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
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
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.
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.
...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
>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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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
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).
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).