Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
That we've all learned the disappointing lesson that lab results don't tend to display the same capacity in the real world.
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
and your isp will still cap your drooling consumer connection at 256k upstream.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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.
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.
...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.
You forget what the "killer app" for this is...
HDTV
The telcos are sick of getting there asses kicked by Cable in the broadband/tv/telco arena.
Right now they are trying to have a go at it with bundleing DSL with DirectTV - but that aint flying so well.
If they can pump out bits this fast it would make them quite a formidible player in the "Convergence" field.
They've already cranked their infrastucture everywhere with DSL repeaters to get around the CO distance issue - Rolling this out shouldn't be a big deal.
Amazing to contemplate it though - 200mps Internet, Telco, HDTV - all on a single pair of CAT3 - wow!
---- "Logoff! That cookie shit makes me nervous!" - A. Soprano
...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."
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.
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
Who cares about faster? I want a steady, low latency connection with decent upload. Sorry, but cable, while good at times, can frequently and easily fall into overpopulation on a segment, much moreso than any other data delivery method. I know, I've been there; I've had a few good years with AT&T, so good in fact that I didn't mind the bleh upload. When Comcast came around, they oversubscribed, didn't do anything about it, and suddenly not only were my downloads hovering around 200k/sec, latency started TOPPING 1000ms and routers were dropping packets left and right.
Most of us want the low latency connections and a decent upload, especially if you run a server at home. Good DSL providers (SBC, Verizon, and Earthlink do not fall into *good*) do not use PPPoE, offer (multiple) static IPs, and don't care if you run as many servers as you want as long you are not abusive. I may be lucky in that I only pay $60 a month for 1.5 down and 1000 up with 5 static ips, but I'd gladly pay over $100 for that compared to the gee-whiz-I've-got-3mbps-down-but-256k-up glorified dialup line, which is almost useless to me (and anyone that makes good use of a home server).