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Copper Wire As Fast As Fiber?
Krishna Dagli writes to tell us that a new consortium of hardware vendors and phone companies have banded together in order to try for fiber optic speeds over copper wiring. From the article: "To avoid interference, current DSL implementations use static spectrum management that is built for a 'worst-case' scenario. Most actual phone lines would allow for far better performance, and DSM technology will allow each DSL connection to be regulated in real time by the hardware based on measured crosstalk and on current data needs of each customer. The end result could be DSL connections that top out at 100Mbps or more."
But when will it hit my doorstep at a reasonable rate?
All this talk of speedy internet access is great, but I'm still not seeing much benefit when it comes to what my ISP offers.
They're cutting corners then. Their advocating that the integrity of signal be put at risk to increase speeds. But optical is also built in worst case. So really, its still slower, they're just making it less reliable in the process.
Copper Wire as Fast as Fiber? What a misleading topic. How about 'Copper Outside Plant can rival current FTTH speeds,' as this is much less inflammatory and more on target with what is intended to be said. With such a general topic there's no telling what the story is actually about, and in this case, it's not any of the following:
-Copper Outside Plant transmits data at OC-192 speeds
-Lab makes Copper transmit OC-48 speeds
-Copper Wire discovered to have same frequency versatility of fiber
-Police Cables allow bacon to move at speed of light
Sheesh.
love and peace
-cheez
it is hard enough getting ISP's (in this case those dirty theiving telco's) to pony up the actual bandwith advertised on a simple 1.5Mbps DSL line. I might be able to get 100Mbps to the DSL suboffice but I seriously doubt that ISP's would be willing to pay for the connection further down the line to actually provide that kind of speed to anything outside their local network. ISP's tend to oversell bandwith and hope for the best.
I thought the signal traveled at roughly the same velocity over copper as over fiber optic cable. Is there really enough of a difference to matter?
It's not likely we'll see this very soon. As soon as Ma Bell gets their hands on this, they'll blunder it as usual and blame everyone else for their problems... If they are successful, you can bet that you'll get high download speeds, but will be locked up with that lovely 256k uplink. Oh, you want more? That's a 'business line', you get to pay triple!
At this point the only speed ISP's talk about is download speed. Even with my 8mbits Cable connection I've never done a single download that maxes this speed. While fast download is great its the other side that most people need to be boosted. However with ISP's not wanting people to be able to run server class systems off their consumer provided "Cheap" internet they are not going to boost the upload caps anytime soon. I suppose it will be funny with a 100mbits down and 500kmbits up connection for only $29.95 for the first 3 months!
By increasing the capacity of copper to (best case) 100Mps they are only prolonging the inevitable. Fiberoptics has an upper limit that is immensely higher...
Unfortunately, my phone line doesn't even manage the 8Mbps my connection is nominally rated at; I'm lucky to get as high as 3. According to BT's availability checker, my postcode should get about 4Mbps. A few minutes spent typing in random postcodes in London only found a couple that got as high as even 6Mbps, let alone the full 8 that most ISPs offer.
100Mbps? Not in the UK, not over our phone lines.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
I'd love it if this were used to increase the distance limit on DSL. Right now, I'm "too far" from the CO and the phone company won't even talk to me about DSL.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
So, in other words there's a technology to make existing infrastructure MUCH more efficient. Don't hold your breath waiting for it. DSL is owned by whom? The monopoly telephone companies, and with the recent court rulings that say they don't HAVE to sublease it is not likely there will be 1:1 competition in the near future. My guess is that the phone companies will see this as an excuse to raise prices, due to perceived value*, rather than to provide improved performance that competes with cable at a similar, or lower price.
*Just as CDs cost less to manufacture than cassette tapes, but until recently sold for more $$, such as it will be with "extreme DSL" (or whatever they call this service).
The article title implies that a copper wire can have more bandwidth than a fiber. Read on:
See the switch in argument? From "copper > fiber" in the title (and other locations within the article to boot) to "copper*50 > fiber*1". I'm sure if I bundle 10,000,000 twisted pairs then I can out-bandwidth a single fiber any day, but does that mean I should say copper is faster than fiber?
It's like titling my article "3.5 inch floppies hold more than a hard drive?" but then say if I combine 2 billion floppies in parallel then I get 3 TB of storage where as a single hard drive only holds 700 GB.
Apples and oranges.
That said, I think the article is trying to point out that the existing copper can be better utilized and achieve higher bandwidth than if a new, single fiber were trenched in its place. I see little controversy in this. But this does not mean "copper > fiber".
I have to admit that this is probably one of the most confusing and poorly written Ars article I've ever read.
:wq
You straighten your tie, clear your throat, and jangle your keys as you step into your CEO's office, wearing a nervous look on your face.
... and its potential bandwidth is 100 MBps per customer." Then you point and laugh. "Just kidding! DSM is unreliable, theoretical vaporware! Hah hah! Eh, boss? BOSS? WTF OMFG somebody dial 911!!!"
"Boss," you begin, "about that $10 billion we just spent on FTTH? Well, turns out our competitors are sticking with copper wiring and DSM
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Fast inet to the home is great and all, but it won't mean anything if ISPs don't budget for their customers actually using the connections. As things stand now, people running bittorrent are supposedly being greedy for simply using a good portion of their bandwidth all the time. 100Mbps or whatever is useless if you're only supposed to use it for downloading the odd PDF or big JPEG.
Seriously. They've earned enough money from their ancient unshielded untwisted copper pairs of wires. I want something better than DSL, and there are many alternatives.
I am perfectly happy with my Comcast cable Internet (in spite of the 300-500kbps tx speed limit). Fiber would be ideal, but why dig holes, and block up the roads, hire union workers -- it's much ideal to use something like free-space optics, WiFi, and even fucking tin cans tied together with yarn made from old cat hair than to choose to hand over good money for old crap from Verizon.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Well, it's all depending on your sense of scale.
The propagation velocity of an electrical charge down a conductive wire is a significant fraction of the speed of light. In most cases, this might as well be the speed of light, because it's so much faster than anything else that we do, or work with. (The current doesn't actually flow at the speed of light, because not all the electrons are moving in a straight line down the wire. So even though the electrons are moving at the speed of light, the net velocity of the charge is some fraction thereof.) Something sticks in my mind about electricity usually propagating at around 0.3c, but I can't substantiate that.
However, light travels down a fiber optic cable at, unsurprisingly, the speed of light. This can be anywhere up to 3x faster than a signal moving down a conductive cable, depending on the properties of the fiber and the cable.
So while light is significantly faster than electricity, for all practical purposes today, they're both "really, really fast;" the limitations to data capacity arise for other reasons, mostly related to bandwidth, and not because of the time that the signal takes moving down the wire.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Very *slow* fiber maybe... and my line will barely do current dsl speeds, so I'm not holding my breath...
electricity is now as fast as light...
did we start removing common sense from people or something?
I wouldn't mind just having DSL 10x faster, actually. But, it's one of those things: the more you have, the more you want, and the more you need. This would be pretty great, though. Downloading Linux distros in minutes instead of hours...
*dreams happily*
Everything I need to know about copyrights I learned from Slashdot.
I have a couple of concerns with the direction this article takes.
1. To say that any money spent on FTTH is money wasted due to the potential of this completely untested technology is really unfair to say the least. At this point we do not know if the new tech will even provide results. Also, there are many places that really do have terrible copper, especially in the consumer markets. Many old homes and apartments have copper that cannot even use current DSL, let alone attempting to use an even more intensive signal.
2. At the beginning of the article the person paints a picture of a guy going to his boss to tell them that we may have made a mistake in going with this FTTH idea. This is about the dumbest thing this person could do because a) The decision is made and cannot be undone and b) if the boss is not putting pressure on you do not bring up things that you cannot do anything about which will get your ass in trouble. It is never a good idea.
I can see where the person is coming from. We should be honest and come forth and say we should do this, even though we initially thought we should of done and did do that. Unfortunately our corporate climate has never been overly friendly to brute honesty. The last thing you want to do is stand up in a loud voice admitting guilt to the problem. It is like saying, "Well I ment to get it done, but x, y, and z happened." Sorry but ment to and what actually happened are two entirely different problems. Now your SOL.
Brendan
I did my own test to see if copper wire was a fast as fiber.
Day One
Ate a bowl of fiber. Bowel movement within two hours. Pretty fast.
Day Two
Ate a bowl of copper wire. Severe internal bleeding.
Ultimately, results were inconclusive as the emergency surgery on day two negated any possible effects of the copper wire.
Unknown host pong.
A physical limitation to any transmission medium is the propagation delay from one point to another. Sure, you may get the same unidirectional transfer rate with copper compared to wire (which I doubt considering the possible frequencies involved), but bi-directional communication will be hampered by the propagation delay, in which fiber obviously has the upper hand. There are other issues regarding the resistance of the medium, forcing you to add repeaters periodically, but I digress for now.
Note: electrical signals do *not* propagate at the speed of light through copper.
Lessons learned:
1) Copper wire can support high rate data traffic;
2) The necessary signal processing is complicated;
3) The cost is !#%#!$%@;
4) So, verizon has FIOS now.
Do not believe me? Take a look at my nick. :-)
^(oo)^pig~
OTOH, http://www.itarchitect.com/article/NMG20010416S000 6 states:
So don't take it for granted that just because an electric signal doesn't travel at c in copper that it's slower than light in fiber!
On a barely-related tangent: As someone who put up with a satellite internet connection for 4 years, I can state authoratatively that the speed of light isn't nearly quick enough for a variety of purposes....
The article title is a good example of sensationalism. They think it had to be something catchy in order for us to deem it read worthy. I agree, apples to oranges.
Yep, it was.
Even if the fiber that's being taken out to your curb can take 100Mb/s, if they don't think there's a market for it, they probably aren't buying the backhaul capacity to provide that level of service.
In other words, they might be able to get you hooked up at 100Mb/s, but you'd only be able to talk to your neighbors and other people on the local subnet at that speed.
This is a real problem for almost all broadband ISPs, because they're just not buying the capacity from their Tier 1 ISP that they should be, in order to offer even the speeds that they're advertising to people. "Real" internet connections -- and by that I mean ones to upper-tier ISPs with bandwidth and QoS and uptime guarantees -- are not cheap, and thus they get skimped on.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Another excuse for the Telecoms to delay the rollout of fiber and pocket all the money the tax payers continue to give them to roll out fiber.
To avoid interference, current DSL implementations use static spectrum management that is built for a "worst-case" scenario. [...] and DSM technology will allow each DSL connection to be regulated in real time by the [...] data needs of each customer. The end result could be DSL connections that top out at 100Mbps or more ...but are down most of the time, and are slower than advertised most of the rest of the time.
One of the reasons Verizon went to fiber is that it is cheaper to maintain than copper. If that means a direct benefit to the consumer by a cheaper montly rate, then I am still all for fiber.
... here we can get 16 mbit dsl for ~60 euro together with a telefon flatrate. But it's of little use since your upload is 1 mbit. You can't really use your big pipe since most servers won't give out data that fast. And distributed networks which could saturate this pipe won't work because one is not able to feed back that fast and so you're stuck on 1-2 mbit down (e.g. bittorrent).
So it's great that they're testing new technologies but the real bottleneck isn't bandwith to the costumer but their ability to send data.
But, from:
1 7
Indian ISPs Taxed for Generating "Light Energy"
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/10/17322
Will it get around the VAT applied to optical?
David Syes
Okay, this comparison seems rather slippery upon first glance. Let's break it down so we are clear on what they are attempting to communicate to us:
So again, I went to wikipedia to check the actual bandwidth of current optical fiber communications and learned that recently speeds of 14tbps (thats terabits-per-second) have been reached over distances of 140km. This leads me to the conclusiong that while the currently installed FTTH switches could be limited to doing 2.5gbps (per 50 homes apparently? regardless..it doesn't really matter), which is by no means the limit of fiber-optic communication. 2.5gbps was the limit of third-generation fiber-optic communications (during the 1980's).
Now lets take a moment to revisit the title of this article, "Copper Wire as Fast as Fiber?"; This article seems like a bunch of "FUD" to me.
--Battlefield 2, anyone?
Censorship is obscene. Patriotism is bigotry. Faith is a vice. Slashdot 2.0 sucks.
I agree that more connection options are definitely better, but I think I'd take Verizon over some free-space-optical lashup ... at least, when it's raining. Or snowing. Or foggy...
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The price of copper has gone from $0.25 a pound to $3.50 a pound in the last 5 years.
The copper -vs- fiber debate almost ended in 2000 because fiber is such a superior data transmission medium.
The copper -vs- fiber debate is completely over for new installations.
The material cost is on par now, and the primary cost of the installation is not the material but the labor.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Copper and fiber - much better for security purposes than wireless; but most of us don't really need the added protection. Wireless encryption should be able to make my data harder to steal than it's worth in most cases. I'd like to take this opportunity to tell both the telcos and the cablecos to diversify their network divisions - that physical connection is becoming as useful as the human appendix (except for certain special cases).
...in a Jimmy Cagney voice: "Nyah! You'll never catch me, copper!"
It looks like you might be able to get 100Mbps out of your DSL line so long as the CO is in your back yard. If you're like most people and live further away, then your speed will drop off sharply. While I'm sure most people will see an improvement from this technology, I doubt it will get many people up to 100Mbps. It's more likely you'll be able to go from 3 to 10-20 Mbps so long as you're within 1500 feet or so of the CO.
I read the internet for the articles.
... the users will see is that the dumb fuckers from Verizon will be able advertise UP TO 100 Mbit/sec instead of up to 6 Mbit/sec as they do now. The line throughput will suck as usual and will be about 20-30% of the UP TO value or worse.
With all this talk of ever faster download speeds, I sure do wish my provider could do something about my upload speed. My download speed is now 20 MBps, but my upload speed has been stuck at 1 MBps for years. My IPS has complained to my telco (ADSL provider) about this, but so far nothing has changed. I'm told that the teco's business strategy is to only sell the higher upload speeds together with business accounts, which are way more expensive. Even the damned cable companies apply this strategy, even though there's never been a technical reason for it. Not so long ago I had a speed ratio of 4:1 -- 4MBps down and 1 MBps up. Now it's 20:1. Will I soon be seeing 100:1? Will I be stuck at 1 MBps upload forever?
I'm sorry, when did this news come out? Oh, wait, I see; that must refer to Verizon's decision to accept $18 billion for the promise of rolling out fiber to the home.
I am confident that nothing Verizon has done has cost them $18 billion. I doubt if there's a single county in the Verizon empire in which more than a thousand homes have FIOS as an option.
The Internet is full. Go away.
X_X
When I first got a cable connection, in late 1997, the modem was $300, the installation fee was $150 or so, and the monthly fee was $50. I had a static IP address and the only limitation on my bandwidth up and down was the local application or remote server's ability to feed the data into the 'net, so far as I could tell.
Then some of my neighbors starting getting a cable modem...
Now it's all different. But the interesting point is that the cable modem is about 1/3 the price, there is usually no installation fee, and the monthly fee is still $50, despite 10 years of inflation. DSL is typically even less. In other words, the main development in broadband over the past 10 years has been a fall in the real price and a lot more people using it. (I'd say, personally, it's also a bit more reliable -- in '97 the cable net connection would flake out for an hour or so every few days. Now it almost never does. But that's just one operator, YMMV.)
Had we wanted, instead, faster and better service at the same real price (e.g. $75/month in 2006 dollars), then maybe we'd have got that. But that is apparently not what our buying habits told the cable and DSL operators we wanted.
Cable Internet Service providers (Cox, Comcast...) have been doing this for years. It goes a little like this:
/meh
Data leaves headend via huge fiber bundles to the different 'nodes' where it splits off via cable heading for our individual houses. This cable is able to [easily and cheaply]carry data for HDTV, High Speed Internet upwards of 15Mb, and even phone services.
Also, data travels thru fiber (as light) and cable (as digital pulses) at the same 'speeds'. Light through fiber since it's...well, light. Copper because the elecrons don't really 'flow through' the copper like water; a better analogy is like lining up a row of billiard balls and hitting the Qball (representing the new digital pulse) into the one on one end and watching the ball on the far side of the row 'pop' out the other side. At the atomic level, this happens at the speed of light.
lastly, i disagree with the article since it assumes the technology at the 2 ends of the medium, be it glass or copper, doesn't progress and become capable of higher capacities of bandwidth.
how incredibly UN-interesting and un-original.
How is "topping out at 100mb/s" even remotely "as fast as fiber"?
6 231
Here's a recent slashdot article reporting 14Tb/s over fiber...
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/30/18
You can shove more data over fiber, by several orders of magnitude, given enough equipment at the end-points. Copper only has a few hundred megaherz worth of useable frequency spectrum and that coupled with the noise floor and signal to noise ratio (SNR) puts an upper limit on how much data you can push over it. You can't just pump in higher voltages to improve the SNR because even with variable-sized twisted pair you will get noise leaking into adjacent wires.
The issue with fiber is that getting the several orders of magnitude improvement in bandwidth requires increasingly expensive equipment at the end-points. This is fine for long-haul fiber but obviously not appropriate for a consumer end-point. Fiber gets multiplicative bandwidth improvements by transmitting light at different frequencies all over the same physical fiber optic cable. Specialized chips can pick-off the frequencies and split them into individual transceivers. A consumer end-point could decode one of those frequencies fairly cheaply, but not much more then that before the equipment becomes expensive. This is certainly viable... the head-end can transmit dozens of frequencies over the fiber and the distribution point on the pole can split it out to homes, or even just route it over shorter-haul copper in proximity to the home (which is probably a lot cheaper then running fiber all the way into a home).
-MattAt least that is what I learned it was called.
A statement that is true of a whole is not necessarily true of each of its parts. When you apply the statement to one of the parts, you have comitted the fallacy of division.
Higher bandwidth is nice. I want it to be able to reach my house in the first place.
Given latency and loss of packets on wireless, I'll respectfully say I'm keeping my wired connexion. It's far from sufficient for anything where interactive duplex communication is happening. Of course, given the fact that right now, cellular is attacking most of those issues, and at least vs telcos, they have a more business-friendly pricing model, maybe the telcos need to diversify anyways.
Everybody knows there's a worldwide shortage of copper... that's partly why bums can make so much extra cash stealing your copper water pipes.
We need to find a new material for wiring and quickly... I nominate fiber, since we're already using it.
Just how critical are your network communications (and how fragile are your network applications) anyhow? Wireless doesn't yet, but someday will overcome the (minor) obstacles you mention. Who cares if the retrans rate for packets is a bit higher, as long as the ultimate throughput is comparable? I can see some possible issues (mostly regarding streaming data), but even those are neither insoluble nor particularly intractable.
What's the lead time/quantum for backhaul orders? Are you implying that if not enough of a market for e.g. 100Mbit service materializes, all that backhaul would rot at the warehouse? I doubt it, since they could easily control the ramp-up of faster services and therefore schedule backhaul purchase in a way that limits their exposure.
I find it much more likely that they simply have the "advertise 100Mbps, deliver 2Mbps" part factored in their business model.
Actually in some other discussions I've said that I think this could be really beneficial -- with systems like BitTorrent, and to a lesser extent Skype and other P2P systems, it's conceivable that a big broadband provider could configure its network so that a lot of "bulk" traffic was kept on its own wires, and didn't have to traverse the public net.
For example, if they provided a Skype supernode that all the broadband users could connect to, whenever one of the customers wanted to call another, the routing could all be done without having to send packets through a peering/transit point. It would all be on the ISPs network, which costs them basically nothing.
You can make similar arguments for positioning cache servers for other types of stuff on the network. Were it not for the copyright concerns, they could probably save themselves a lot of customer aggravation and bandwidth expense, if they just did some intelligent caching of bittorrent traffic. (And it's my understanding this is the whole theory behind the Cache Discovery Protocol, but I'm not sure which ISPs are going to use it.)
The place where I think this could have the biggest effects, would be in places that have large networks that are basically isolated from the public net by narrow connections -- say, Australia. A system of intelligent caching and encouraging the use of P2P applications would probably lighten the load on the traffic actually passing in and out of a "network island" by favoring internal connections instead.
So a broadband ISP that let you connect to your neighbor at 100Mb/s but only pass packets out to the public 'net at 1Mb, might at some point in the future, if it was designed correctly, seem like a really sweet deal.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I'm sure if I bundle 10,000,000 twisted pairs then I can out-bandwidth a single fiber any day, but does that mean I should say copper is faster than fiber?
Well, that depends. Do you get paid by the page view?
"See the switch in argument? From "copper > fiber" in the title (and other locations within the article to boot) to "copper*50 > fiber*1". I'm sure if I bundle 10,000,000 twisted pairs then I can out-bandwidth a single fiber any day, but does that mean I should say copper is faster than fiber?"
That was my first thought, but then I remembered the diameter of fibre optic cable coming into my house. The outer diameter for a 2 FO line cable is about the same as 4 cat5 cables (16 wire pairs) combined. Strip away the mantel and I guess 24 wirepairs might fit.
Sure 1 FO line is much smaller then 1 copper wire, but it is very brittle (hence all the extra protection).
I guess for the "last mile" to the customer a bunch of copper wires might actually be more cost effective per Mpbs. For the backbone a fo bundle easily beats a copper bundle.
Speed of light isn't constant. YA RLY. It is the fastest in a vacuum (c is the speed of list in a vacuum) and slower in other materials. To figure out the speed just take the refractive index of the material times c. So the speed it moves at depends on the material the fibre is made out of.
Yeah, and we'll plug that 50 Tbps fiber into our optical quantum computer.
Let's face it, you have to convert to/from copper eventually; fiber is only good for modulating multiple carriers and going long distances. No single channel is going to pass any more than 10Gbps because there isn't an IC out there now or five years from now that can do anything with it.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
fibre CAN go faster than 2.5Gbps,
the last section to the doorstep is not usually cat 3,
and they still rely on fibre etc. to get the data within range of the customers. Yes, you do save having to swap the last section of copper, but it not usually the big issue in providing broadband.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Yes, in some instances last-mile is more or less than a mile. But in my case it is about 12 kilometres to the exchange. So if they could change the specs to allow 1 measley Mbs over 12 km I would be pretty damn happy. And I would think that the distance rather than the speed increase would actually be of more value to telcos. As it would provide a larger revenue base. I don't hear that many people complaining about speed.
nearly all the broadband providers are in the buisness of lieing
Well...nearly all human beings are in the business of lying, in the sense of stretching the truth to our advantage as far as humanly possible, and then some.
Perhaps someday, when all women are really less than or equal to the weight they write down on their online dating ads, and all men really do call when they say they will, and all children really have done their homework when they say they have but the dog ate it, then the ratfink ISPs -- who, alas, are made up of those highly unreliable components, viz. ordinary blokes -- really will list the advantages and disadvantages of their services without resorting to a paragraph or so of fine print at the bottom of the page, or some artful re-definition of various English words.
"-Police Cables allow bacon to move at speed of light"
If you can find a copper or optical cable that will move chocolate from one end of a cable to the next, we can implement Willy Wonka's dream.
Oh You POS
Wireless technology will always be more unreliable than wired technology. Also, wireless broadband needlessly wastes valuable radio spectrum. I seriously doubt wires will go away for WAN use.
Great, another technology for increasing speeds that we in Australia aren't going to see for about five years. With Telstra dragging their heels and collapsing in their pursuit of FTTN, and the damn slow adoption of ADSL2+ to anywhere that isn't a capital city has left the majority of Australians in a position where 1.5Mbps is the best that can be achieved.
I would LOVE to hear about the adoption of new high speed broadband technologies in this country, unfortunately it isn't going to happen until Wireless technologies are in a position to directly compete with the wired network (So Optus, Vodafone etc need to have the infrastructure in place to obsolete Telstras copper) or somebody actually rolls out a redundant copper network to directly compete with Telstra. Even should this happen, there will need to be cable laid to offshore so that Telstra isn't monopolising the only International link we have by charging outrageous prices.
Isn't it great when a Government creates a monopoly then sells it to private industry? We are told to wear the choice of second rate technology because there is no incentive for a private monopoly to spend money, when they can make just more money by doing nothing and charging exhorbitant prices for second- or third-rate Internet.
It would have been better if they had kept Telstra fully Government owned. I hope elsewhere in the world will get to see this technology. I pine for it.
Cheers, Chris
Next time you claim something runs at Fiber Speeds, make sure it hits at least 1Gbps, please.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
Already happened, its called a copper pipe.
This is what the are doing.
That voice is no longer a cash cow. Bits are now bits, and cable can also provide voice service just as well. Besides, landline voice is going the way of the dodo, thanks to cellular.
Only way phone companies can survive is to leverage their terrestrial infrastructure, and compete directly with cable companies providing cable TV and internet. But because of lack of investment on their part for the past few decades, they are scrambling to either rebuild (=fiber, Verizon), or squeeze out a few more years on copper (=DSL, SBC, ATT, Qwest, etc). But in the end, in order to compete with cable for HDTV (~20Mbits x #channels), they *have* to lay out fiber. Anything less than 1Gbit line to the home couldn't compete with cable.
Will the War in Iraq get better or worse in 2007? Vote here
With all the Fair Usage Policy around with most ISP's in the UK, does it matter how fast speeds you can get?
Internet tube to sell you...
Dynamic rather than static allocation of bandwidth could indeed help both maximum rate and maximum distance for DSL. For those interested there's a plot I did of Shannon capacity for a number of different media types, (including fiber and DSL lines) at6 08/00001828001.html
http://www.computingunplugged.com/issues/issue200
Note the real-world disclaimers mentioned in the text though...
n6gn
In other words, they might be able to get you hooked up at 100Mb/s, but you'd only be able to talk to your neighbors and other people on the local subnet at that speed.
:)
You say that like it's a bad thing.
Seriously, how is it a bad thing? It may mean that we wind up with local community "subnetworks" where you get good BW and speed to your neighbors. Mmmm multi-house LAN parties.
Further when people have such speeds with their local neighborhood what do you think will happen to demand for increasing speed/BW outside of that LAN? Give people a taste of what they could have and they'll realize what they are missing elsewhere. Hell they could expand that first to their own network. You get the faster connection on their net, but suffer a smaller pipe to others - just as calls within are free . Again the demand for bigger pipes will be quantifiable when they see personally experience what massively larger bandwidth does.
Further if the providers offered an OPTIONAL cache service where you used their caching proxy you could see a significant boost in web browsing speed and they an see a reduced inter-network bandwidth. Perhaps they can host mirrors or join mirror networks to effectively provide the bandwidth to their clients. Hell if the local net as above was 100Mb/s I'd host a Gentoo mirror for that network. I'd probably run a few other mirrors. I'm not the only one either.
In a way it solves the chicken and egg problem. ISPs can't say they see a demand for larger pipes like that. Users don't know they could have it and don't know ho wmuch different it woudl be so the demand may not be there. Grassroots demand building 101: let them sample the goods.
Overall it isn't really different than now. I've got a decent sized network pipe but many servers I connect to simply can't support it. How would this be any different?
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Had we wanted, instead, faster and better service at the same real price (e.g. $75/month in 2006 dollars), then maybe we'd have got that. But that is apparently not what our buying habits told the cable and DSL operators we wanted.
You can't buy what they don't offer.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Photons, from what I have heard, ALWAYS travel at c. Light seems to travel slower when matter is present, because the photons are absorbed by atoms and re-emitted a miniscule fraction of a second later (which is a LONG time for something travelling at c).
---- "XML is like violence. If it doesn't fix the problem, you aren't using enough."
But when will it hit my doorstep at a reasonable rate?
When the phone companies get the word that Brand X applies to them as well as cable companies.
really?
how well would it be during a storm? When my neighbor turns on his power saw? when a vacumme cleaner is running?
Wireless is more suseptable to EM interferences then fiber.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Last time I checked the price of copper was increasing. The cost to make a penny has toppled its actual value. How long until the cost to lay copper lines can't beat the next new, cheap, and renewable source? Probably by the time this rolls out.
HCl is very slow at attacking copper metal. It dissolves the oxides, hydroxides, and carbonates that cover it, but leaves gleaming clean metal behind (Try it: You can buy 9M HCl at Home Depot as "muriatic acid" - copper gets very clean but not dissolved). Now, Nitric or Sulfuric acid, OTOH...
Most of your post is insightful, except for the cassette part. If CD's were the equivalent of cassettes, then you'd have a point? However they're not and that's what you pay extra for.
Also you miss the fact that free market forces are limited in the case of telecommunications, be it DSL, Cable, or wireless because resources are finite, and having everyone fight over them would be inefficient for the consumer.
US Telcos--all talk and no action.
That all depends on how fast you can pulse light, rather than electricity. If you can pulse light a million times a second with one piece of equipment, yet another piece of equipment that uses copper and electricity can pulse 5 million times a second, which do you think would have the better bandwidth?
Come on, this is only news concerning how fast you can pulse a signal down a pathway, and how many pathways you have available. Fiber channel drives used to be the shit, high-bandwidth and more, look where they are now. Hello, SATA, cables of copper. Bye Fiber channel. I still run two Fiber channel drives in my 533 MHz DEC Alpha box. SATA still blows them away.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
There's a lot of wire in the ground already.
And it doesn't matter how much it would cost to buy a pound of copper, if you already own it and already have installed it, it's cheaper to use it than to install fiber.
There's always money in making already installed cables work better to avoid installing new ones.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Sorry mate, but Fibre is cheaper these days, at least in greenfield situations. That is why KPN in The Netherlands has now decided to roll out fiber to all new building sites. It is cheaper, because the price per meter has dropped considerably (but maybe not to the level of copper), but also the maintenance costs of a fibre roll out are cheaper. Speed is also an issue, because with a fibre roll out you buy yourself a thirty year upgrade possibility.
A vacuum has an index of 1, all other matter an index greater than one.
Actually there is some interesting possibilities of things with a negative refractive index that has come up in recent years, but at this point you aren't going encounter it.
We run gigabit all over site (i work on a mine) and the Telco's link coming into site from the nearest city is just being upgraded to 12x512gigabit cores.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I've just been installing 10GB fibre interlinks. the fastest copper I have to hand is able to do 1GB. I'm promised some 10GB
copper - but that will only go over very short distances...whereas the fibre is going for miles. there will always be a competition
to drive shoddy old copper as much as it can be driven due to telecom profit margins - at the expense of customers who
paid for such copper many times over now - and back in the 80s! - I only wish such efforts were expended on making
thinnet and thicknet more useful so that we didnt have to say goodbye to all that copper a couple of years back. that stuff
snaked through every building and would now make an ideal backhaul for modern services if it could run an GB speeds
Of course, as with any prediction only time will tell.
Cool it, AC. The guy was just making a funny. There's no need to be a jerk.
I don't think that, for the most part, the phone companies *care* about trying to give you the maximum bandwidth on such a connection. The interest that they *might* have for deploying faster data-rates over copper (or Fiber for that matter), is about allowing them to sell you additional services, such as Television, Movies-On-Demand, etc. They might bump up the Internet bandwidth some, just so that their marketting can try to claim to be competitive with Cable, but if telcos roll out high-bandwidth technologies, it's not because they think there is strong market demand for much faster internet access. It's because they want new revenue streams.
Quite ...
It also ignores the crappy joints and all the other problems in the local loop.
You will never get to heaven with an Ak 47... But A Zu 30 is good for Low Flying Cherubim
I'd settle for an ADSL line that can deliver on current speeds. I've an 8Mbps link, but due to attenuation problems ( I'm 3Km from the exchange ) I've had to get my ISP to tweak the frequency range, cap my training speed to 4Mbps and change the Path Mode from Fast ( the default ) to Interleaved. Only with this combination do I get weeks of uninterrupted service, and it's half the speed I'm paying for.
It would be if I had an ADSL modem where I could tune all this lot from my end. Every time there's a serious outage at the Exchange, some or all of these settings get lost and I have to spend hours on the phone fighting to get to a 3rd level support guy who can restore my settings for me. It's a pain. Anyone know if this is even possible?
How does one aggregate channels together to feed such a stream? Who has such specialized routers?
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON