared to ordinary flash. If they can make it cheap, in about five years MRAM will replace more than half of all current flash RAM applications, and probably a lot of DRAM as well.

Re:slashdotted! article text:

[Anonymous Coward]

Fuck, sir, are a youhead.

RI providers

[fisgreen]

I've lived in RI (Newport) for almost two years now, all of it with Cox Cable. I routinely get 350 KB/s down, and (perceived) reliability is well over 99.5%. For a while, they were a great deal at $35/month, a few months ago they raised to $40 but gave existing customers 3 extra months at $35. Also while "unlimited" technically means a 30GB cap, I know I've busted that quite often, but never heard a peep out of them.

I'm very happy with Cox, and don't hesitate to recommend them as long as you can live without a fixed IP.

Re:RI providers

[cbreaker]

Cox in RI was much better when it was @home.

When it was @home, I had a static IP address, no cap on speed (I would occationally see 10mbit download speeds and 100k/sec uploads), no ports blocked, and much better uptime.

I live in Pawtucket. I've always had a problem with Cox. My first cablemodem was an old Motorola cablemodem (wasn't docsis) and it was blazingly fast. Then they switched to Docsis, and the motorola modems had a problem on the network (they worked... barely..) I had to buy my own cablemodem since they wouldn't upgrade mine for free.

So then they switch away from @home since it went out of business. Now I have blocked ports, slower speeds (although still better then my friend in Mass with 1.5Mbit downstream cap, but he has no blocked ports... and 5 IP's for free.)

Then my cablemodem broke, so I had to get a new one. They wouldn't let me do it over the phone until I took the old one back to some service place in Warwick. Then they screwed up the serial numbers and mac, so the new one wouldn't work. Two weeks later calling twice a day I finally got someone on the phone that said "Hey, the serial and mac are in the wrong fields. Fixed."

I lose my connection twice a week, or more. And their DHCP servers are down so much that I just assigned myself an IP on their network. Every three months or so I have to assign myself a new one because someone gets mine.

They charge $15 a month for rental of a cablemodem. My buddy in MA pays $1.50. If you have your own modem it's hard to get service to come to the house..

One time they shut off my cablemodem after service because the tech said I was running servers. Took me a week to explain that I work in IT and I have a lot of machines so that I can learn job skills at home.

I don't like Cox.

wireless spread spectrum...

[Anonymous Coward]

...will have so-called encryption so weak that anyone can crack it with little effort, and the latency will be so bad that its broadband will be only useful for downloading large files more quickly but will be utterly useless for anything that requires quick responsiveness like VOIP or online gaming.

Speed is not what is so interesting in particular

[drinkypoo]

Though it does open up the possibility of video on demand over DSL.

Reach of over 4km (13,200 feet) at speeds exceeding 4 Mbps.

What we really need to know is what speed does it deliver at 17,000 feet, and what is the maximum range? Pacific Bell/SWB (West Coast) is only deploying to 14,500 feet maximum now rather than the old 17,000 feet because they couldn't make it reliable at 17k (though in some markets with decent copper, you can get full speed at that range.) Unfortunately most of the pacbell copper is terrible.

Meanwhile DOCSIS cable does 45Mbps peak down (non-shared) and 11Mbps peak up. I've personally gotten 6Mbps down on DOCSIS cable with a really funky and poorly attenuated cabling setup.

Let's solve the last mile!

[RandyF]

Hey!

Let's stop the whining about lack of high-speed coverage! I have another idea.

Anybody up for pitching in together to build a company to force the last mile. We'll simply bypass the telco and cable companies, put in higher bandwidth than this, charge reasonable fees, and have on-demand video and VOIP as built in services. We'll start with dense neighborhoods and then acquire grants for poor neighborhoods and rural areas. We'll use a shared bandwidth scheme with a minimum speed gurantee. If only 1 user is active, he gets the whole pipe.

It's time to stop the whining about how bad the high bandwidth coverage is and just start making money changing it!

There are enough of us out there (and I'm talking just /.ers) who can cover the technical, financial, and regulatory bases and make this thing happen. Why wait for the bloated telcos and cable companies to build (and own) the new infrastructure. Let's build it ourselves.

New Motto: No more dark fiber! No more dialups!

Re:Let's solve the last mile!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm all for it. Care to explain how you plan to do it economically? Whether you go for wired or wireless, you're going to have to buy/lease land to place.

Wireless is a possible solution, but you have to pay real money to optimization engineers to get good coverage (as a cell phone company!), and the landscape is LITERALLY always changing, with buildings going up and other wireless stuff interfering. You won't have as much problem with other wireless stuff if you can secure your own frequency from the FCC, but that costs serious money, whereas unregulated stuff is free but, well, unregulated and thus less reliable.

Or, you can go for fiber if you want to. You could rent dry pairs from the phone company, but if you do this on a large scale, you may find that they'll end up sending their hordes of lobbyists to the regulators and get an astronomical fee increase and put you out of business. Of course, you could also lay your own data lines (copper or fiber, whatever), but you'll find that that is ANYTHING but cheap. You need to own or lease right-of-way, and you either to bury lines (expensive) or install poles and string lines between them.

So, if you can come up with a plan that works technically AND economically, by all means, post the numbers.

Re:Let's solve the last mile!

[RandyF]

There's always a way!

For neighborhoods with Associations, the trick is to get into some meetings, send information to the residents/members, sell the individuals on the idea. Then, with their help (they do know the neighborhood best) lay out a plan and trade right-of-way for some of the setup fees. The monthly income (say $50 per month) would, after a time, pay for the installation.

For lower income or remote areas, apply for grants or subsidies on a case-by-case basis. It won;t work everywhere, but it will work.

The ROI is not fast. This is an investment of tenacity to build a large sustainable corporation. There comes a point where critical mass is reached and it begins paying back nicely. Somewhat like loaning money for real estate; if you make enough loans, eventually your monthly income outstrips your outlay. In the same way, building the last mile infrastructure will put in our hands a monthly base income plus the ability to offer added services.

To get it going takes a lot of people believing in the vision and investing. For instance, a $10 per month "association" of 100,000 people would provide $1,000,000 per month to work with. TADA...

You'll have it when...

[sterno]

... somebody is willing to pay for it. As it is most people are happy with the speeed they get from current cable modems and DSL. Unless there's an application that the average consumer wants that consumes more bandwidth, there will be no market for these services.

If you can imagine it , someone will make it ...

[Ex-MislTech]

Given time of course ;)

http://www.alcoa.com/afl_tele/en/product.asp?cat _i d=67&prod_id=319

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

forget this, howsabout UWB over copper?

[otis wildflower]

check Cringely's latest posting.. UWB over copper, which survives conversion from copper to fiber and back.. If it's as good as promised, it'll bury DSL..

Same boat

[SuperKendall]

I'm behind a splitter, so it's either SDSL or Comcast which feels like dialup for uplink.

I was seriously considering just buying a full T1 and reselling wireless access to nearby neighbors. Since I'd be willing to pay $200 a month for a full T1 where I could host stuff at my house, it would only take about 25 users at $20 a pop to make it worthwhile... but what a pain to manage.

I wonder if it would be feasible to somehow pay for access to the splitter, run a T1 to there, and then distribute DSL from there to everyone in my development? Hmm... I really think if you advertised as "100x faster than cable modem!* (*based on average upload speed) Share movies with your friends! Monitor your house from anywhere!" That you could sell a load of service. You could even throw in a few X10 cams for free!!

Please, someone feel free to steal this idea and sell me faster service before I can do it myself.

Bandwidth-wise, nothing beats...

[jetmarc]

..a Federal Express aircraft full of DVD's. Although ping latency is horrible :(

Start a neighborhood Co-op

[Ex-MislTech]

Talk to everyone in your neghborhood, ask them if
they want broadband .

You can use point to multi-point, and can use Mesh
topology to extend your range too .

Mesh AP www.locustworld.com

Find a high elev. landmark, and use that as a Wi-Fi
transmission point .

The Co-op can be a non/not-for-profit and you can
save money on some taxes, and expenses .

The cost per user goes down the more users you get .

I am setting up one of these in a rural area soon .

Peace,
Ex-MislTech

Looks nice but I do not see this coming to the US

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the FCC tried to reach a solomon-like ruling that had provisions for both the baby bells and the CLECs, they ended up telling the baby bells that they still have to allow access to the old copper network but are free to develop newer networks without providing that access.

What this does is not give the phone companies any incentive to roll out anything new to their copper networks. Therefore, unless a big CLEC can take on the financial burden, I do not see this being rolled out in the US.

4mbps?

[kkith]

milli bits per second? :)

I don't mean to feed a troll, but

[thynk]

If your own commercialism stops innovation from reaching consumers, vote democratic. Don't oppose taxes. Write letters to your local representatives.

If the issue of FTTC or FTTH is ever supported by the democratic party, then I'll vote for it. As it is, I think too much of my tax money goes to social programs. Seems that the USA is a little behind on the broadband wagon, with the exception of a few communities that are not waiting for the cable or phone companies to run FTTC, but are doing it themselves. Good for them. I have written my local reps, but haven't recieved a response back on my queries of when FTTC/H is coming here.

I had a point here, but it seems to of escaped me, but this is /. after all, so I guess I don't need one.

Now if only...

[DarthVeda]

Now if only I could just get a lousy 300 Kbps out of my crappy DSL

MOD PARENT UP! Informative!

[Anonymous Coward]

MOD up!!!

Not future tech - my ISP offers it *now*

[Bj�rn Stenberg]

My ISP, Bostream, offers this to customers already. Here's their service info page (in swedish)

In essense it says depending on distance to your switch, you get:

<300m: 26 Mbps full duplex
<1000m: 13 Mbps full duplex
>1000m: 8/1 Mbps (down/up)

Price: 399 SEK/month (~50 USD)

Another swedish ISP, Bredbandsbolaget, is also offering VDSL but currently "only" up to 10Mbit.

Typo in the article?

[Tony Hoyle]

4MB at 13,000 feet is about the same as standard ADSL (in fact my ISP offers such a package relatively cheaply).

4MB at 130,000 feet would be impressive, though...

The top speed at 1000 feet sounds good, too, until you remember that at that distance you could run cat5e at 100MB (maximum distance for cat5e is about 1100 feet, cat7 goes about a mile... don't see much of that on sale though).

Re:Typo in the article?

[tjb]

Yeah, but you can't mass-deploy 100 Mbps ethernet like that - the crosstalk would kill you. Ethernet is spectacularly inefficient in the way that it uses bandwidth (though GigE is much better from what I can tell) and the spectral compatibility with repsect to self XT (not to mention other comm protocols) is terrible. But that's not what ethernet is for - ethernet was designed to be simple and cheap and fast and short-ranged.

And to tell the truth, this particular VDSL implementation isn't going anywhere. QAM is going to get clobbered when it comes to standardization by DMT. QAM VDSL is made up of 3 or 4 massive downstream channels and a similar number of upstream channels interleaved in a frequency-domain-duplex fashion, with each channel having a different symbol rate (somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but I just can't see any other way to do this with QAM unless the channels all have the same bandwidth, which I don't believe they do). This means that you need separate analog receivers for each of the channels - yuck. And QAM is also disadvantaged by the fact that these massive channels have to deal with interference by notching out the offending frequencies in their equalizer, and given limitations on the number of taps you can have in an equalizer at these kind of symbol rates, the notches are going to either be inneffective or way too wide.

DMT VDSL, on the otherhand, is effectively 4096 (or 8192) separate QAM channels, each 4.3125 KHz wide. This means that a) Everything runs at the same symbol rate, greatly simplifying frequency-domain-duplex arrangements and b) If there is interference at a particular frequency, you just load less bits there (or shut it off completely), and this can be done with a 4.3125 KHz resolution.

A) means DMT modems will be cheaper and B) means they will deal more gracefully with noise which in turn means it can be more widely deployed. Both those things mean more money for the telco, and telcos like money :)

Tim

uh huh...

[abhisarda]

this will remain a pipe dream

Spread Spectrum and SETI

[mcrbids]

Let's say that aliens were using a high speed, encrypted, spread spectrum algorithm for their communications - would SETI detect it?

If my understanding is correct, the answer would be... NO.

Given that we started broadcasting around 100 years ago, and that we are probably within another 100 years of changing to something that SETI can't detect, and the billions of years that evolution has been working, wouldn't that make SETI fairly pointless?

They make a nice screensaver, though... =)

13,000 Feet

[BarefootClown]

but the chip can still serve up 4mbps even at 13,000 feet

OK, sure, so this is great for all of us light airplane pilots, but what about the airlines?

Re:13,000 Feet

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgot to show some prof like the Sweedish guy. http://provider.bb.yahoo.co.jp/adsl/12m/index.html
Translate into englist using http://babelfish.altavista.com
The is just one of the ISPs here in Japan. The service is provided my NTT which is the telephone company here.
An the best the price 20 USD pr month.

Re:13,000 Feet

[Anonymous Coward]

One more thins that is no download limits or time limits but free us 24/7.

Re:13,000 Feet

[Anonymous Coward]

My commenst shoul have been a reply to http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=67527&threshol d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=137&mode=thread&cid=6196454 Myst be because I using a 12 mbit connecton now :)

Johnson Transport

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you probably forgot to factor in the burn time of each CD. Assuming the CDs are all filled to capacity and you have a 52X burner, then each CD will take approximately 1.5 minutes (91.897s).

Further, assuming Johnson can run at 33.963 ft/s (the Olympian record) for the entire length, it would take 29.444 seconds. Thus, it takes 91s times the number of CDs plus 29s for him to get across.

So, you have:
700MB*x/(91.897s*x+29.444s)=y*Mbps.

As you can see by taking the limit of y as x approaches infinity, you can get a maximum of about 60.9Mbps.

In order to get 150Mbps with the Johnson Transport, you would need a burner with a burn speed of approximately 130X.

Now, say we clone Michael Johnson...

Further, as you can see, we can now create a derived unit known as the JohnsonX (the transfer rate possible with Johnson carrying infinite CDs burned at 52X) which will be equivalent to 60.9 Mbps. Further, we could investigate the rate at which data is transfered if one Library of Congress is moved by a team of Microsoft and SCO lawyers, both known to be full of hot air, thus contributing to speed. ;-)

Japan and 12 mbit

[Anonymous Coward]

WHAT an invention. I can buy a 12 Mbit internet connection TODAY in Japan and they have just "invented it".
I am sure you can get 150 Mbit 20 cm away from the hub.
That looks more like a not for some stock investors not for real IT people hat knows what they are talking about.
We are already moving on to the next glass fiber. The true future of communications... for now. They might have slow ADSL connections in Africa somewhere.

I would think more along the lines of campuses

[Sycraft-fu]

I work at teh University of Arizona and, like many large universities, we have our own cable plan. We own the right of way for the entire campus proper and have our own fibre and voice network. Now, for some reason or another, there are some buildings like sororities that are on the voice network, but not the data network. They have voice grade copper to their building, but not fibre. I've never been able to really find out why. So, this means that they either need to go with wireless or T1s.

Well, two of these sororities are, literally, across an alley from our operations centre where the phone switch and network core sit. A number of other are just across a street, or down a little father. Well this would be great for them. The closest ones would be able to get 100+mbit just like the rest of campus, and the farther ones would still get deceant speed. All this, and they wouldn't have to pay for teh fee to have fibre layed to their buildings (if we would even do it, I'm not clear if it is an ecenomoic or political holdup).

Also the speeds look over all better, even at longer distances. So most people can't get the mz speeds, who cares. They are claiming 4mbps at 13,000 cable feet. Sounds good to me, the DMT DSL I have now could only barely get 4mbps to me and I am only about 5000 cable feet form the CO. If they can crank of the speeds at longer distances, makes DSL a lot nicer.

I get 3Mb/sec now with Cable

[sirshannon]

I have been on ADSL since they first offered it here in late 1998. I was 13,000 feet off and clocked 1.2 Mb/sec consistantly. I just moved and am only 10,000 feet out now but can't get ADSL here for some damn reason so I sucked it up and called AOLTW and got cable broadband. I am clocking 3 Mb/sec now and am no longer a DSL advocate AT ALL.

evidence here.

Features, not speed

[EvlG]

For me features are more important.

I want multiple IPs at reasonable prices, with no silly restrictions in TOS.

DSL is the only way to go for anything like that. Cable is "don't like it? go elsewhere." It may be faster, but its not more useful for me.

Using In-Place technology is cheaper.

[splerdu]

Old technology already has the infrastructure in-place. 150Mbps over copper is significantly less expensive than having to lay down new fiber line to each house.

VDSL @ home

[G3ckoG33k]

Damn, that blew my bragging rights for 26 MBit/sec with VDSL... Ok, I won't get it until September, but still. Check out Scream at www.bostream.com for about 35 USD a month through your telephone wires. Make sure your area is covered by their services.

A Waste Of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

So? Yet-Another-High-Speed-Copper-Solution down the drain. Telecoms won't implement this to consumers at full bit-rate. They'll charge us an arm and a leg and cut the bandwidth into a tenth of what it can really run. Because they're a monopoly. That's the only reason. Their hardware is hardly capable of serving up what limited bitrates they provide for us now. So lets say someone found a way to transmit gigabit over 15,000 feet. They'd give us 5 or 8 megabits, and hoard the rest. Why? Why would they ever do such a thing? Because they can? No. Because there's no one else out there to stop them. There are no other local phone companies controlling COs and cans. It's all Baby Bell equipment. So of course they're going to control the speed of what goes over what is in effect _THEIR_ copper. And the government just gives them more and more resources to drain away until we're left with moving to some remote area of the country just so we don't have to be served by a Baby Bell.

We've had VDSL for years now. Very-high-bitrate DSL. And HDSL. The latter able to achieve T1 speeds, the former around 78Mbit/s, if memory serves. They claim it's too expensive? Not realistic? Who needs that kind of access? Why do you think they keep people on dialup? Why don't they just offer some kind of free installation and 3 months free for every dialup user? They'd be making more money AND providing a service, but they keep the old dialups avaliable. Why? Well, one could say they were trying to hold on to the costs incurred by their old hardware. I'm not sure why exactly. They do send all their customers those deals for DSL in the mail, but they haven't tried to phase out modems at all. I know they have to cover those long-range people but there are alternatives to 56K they still won't consider.

I have a proposition for all you go-getting investors and venture capital fucks: who wants to make a new telecom? Something to start local and provide for one area the best damn telco in history, and then scale up to national service. It would take a lot of work and some serious bucks, but the end result would be us re-writing the rules on some of the most fundamental IT laws. And the key to getting people to switch from the "consistent" Bells? Free internet access. Through xDSL, through those ancient modems, and through commodity WiFi. Just imagine the possibilities of wireless internet access along every telephone pole or CAN or underground tunnel. You could drive to work and have the internet every step of the way, at 54Mbit/s. Of course, this is a dream too. But it would be nice.

:try

[Anonymous Coward]

Try speakeasy.net

But what good is the speed if you can't use it....

[node159]

Hmm let me do the maths, I pay $30 US for 128kbps 10Gb per month or $0.15 per Mb for full speed (max of 400KB/s)... I see a very poor future. Here in New Zealand we have the technology, hell I have a fucking Gigabit fiber running outside my house but at $500 US a month, and thats for 10Gb only, its all about the money. Whats the point in having the technology but having it priced so insanely high that no one can afford it, i'd rather be without thank you. PS: Dial up is piss cheap $10 US for as much as you can get (read 24/7/365), and comes as cheap as $5 US for 150 hours.

discrepancies

[Anonymous Coward]

hi!

could someone reminde me please of the mega-terra-giga overwhelming discrepancies
in society, please.
you know ... if i don't get reminded how unfair this fu#king planet is, and how
inventors (NOT investors) get cheated by marketing etc. i "might" blabber
about the design of my fusion reactor, my super simple multi gigabit
wireless network design and my warp (sic) drive ...
thank you!

1992:
"Ma, i need 20 bucks for my internet access subscription?"
"Not a chance in hell ..."

P>S> remove the "i.q." tester from your preview function /.

Re:discrepancies

[Anonymous Coward]

get a blender and shut up, dumb-ass!

and since

[ViVeLaMe]

it's German, it will be boycotted by the US.
See ya in 10 years! :-)

DSL providers need a kick in the ass...

[aquarian]

The speed of the connection isn't the problem. Anything faster than 400k or so is plenty for most people -- most servers on the internet don't serve anywhere near that fast anyway. What's killing DSL is the speed of deployment, or lack of it.

Though I was previously a happy DSL user, I've gone with cable this time. While there are supposedly at least two DSL providers in this town, neither one returns phone calls, shows up for appointments, etc. And even with previous homes I never got DSL anywhere close to immediately. It was always at least 2 weeks until an appointment, and something was always wrong the first time -- the technician didn't bring the right equipment, the lines had problems, etc. I never got DSL in less than a month, which is unacceptable.

Bad phone lines are one thing, but mostly there's no excuse for this.

With cable, all you do is get a modem, plug it together, and you're all set. No crappy PPPoE software, hardware incompatibilities, line filters, etc. Most cable providers can get you a modem within a day or so. If that's not fast enough, you can usually drop by their office and pick up a modem yourself -- and be online within 5 minutes of getting home.

DSL providers are losing big. They don't need a shot in the arm -- more like a swift kick in the ass. Their shareholders ought to be livid.

Re:DSL providers need a kick in the ass...

[Saganaga]

You know, you're absolutely right. I had forgotten how absolutely horrible Qwest DSL customer service was (repressed memories?). When I first got DSL back in August 1999 I would sometimes be on hold for 45-60 minutes with tech. support, and it seemed like no one knew what they were doing.

And you're also right about the installation time lag. DSL takes weeks to be installed, whereas cable for me has been installed in a day or two both times I've gotten hooked up.

DSL providers do indeed need to get a clue. Maybe the speed increase (if it ever happens) could help, but without better customer service and technical support and quicker turnaround, they are never going to regain market share.

u r a fukc

[Anonymous Coward]

you r theh fuck

New Zealand speeds

[Anonymous Coward]

You people are incredibly lucky talking about such high speed connections - you can pay $60 NZD here for 128kbit ADSL with a 5gig limit, the only alternative is $80 a month for $256kbit cable with 10gig cap - any higher speeds and the prices jump incredibly and the transfer is capped at 1gig. as it is im stuck with 56kbits dial up due to prices being too high (income is incredibly low)