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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.
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
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.
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!
With what? There is only so much you can download and only so much you can upload. Unless someone is going to put slashdot or even better, fileplanet on one of these, then the phone company will not get saturated.
Furthermore, the ISP can monitor bandwidth usage. They don't have to shut anyone down, just follow a nice formula. Full speed up to X bandwidth used in a month. 10% speed for next X bandwidth used in a month. 10% of that speed for X more bandwidth used in a month... etc. etc.. Speed gets reset for next billing cycle. If they stagger billing cycles (not all on the same day), then their pipes will be free :)
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.
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.
I could see an ISP maybe offering 200mbps speeds between customers of the same ISP in the same city, as an incentive for customers to convince all their friends to join. It doesn't cost them anything if their customers are just using spare capacity on the local loop. Of course, the upload is probably a lot less than 200mbps, and if multiple ISPs offered the same service, it wouldn't take long before some enterprising customer would sign up for both and run a gateway between the two (not that that would harm anything, but the ISPs probably wouldn't like it).
-jim
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?
One thing you can be sure of is that the telcos are not putting this in just so a bunch of P2P pirates can wack off 12 times a day. It will be tied into a service with it's own revenue model.
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?
Imagine a HD TiVo, recording and watching 3 different shows/movies at the same time, pumped through your DSL line.
Exactly. And, imagine the Telco hosting that data. That's the whole point of technologies like this; minimize the peering requirement, but maximize the data that the end-user wants to get.
"The costs to provide that much bandwidth, even ridiculously oversold, are too high."
I seem to remember hearing this argument being levied at the cable providers back when they started providing their service, since it is so much faster than most DSL. Apparently it wasn't true for the cable companies, why would you expect the phone companies to be limited the same way?
And for the record, I work for a CLEC, and it wouldn't be that hard or that expensive to get pipes far bigger than OC-3's to our colo facilities.
I think you mean 7Mbps and 1.5Mbps instead of baud, but I digress.
Here in Georgia, BellSouth's DSL offering has started to offer 3Mbps download and 384Kbps upload speeds. Essentially now on par with Comcast. No changes to the line filters or even the need for a truck roll. All assumably done as the DSLAM in the local area (here they use copper to fiber units away from the CO, preventing the likes of COVAD from offering competing DSL service).
I think the DSL and cable providers could, and will, ratchet up speed as needed to compete against each other and when services that require massive speeds become apparent. Hopefully WISPs may offer competition that could up bandwidth or service level offerings.
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
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.
I remind them that the contract and terms of agreement that I have in the book they sent me, state "Unlimited Bandwidth" and threaten to take them to the better business beurow(sp) if they don't put me back on, and take 5% off my months bill for the 3 days I didn't get to use the service. If they don't believe me I tell my lawer who's on the phone to speak up now, he cited some precidence and I haven't been disconnected for using "too much bandwidht" since (altho at 98GB in 3 weeks....)
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
Is the government subsidizing it at all? I was under the impression that some Asian governments were putting a bit of their tax dollars into the whole broadband thing. Unsure about South Korea's case, but that's why I'm asking :).
Not a bad idea, I think. Infrastructure upgrades are a key to any economy's long term growth.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
You could always have content providers contracting with some service, who would then lease space from the telcos in their offices to set up and maintain servers inline with the UDSL service.
Information wants to be free.
Entertainment wants to be paid.
You just want to be cheap.
Digital Cable, Standard Definition Only, Dolby + MPEG audio, 8mbps per channel.
Digital Terresterial TV, Standard Definition, Dolby + MPEG audio, 12mbps per channel.
Digital Terresterial TV, High Definition, Dolby Digital audio, 18mbps to 22mbps.
So with a 200mbps connection, you could easily, easily send a 22mbps high definition TV stream, and there would be no slow down for regular internet use.
Remember Digital TV uses MPEG2 compression, just like a DVD. You can set whatever symbol rate (data rate) you want. Obviously, the more bits thrown at it, the better the picture. However, there is little noticable difference between 22mbps and 45mbps, even with a 1080i screen.
Maybe one day when we can actually get 1080p screens, the higher broadcast quality symbol rate of 45mbps would be required.
But then again, DVD's run at 8-9mbps, and the picture from them is just fine. Excluding dark scenes. Or underwater. Or fog.
Think Fibre-To-The-Curb.
Have a look at TransACT who have cabled up the Australian captial, Canberra with FTTC. Customers get phone, internet (VDSL, with the customer allowed to choose provider) and digital TV.
It's possibly depending what cable you have in the ground/on the poles.
Now, I wish I had FTTC or FTTH where I live instead of some shitty 2-wire Tel$tra Copper or Hybrid Fibre Coax by a provider that charges too much.
"Not a bad idea, I think. Infrastructure upgrades are a key to any economy's long term growth."
Sure. Many people like to bash countries like Sweden for putting tax money into building network infrastructure (being socialist, not letting the market to take care if it "naturally". I guess you could look at it same way you do with public roads; everyone realizes that government has to take care of them or nothing will happen. There are private roads, sure, but I can't imagine all roads being maintained by private companies. Maybe that's just me.
Actually, the articles are kind of not too clear, but the bandwidth is 200 mbps AGGREGATE. i.e. upload + download = 200 mpbs. It will be designed to support symmetric 100 mpbs up / down, but many deployments will be assymmetric - more down / up like todays standard ADSL.
So the technology will support aggregate 200 mbps. With download speeds from 100 mbps through ~150-160 mpbs.
I should know - I'm working on one of the chips for the product! (anon, so marketing won't yell at me)...