DSL-Extender Brings Broadband 20km

An anonymous reader writes "Whirlpool outlines Telstra's new DSL deployment: "Telstra announced a trial of the technology back in January, saying it would allow DSL to be connected to people who were up to 20km from a central exchange. DSL Extenders work by splitting an existing copper phone line into eight separate ADSL lines using a tiny, ruggedised remote DSLAM.""

Comments

Interesting, but...

[suitepotato]

...it isn't much beyond an incremental sort of gee-whiz improvement. You can send T1s over long distances and then break them out fractionally or hook them to a DSLAM and use as a backhaul for the customers. The submersion thing might have come about from submersible communications at sea or from the fact that many remote mechanisms in telecom tend to be underground and the waterproofing for those vaults tends not to be the greatest.

I give it a big shrug and a I'll check into it later. I work in telecom so it does get my notice. Now if they make a 1.5Mbps line work to twenty miles on pure copper all the way, that will knock my socks off.

Re:Remote DSLAMs

[el_womble]

This has always struck me as stupid.

Copper: great for POTS, crap for data, ubiquitous. So they invent DSL to compensate for copper's inadequacies.

Fiber: crap for POTS, great for data, ubiquitous right up until the end of the street. DSL doesn't work because its a copper technology, so these poor people who are feet away from all the broadband they could ever need can't access it because telcos only know how to do DSL.

I'm not oblivious to the fact that it costs more to split fiber (light doesn't split like electricty), but thats because we don't do it very often as the priority has always been POTS. How long will it be, now that data outweighs POTS, until we get fiber to the front door?