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200mbps DSL On Its Way?
An anonymous reader writes "I came upon a news story about Texas Instruments developing a new DSL technology which will allow ISP's to boost their bandwidth to 200mbps (Yes, mega bits per second). The UDSL service, as it is dubbed, is backwards compatible with current DSL technologies such as VDSL and ADSL. This should get many cable internet users, like myself, a second look at DSL." Update: 06/15 01:26 GMT by T : "mps" and "mbs" both de-mangled.
Then maybe I would have a First Post... I had to try
They never mention what kind of distance you have to be from a node in order for this to work. I imagine all these "geek apartment buildings" are next to the C/O ;)
Also, will the telecos even have the bandwidth from the node, onward to really sustain that kind of bandwidth? I mean, we're looking at OC-3 speeds, right? I can imagine their pip getting saturated.
Finally, what good is this if ISP's shut down anyone who use "too much bandwidth" anyway? We're already at that scenario with 1.5 meg/sec constantly. What about 200? Egh.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Such a breakthrough lab technology makes it to the market and drives down prices to the point it's affordable to the average geek net user... I wont be holding my breath for either part myself.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
There isnt the infrastructure to support that much data .. I'm talking about the core.
.. the bandwidth will drop.
Once more people start getting it
Yay! Another service my ISP can charge through the nose for! Pure profit, baby!
How appropriate. You fight like a cow.
...it's faster than the TI-99
Personally I love this idea. It will let my local DSL provider advertise "20x the speed of cable!". Then they can increase the number of subscribers per segment by 20x and I can continue to enjoy these 40k/s downloads while my ISP charges more than they ever have. I think this is a huge step forward, but if I pay a little extra can I also request a boot to the head???
'which will allow ISP's to boost their bandwidth to 200mbs'
awesome, now it will only take 5 seconds to get a bit.
think how fast sites could get slashdotted then.
That we've all learned the disappointing lesson that lab results don't tend to display the same capacity in the real world.
When your phone lines start burning through the walls, don't say you weren't warned.
--
Are you a Chipotle Fan?
People have cable TV. All Cablevision Corporation has to do is offer some special deal with cable TV and people leave DSL. DSL companies can't do that. They're crippled because DSL is a technology only applicable for internet access.
Yup, I'm a cable user. Love it. Still faster.
They'll actually let us use the bandwidth they provide to us without restricting/overcharging us?
Nah.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The only question now is how much of this theoreticial bandwidth will actually be passed along to subscribers. There is only so much bandwidth on a fiber line that most isp's are using to feed current cable and dsl lines, and current cable and dsl are able to transfer at higher speeds than most are being used at. Seems to me more like a formality.
thisnukes4u.net
I wasn't aware that Mps or Mbs were units of transfer speed.
and your isp will still cap your drooling consumer connection at 256k upstream.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
So, I will expect 200mps DSL ...oh, let's see... on the fifth of never.
I guess it's cable for the foreseeable future.
This is not going to be consistently faster than ADSL or VDSL... They said most of the time the speed will be like ADSL or VDSL depending how far you are.
Doesn't look like this is going to be a reality any time soon:
Texas Instruments expects to have samples of these new chips available in the second half of next year.
The first generation of products using Texas Instruments' chips will likely be introduced sometime in 2006.
200mbs (Yes, mega bits per second)
No, millibits per second. Get your prefixes straight. Oh and by the way, the headline says "200mps" - 200 metres per second?
I remember reading not too long ago that 80% of SPAM is relayed through virus-laden open relays.
/Shudders
Can you imagine the amount of SPAM a 24x7 200 Mb connection can generate?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
So much hype, yet so little reality. I guess it's just the cynic in me...but all these technologies are great, but they are worth nothing if they don't show themselves in a meaningful time frame.
Take CD burners for example. When they first came out (as WORM drives) it was all, "ooh, you have a drive that can WRITE cds! wow!! It took a decent bit of time as it progressed from the SCSI writers to the 1x then 2x then 4x IDE writers. When DVD writers came out, they were quite unique as well. Now only a short while later, grandma and grandpa have one on their pc they bought to send email to their grandkids.
Unless these new techs make a debut soon, it'll become old hat, and all energy that went into development will be useless. They'd be better off keeping these "proof of concept" techs in the confines of the test lab, till they are actually able to get this thing into production. (A la, Duke Nukem Forever, which if they just kept their mouth shut, wouldn't make them the laughing stock of the gaming industry).
My 2 bits.
...on their current technology first.
I still can't get DSL at my house, one that was built 7 years ago in a new neighborhood. The cable company had no problem getting it out here though.
Sorry, but availability rules over bandwidth. The bandwidth of a non-existant connection is 0mps.
This is vaporware.
Right NOW, I've got a 7megabit/1megabit DSL connection right now with full throughput, static IP for $25/month (as part of a $50 telco/dsl package) I could never get service like this with such low latency from my cable provider. Plus I had to deal with the cable provider. yech.
Obviously, it helps that I'm 1/2 mile from a CO, but there are deals to be found!
Wonder why they did an Anonymous Coward for this comment? ;)
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
As it says in the article it allows for ADSL speeds at distances > 1km and only reaches the fast speeds at 1km. Doesn't seem all that great to me. You still need your network provider to have a very fat pipe coming to within 1km (probably less) of your home. Which is not the case for most people.
"UDSL provides a middle ground, according to Chow. Because the technology is compatible with both ADSL and VDSL standards, it adheres to requirements of both technologies. For example, at distances greater than 1 kilometer, it provides an ADSL-like service with ADSL data rates. But at shorter distances, it can provide VDSL-like service with data rates that match or exceed VDSL. In some instances, Chow claims, a UDSL service could provide up to 200mbps of bandwidth. This is four times as much bandwidth as is currently available through VDSL services. "
Maybe with this new DSL I'll actually be able to download movies from Starz
But seriously, bring on the bandwidth. Hopefully it wont be something stupid like 199mbps down, 1mbps up.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
When was this? 52Mb/s? They don't have the backbone for that consumer connection.
Are they using these technologies as sort of a small telco -> big telco link? Otherwise, what's the point? Even existing consumer technology isn't the bottleneck.
DSL still isn't available in my area... even so, even if the bandwidth was that high, I probably wouldnt go for it, because most ISP's around here would turn that into a burst rate and you'd never even see close to that. Oh I so miss the days of @home where I had 45Mbit on my own dedicated circuit. I'm still on that dedicated circuit with a different cable company. However 3Mbit is my cap. 3Mbit? *sigh* and all my friends who can get DSL that claims to be 1.5Mbit, are only seeing 800k worth in their downloads, where I see my full 3. This greedy nature of the ISP's makes me want to either A) vomit or B) win the lottery and buy out all the local ISP's so that I can give everyone an uncapped connection and let them fight for the head-end bandwidth. (Hey! YOU! Yeah you, the one reading this and criticizing me, calling me names in your head! LEAVE MY PIPE DREAMS ALONE! =) )
>This should get many cable internet users, like myself, a second look at DSL."
Ever try using a packet sniffer on your cable modem? Seeing all my neighbors Pr0n browsing was enough to make me switch to DSL.
Are you sure you don't mean 200Mbps with a capital 'M'?
200mbs (Yes, mega bits per second)
First, the `m' should be capitalised. `M' is for mega- (1000000 times), `m' is for milli- (1/1000).
Second, Mbs means megabits times seconds, not per second. It should either be Mbps or Mb/s. The former is used much more commonly, so let's go with that.
Yeah, I know it's a minor nitpick, but it's irking me, and I had to get it off my chest.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
There is no way the telcos have the backbone to support tens of thousands of people all pulling 200MB in highly poplulated areas going into a single CO.
Pardon me if I don't hold my breath.
If you actually read the ZDNET article, they state:
"UDSL provides a middle ground (between ADSL and VDSL), according to Chow. Because the technology is compatible with both ADSL and VDSL standards, it adheres to requirements of both technologies. For example, at distances greater than 1 kilometer, it provides an ADSL-like service with ADSL data rates. But at shorter distances, it can provide VDSL-like service with data rates that match or exceed VDSL. In some instances, Chow claims, a UDSL service could provide up to 200mbps of bandwidth. This is four times as much bandwidth as is currently available through VDSL services."
So basically 200mbps is probably only attainable under an incredibly small percentage of installations where the variables are all basically perfect.
I have to say I'm glad I live in Canada after hearing you all bitch. My dsl seems pretty decents. No download or upload limits. Uploads and downloads cap at a reasonable level. Bell doubled the speed for free. I do have one arguement against cable right now though. When the cable and phone line got cut down the street. Bell was there pretty much right away and it was fixed in 2 hours while it took rogers (cable) all night. Cable doesn't seem to consider itself critical yet.
like all previous flavors of dsl, the closer you are to the dslam, the higher the bandwidth you can get. so how close do you gotta be to get 200Mbs - 2 inches?
...if you download more than 1G/month, the ISP will pull the plug on you for excessive bandwith use!
Best Buy can have you arrested
This raises the question of how much bandwith is required for HDTV? I thought cable already was delivering this content. Does that mean a cable line can deliver more than the 200-300kbs I am getting now (on a good day).
The second question I would have is how fair will this be? When cable modems came out, they were available in the richest communities first. Then it spread to the middle class communities. I have a freind who lives south of chicago who wanted a cable modem 2 years ago (for his mom, who refuses to move out of her childhood home which is in a deprived neighborhood), and AT&T at the time was not offering broadband in his neighborhood. Yet I got mine a year before he asked for his. And what is worse is when the cable modem came out, a friend of mine who lives less than a mile away from me got his 18 months before I got mine, and he got a better deal. The cable company has raised the price twice since then. So for those who would say the first people pay for making the technology available to all, I would question that assumption.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
In some instances
Care to quote where it explains in what instances 200MB is possible?
I know I'm stupid for actually reading the article, but this isn't much more than a combination of ADSL and VDSL technologies that will allow ISP's to only buy one set of equipment on their end. You will still expect the same ADSL speeds you get now unless you live next door to the phone company. Most CO's aren't even equipped with VDSL hardware in the first place, so don't expect much unless you live in Hong Kong. This will not magically make your 1.5Mbps ADSL line any faster. The only ones benefitting here are the ISP's and possibly the VDSL users closest to the CO's.
Yeah, but WHEN?
I build networks as a part time job, everytime there is a problem with DSL(and the office is in my town) it either dosnt get fixed and the people just end up with cable or it takes weeks to fix. My grandparents were going to get DSL but AT&T sent out a guy to look at there house he said it was the lines from the office to there house and then AT&T said they had to send another before they could even start the paper work for someone to look at the lines. We just gave up and went with cable and have been happy ever since. If this is the kind of tech support DSL is going to continue to have DSL is going to go away, at least in the US.
I was going to say... 200 millibits per second? That's remarkable in its own right, but I don't think I'll be dropping cable for those rates...
/*No comment*/ #No comment
Nor does the article seem to address whether this is a symmetric connection or not. Of course having that kind of a fat pipe in the house would be revolutionary anywhere in America, but it would be nice to see more symmetrics options available. Even cable providers are putting arbitrary uplink caps on their service these days. Time to move to Japan?
...caps for DSL users too!
In fact I suspect this has been one of the major drivers in Laptops becomeing popular. For interet use they were as fast as desktops, but were wireless, and the convenience was great. With Apple products this used to be even more true because the laptops had the same speed processors as the desktops (unlike the PC universe where svelt Laptops severly lag desktops in performance.) Thus until the G5s came out choosing laptop over a desktop was a no brainer.
With this new 200Mbs connection once again you have to choose: wicked fast connection with a WIRE or go unwired. For most internet surfing the other end of the pipe is too slow to keep up even with 802.11b, but that will change if 200mbs becomes ubiquitous.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Trying to get FP and on a Uni computer
Yes, why has no one asked about the current exorbant costs of VDSL and what those costs mean for USMDSL (UltraSuperMegaDSL).
I've always liked the concept of DSL better, too bad it just lags behind cable in total achievable bandwidth usually.
We have DSL at my home in NJ, Road Runner Cable in Rochester and I'm using Comcrap in Boston right now. The DSL (Verizon) could handle games, it transferred quickly, but the pings were usually lower than the Road Runner cable. The Comcrap cable I have in Boston gets 9mbps and the pings are basically just as good as our DSL in jersey.
They're all pretty good, but DSL is often the cheapest option in some areas, so that's really good.
Presently here, but not there.
It mentions "at distances greater than 1 kilometer" it's comparable to current ADSL offerings. Whoopty doo. ADSL has a range of about 3 miles from the central office or nearest remote station. For the metric impaired, 1 kilometer is about 0.62 miles.
A circle with a radius of 0.62 miles centered on a C/O (thanks to handy Google calculator) covers an area of about 1.2 square miles. Similar math has standard ADSL covering an area just over *28 square miles*.
So we're looking at a technology that meets current VDSL speeds in a coverage area less than 5% of the size offered by standard ADSL. How much freaking smaller do you have to go to offer UDSL?
If we have to go 5% again (and that's being generous), we're looking at having to be closer than 0.14 miles to the C/O (225 meters).
Right now I live close enough to my C/O to get a 7Mb connection. I only have a 1.5. With this technology I'd probably be one of the few to benefit and maybe see that top range peak out at 10 or 20Mb. But seriously, this tech means jack to the average DSL customer who's usually using it because a.) they can't get cable or b.) has a grudge against cable or is c.) stealing cable.
200mbps (Yes, mega bits per second).
then
Update: 06/15 01:26 GMT by T: "mps" and "mbs" both de-mangled.
Well if you're going to take any effort to de-mangle, how about de-mangling into something that doesn't mean "milibits per second" if what you really mean is "megabits per second" (Mbps)?
-b
(argh)
myselfmusic
Seriously - you will never get it since it's from the phone company. All that will happen is that the phone companies will offer large businesses the same bandwidth they've had before for the same rate except that it will cost the phone company much less to deliver.
Surely I live in the boondocks? On a remote island? Treehouse in the woods?
I'm in Northern Virginia, a stone's throw from AOL's headquarters, Oracle, Microsoft, PeopleSoft, Accenture, enormous datacenters holding things like Google and Hotmail, and what's supposed to be the nexus of more global fiber links than anywhere else on Earth (Herndon, VA). My home was built in 2000 so it's not like I'm running a 1950's era POTS line. Hell, the CTO of PSINet (the ORIGINAL dot-bomb!) used to be my next door neighbor, and even he couldn't pull any strings with Verizon for our neighborhood.
Without Comcast, I'd be screwed. Well...more screwed, anyway.
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
And just when you were wondering how to fill up those 400GB Seagate SATA Drives ....
An article on 400gb hard drives and an article on 200Mbps DSL on the same day! Its a conspiracy I tell you!
Moo!
I moved to the US from Europe a couple of years ago and was absolutely shocked when I saw the monthly costs for broadband over here. I pay ~$50 a month for Comcast internet (3Mbps/256Kbps) today. I have friends in Europe that pay less for 8Mbps/8Mbps, including static IPs. Sure, speakeasy.net offer 6Mbps/768Kbps--for $100 a month! One can only imagine what the price for, say, 100Mbit would be here in the U.S...
P.S. Does anyone know if there's a technical reason for the exceedingly high costs here in the U.S?
We would have had 7Mbaud almost a decade ago if the phone companies hadn't sabotaged ADSL. They reduced the power so that they wouldn't have to do home visits, then found out after deployment that there was still too much interference and filters were necessary anyway. Thus, they knocked us from the original specification to 1.5Mbaud for no real reason.
At least that's the party line. My feeling is that they aren't ready for true competition and are doing everything they can to keep the rate low enough to delay the onset of VOIP.
I see no incentive for them to give us a generation that skips several though that is certainly the right thing to do. Putting the infrastructure in their hands has reduced it to a new tech every 6 years or so. At that rate, they should be shooting for at least a 16 times increase with every rollout. And the ADSL generation was rolled out years later and 4 times slower than what it should have been. So, at this point, we're so far off the curve it seems hopeless.
Seems to me the problem with high speed internet isn't so much the speeds available but rather the draconian contracts that you must deal with. If my service can be shut off when I've exceeded my undisclosed bandwidth by an undisclosed amount, then faster speeds just means that I can reach my unpredictable shut off time faster than before.
RFC2119
So what's the data rate in the uplink direction, to the exchange? Does 'Uni' stand for unidirectional or universal? Is the downlink speed at the expense of uplink speed?
I know it's been mentioned already that a small m means milli (10^-3) but I'd just like to point out that most people could call up their friend and talk a binary stream to him and have him type it in faster than 200 mbps. The two of you would only have to say and type in a one or a zero once every five seconds to achieve this. Crazy what a little capitalization can do.
Another interesting tidbit, Berkeley Spice doesn't read "M" as mega either, you have to specify "Meg". Much to the disgust of EE students, "M," and, "m," are both interpreted as milli.
`which fortune`
You can download at super fast-speeds, sure...
But who's going to be UPLOADING at that rate?
Even if it does work, you're not going to notice the difference all that much.
Its not for the average user...its so the bells can provide hdtv over dsl lines.
is that the telcos will allow people to use the bandwidth but charge for the throughput. I mean-- if the pipe is saturated, then people will still get a reasonable speed. However, we are still dealing with USDL in short distances, then VSDL, the ADSL on the same equipment, just varying the distances.
Personally, I think that twisted pair might be endangered in the long run. Where I am (rural central Washington), the new trend is to run fiber to peoples' houses at least in the small towns (a few small towns are going wifi, but that is another matter). My telephone and 2mb/s internet shares the same fiber at a rate if $51/month.... (Geeks should move here), and I recently upgraded to their $100 offering and bought 2mb/s *symetric* so I can host customers' web sites here.
Note that this is their *residential* offerings. Business offerings can start out at 5mb/s down at least for $9.95 plus telephone lines!
How do the ISP's and telcos make money at this rate? Easy. I am allowed to transfer up to 10GB of data per month. Each additional 10GB incures additional (reasonable) charges.
There are ways of limiting bandwidth without shutting down "abusers." Just find out what it is costing you and pass that cost plus a markup on. This turns a hostile situation into a very good oportunity.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I wish more time was spent making broadband more widely available. I am stuck on dialup (2KB/s at that!) due to my geographical location. I'm sure that many people, myself included, would be happy just to have typical DSL speeds where they live.
Audioscrobbler
Sweet... well at least until i see the bill. I will be more than happy to use it if it doesn't cost me more than 30buck a month. otherwise well its just overbudget.
ATSC HDTV is broadcast at 19 Mbps. Network feeds (less compression) are about 45 Mbps. Uncompressed HDTV is 1.5 Gbps.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
you mean, that some aspects of computer and/or network technologies will be faster in the future? well, now I am just confused...
sic transit gloria mundi
Key word: development
IOW, don't expect to be sitting behind your quantum computer's 50" foldable display while wearing your invisibility cloak and surfing at 200mbps anytime real soon.
I think we are all forgetting something: Most people only have 100 megabit network cards in their computers. Current broadband only is around 1.5 megabits, well enough for anyone with even 10 megabit network card. While some computers now have gigabit ethernet... what is the point when the people who still buy Dells and HPs will probably only have 100 megabit connections? It's like running a 10,000rpm hard drive over USB1.1... - pointless!
"mbps" [sic] is milli-bits per second, which means 1/1000th of a bit per second, which is rather slow, because even at 200mbps it would take 5 seconds to transer one byte.
He wants a fiber to the home solution.
100 megabits or more at an affordable price.
If it happens then cable broadband and telco broadband are kaput.
Not existant.
Like NBC, the more you know...
So basically it's ADSL thats super fast if you happen to live close enough to get VDSL, which is already real fast. BTW, where are they coming up with this 8mbps ADSL figure? Around here (Los Angeles) I think the best you can get is 1.5mbps down/768 kbps up. The most I've heard of is 6mbps DSL and that's in limited areas. Is this just bunk or another case of non-US markets having way better tech (ala cell phones).
in bed.
so at 1100 ft away, I doubt I can get 200mbps, but maybe 100?
However, I'm sure I'll still only be able to get 128kbps upstream without having to sell my left nut for enough bandwidth to run my own servers at home.
Technophiles need to unite against discriminatory practices against upstream bandwidth!
I'm sorry but millibits per second isn't too impressive :)
wow this will definately make Cable mad lol
Mega = capital M = 10**6 milli = small m = 10**-6 But what's 12 orders of magnitude among friends? Should matter, does matter. (Andre Linde was once quoted as saying that the size of the universe was a number on the order of 10**100, and when asked "In what units?" he reportedly replied, "When the number is that big, the units do not matter!")
This isn't about getting huge bandwidth from the CO to the end user via installed copper. It's about installing boxes on poles, pedestals, in apartment houses. These boxes have fibre coming in from the CO and provide LAN-range connections to the end user.
The basic idea is to have a compatible set of equipment that works with existing DSL standards, but can be upgraded, section by section, without changing out the other parts. It's a somewhat lower cost alternative to fibre-to-the-home.
This is roughly comparable to what cable companies do, running a neighborhood LAN with a box that provides an upstream connection, usually over fibre. The topology is about the same.
The phenomenon you are experiencing is called "deregulation". It's what happens when monopoly telco lobbyists write the legislation that creates a fair competitive environment for other companies to compete with said telcos. Of course, the actual legislation is anything but fair. See also: Covad vs. the "baby bells".
This is sort of like the power "deregulation" that took place in California and led to rolling blackouts and ultra high electricity and gas prices, and required a statewide bailout of the monopoly power company, Pacific Gas and Electric.
When anybody in a suit starts to wax romantic about free markets, competition, and deregulation, look for the crossed fingers behind their back and wads of dollar bills sticking out of their pockets. What they really want is to replace a regulated monopoly with an unregulated monopoly, and an inefficient government bureacracy with an unaccountable corporate pyramid scheme that leads to offshore accounts, unprecedented executive payouts, and bankruptcy (followed by an emergency government bailout). See also: Enron, Worldcom.
Real competition would be great, but that's not what we've got. What we have is legislated, goverment-subsidized monopolies paying protection money to Congress with one hand and waving a "Free markets now!" sign with the other.
Of course, the bold new twist on this scheme is to first announce that you're going to replace a government bureaucracy with an efficient outsourcing contract, and then just award the contract to your friends with no bidding process (or a secret bidding process), claiming that national security (or the interest of fair competition) forced the bidding process to be secret or to be skipped altogether. Then you can sidestep all sorts of rules and laws and replace huge sections of the government with unaccountable private corporations, and you get deniability even if you own stock in said corporation. See also: Halliburton, Bechtel.
P.S. Welcome to the USA!
There's a couple of reasons. One, we don't have anywhere near the population density of Europe. Two, the politicians and FCC bureaucrats who "deregulated" the telecom market didn't know WTF they were doing. Instead of saying "Anyone who wants to can build a network", they forced the telcos to lease their networks to other companies at regulated rates who then merely market DSL service. Yes, sometimes that works well (see Speakeasy), but for the most part it just doesn't encourage the telcos to spend $billions on hardware that the politicians then force them to lease to competitors. For some reason cable TV companies were mostly left alone, but newcomers (and the bankers/investors who'd finance them) are scared of getting the telco treatment, so nothing much gets done.
There's been lots of talk of the need to fix this in Forbes and nationalreview.com, but the Republicans in office haven't made it a priority and even if they did the Democrats would filibuster the legislation.
I'm not sure which is worse, the telecom mess or the "deregulation" of the California electricity market, where the power companies (who became power distributors, not actually owning most of the generating capacity) naively assumed that the state politicians wouldn't block EVERY ATTEMPT to build new power plants for an entire decade during a population boom. Price, meet Supply and Demand.
The technical reason? Why enhancing shareholder value of course.
Apparently Seoul Korea is right on the backbone. My travelling companion has something called VDSL at home.
She claims 700 mb in about 12 minutes is normal.
Sigh and all for about $42 canadian.
How will cable internet providers respond? But I suppose they're still king at farther distances. Are cable lines maxed out with ~8mpbs service?
Come on, this is slashdot! The editors, God bless 'em, try their damndest to make the headline as misleading and controversial as possible. Without those fuckers, we wouldn't have the trollfest that everyone currently enjoys day in, day out!
Hooray!
Joseph?
Great move! Instead of just upgrading your 10Mbps line to something faster, you can now downgrade it to 200mbps! Millibits/second is a new concept to me, at least.
Well, a combination of that and geographic differences.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
How about here in Australia. I pay AU$79.95/month (at current exchange that's USD$54.53) for 512Kbps down / 128Kbps up. With a 32GB cap.
:P
/sarcasm
Stop complaining about what you get in America. Makes us here feel even *more* antiquated.
[Thanks, Telstra!]
It's a Bagel.
My crappy Earthlink DSL can hardly ever reach 0.8Mb/s, let alone the advertized 1.5 Mb/s download.
That's all very nice but there won't be a very high demand for such video conferencing. Nobody needs 50 frames per second and 1024x768 to communicate something they probobly could have by phone...or if not phone at least 15-20 frames per second and 640x480, or less. There is a market for hdtv. Thats the difference. Its not about what will stetch the technology the most.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud.
Cheers
First 400GB SATA hard drives, now this?
The MPAA will tremble in it's boots.
We need upload speed. They can suck me off with their download. Nobody cares. Nobody needs it.
Not that the article does NOT mention that this thing performs better than ADSL of VDSL. Is is just backwards compatible. It is almost theoretically impossible to do better than VDSL, unless you increase power (which is cheating), because line attenuation is too high. On very short lines (a few hundred feet), the line characteristics may support higher data rates than VDSL offers. Therefore it is my guess that technology is not necessarily meant for contacting your ISP, although that may be an interesting application. Rather it will be used to interconnect two very close office buildings that don't have a buries ethernet network, but are connected with twisted pair cables. Anyway,imho all discussions about 'will ISP's support this rate' are pointless, unless you live at most 100 feet from one.
A couple of thoughts. I have an exceedingly large/fast internet connection at work (Gigabit Ethernet over an OC-192 lambda on a 32-lambda DWDM system, for those that have to know), which is not being utilized significantly. Fortunately we own the fiber so it's not costing us a fortune. So I have over-and-above the bandwidth the article is referring to at my disposal all day.
It's very difficult to find anything on the web that will send end-to-end traffic at more than about 25 Mbps, and often much slower than that. (Excluding bittorrent and similar technologies, etc., I'm talking point-to-point here). It may be that other limiting factors are causing this (slow servers, my workstation's hard disk, etc), but that's been my experience so far. Although 25Mbps is "fast enough" for almost anything I need to grab.
Except for some distance limitations (which are being overcome with short-haul fiber), a much more ubiquitous technology already exists (Metro Ethernet), so I'm not sure what the clear advantage of UDSL would be. Perhaps there is something I missed from the article.
Most self-respecting telcos have a lot more bandwidth than OC-3s. Most have several OC-12s, OC-48s, or OC-192s. OC-3s are usually the top end of what a medium-sized business can afford to purchase. OC-12s are about the largest you'll see outside of the ISP/carrier world. Even if the telco doesn't have larger pipes, that's what rate limiting and priority queuing are for... *evil laughter*
Finally, although there are always exceptions to the rule, I'd suggest sitting down with MRTG or some similar tool for a while and looking at your actual bandwidth requirements before getting all excited about 200Mbps. Few home users have any real need for that kind of sustained bandwidth.
I'd be surprised if many people reading this post exceeeded even 1Mbps on a sustained basis. Don't believe me? Fine. Calculate your 5-minute average 95th percentile for the month, multiply by some factor between 1.1 and 2.0. I call this the greediness/growth factor. That's about what you really "need". And until demand for high bandwidth dramatically increases, the cost will likely remain prohibitively high.
I suppose the argument could be made that if someone builds it, people will use it, but that remains to be seen.
Wow, two updates and still sloppy editing.
m = milli
M = mega
I don't know about all cable systems, but Cablevision uses 56-bit DES encryption between the end user's cable modem and the Cable Modem Termination System. Cisco, and most cable modem equipment suppliers, recommend this setup to prevent packet sniffing. While it doesn't make packet sniffing impossible, it means you have to crack 56-bit DES keys before you can sniff.
-ted
More speed isn't going to feed the bulldog if you still have to be within shouting distance of the CO. They need a DSL that can get out 10-20 miles from the CO and still offer reasonable speeds (384kbps). If they can develop that technology then the phone companies will fall all over themselves to get it.
The phone company's big problem is that they have a limited service area. In many cases it is even smaller than the cable companies. In order to expand their area, they currently have to build out more COs which is extremely costly.
If they could find a way to increase their area with a small capital investment, DSL prices would fall proportionately and put a lot of pressure on cable to lower their prices as well.
Unfortunately companies like TI and Lucent think it is more glamorous to work on big bandwidth for the less than 1% of the population living within meters of the CO than distance enhancements that would benefit everyone.
must have, come to me 200mbs dsl
I'm 17,000 feet from the CO. Give me something other than ComSUCKcast for >Mb service for a reasonable price, not something I have huddle around a central office for.
I'm in the hole of the broadband donut.
Boy, nobody seems to have read this very carefully -- including the ZDNET reporter wrote the original article.
:-)
Here are the relevant TI pages: their press release, and their UDSL home page.
First: the 200 Mbps peak bandwidth referred to is *aggregate* bandwidth -- upstream plus downstream -- for a symmetric 100/100 connection. These speeds have been talked about in the industry for some time -- see back issues of the DSL prime newsletter. The peak bandwidth in any one direction is probably 100 Mbps.
Second: The peak speeds are indeed at short distances, but they won't be limited to just those people living a block from their CO. Instead they will be delivered as FTTC (fiber-to-the-curb) or FTTP (fiber-to-the-premises), where an optical fiber runs from the CO to a local mini-DSLAM that serves a small neighborhood -- or even a single apartment building.
Third: TI is *not* selling UDSL as an ultra-high-speed DSL, but as a "universal" DSL to make it easier (read: cheaper) to upgrade customers when the time comes. Other silicon manufacturers will be selling similar technologies... But for the DSL customer, what matters is the "when the time comes" part -- and unless your neighborhood already has FTTC/FTTP, the time isn't going to come for a little while yet.
But it will come.
In both cases, the real problem is partial deregulation. The California energy companies were bankrupted because their wholesale providers were able to raise rates, but they were not then able to raise consumer rates. Telecom was partially deregulated, but there are still lots of regulatory hurdles and tariffs for anyone wanting to provide telecom services. The main reason VOIP is becoming so popular is because it has not (yet) been classified as a telecom service for regulatory purposes. If it does, expect to see this technology stagnate as well. The idea of providers beeing required to lease out their network capacity to competitors is not a realistic idea in the long term.
They've demangled "mbs" and "mps." Now if they could only add the requisite nonbreaking space(7.2) between the number and units and capitalize the "M" to represent 1e6 we'd be set.
Michael.
Linux : Mac
"Yeah, I know it's a minor nitpick, but it's irking me, and I had to get it off my chest."
Maybe it's time to visit a dermatologist?
They can't even get 512k ADSL running at full speed yet, so why a company is bothering to pursue 200mbit DSL is beyond me. Until ISPs sort their act out and get rid of (or reduce) the ridiculous contention ratios (often up to 50:1 in the UK) then there's no point in increasing the 'last mile' speed.
Why would I want 0.2 bps?
Use the preview button, you folo!
...are the techs behind it. Locally, DSL is pricier than the Cable modem service, especially for higher-speed service, and DSL is more area-restricted. So, some of my freinds use DSL, some use cable.
However, the local cable provider apparently has incompents working for them-- DNS server and TCP/IP network downtimes are common. For the TelCo DSL, downtimes are rare, usually under 15 minutes, and in the 3-5 AM "routine maintenance" time where normal humans (IE, not me) sleep.
My further evidence of the incompetence of the Cable techs is hearsay, via a freind who (a) worked for a local ISP doing DSL installs, and (b) who has had to switch from DSL to cable, due to moving outside range of the telco POP. He has anecdotally reported (based on various problems he's had) that the TelCo tier one helpdesk is average-to-good, knows their limits, and tier two is excellent-- he's NEVER had to go past them. In contrast, he's reported that the Cable boys until you get bumped to an actual network engineer (IE, someone who routinely LAYS HANDS on the main router while working with it, about tier five or so), you are dealing with idiots who have to use a terminal to check their network-enabled GPS-locator suppository before they can find their ass with both hands.
If possible, I vehemently recommend asking around amoung the local geek crowd for reports on quality-of-service, and basing your decision on that, rather than any zealous views on the technology. I'd actually prefer to use a cablemodem myself-- but not with the local idiots.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Tahya al-Moqawama al-Iraqiya!
Fuck the American imperialists!
We shall kill every last one of them like dogs!