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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?
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!
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. "
RTFA - at that speed they can offer HDTV and other video and voice services over DSL.
"I think it would be a good idea" Gandhi, on Western Civilisation
>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.
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
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.
...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."
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
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
RTFA is not always enough, as it seems. You also need to digest the information and apply thinking process to it.<p>After I did, I figured < 1km will provide ~50Mbps (like VDSL). 200 looks more like an extreme - << 1km or even <<< 1km. Come to think of it, it provides that much bandwidth only in case you plug ISP's DSL straight into your PCI port :o).
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.
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.
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).
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 $billions on hardware that the politicians then force them to lease to competitors. For some reason cable TV companies were mostly left alone, but newcomers (and the bankers/investors who'd finance them) are scared of getting the telco treatment, so nothing much gets done.
There's been lots of talk of the need to fix this in Forbes and nationalreview.com, but the Republicans in office haven't made it a priority and even if they did the Democrats would filibuster the legislation.
I'm not sure which is worse, the telecom mess or the "deregulation" of the California electricity market, where the power companies (who became power distributors, not actually owning most of the generating capacity) naively assumed that the state politicians wouldn't block EVERY ATTEMPT to build new power plants for an entire decade during a population boom. Price, meet Supply and Demand.
Think Fibre-To-The-Curb.
Have a look at TransACT who have cabled up the Australian captial, Canberra with FTTC. Customers get phone, internet (VDSL, with the customer allowed to choose provider) and digital TV.
It's possibly depending what cable you have in the ground/on the poles.
Now, I wish I had FTTC or FTTH where I live instead of some shitty 2-wire Tel$tra Copper or Hybrid Fibre Coax by a provider that charges too much.
Check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baud.
Cheers