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."

Comments

That's nice and all...

[viking099]

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.

Re:That's nice and all...

[walt-sjc]

We had a new second telephone company come to town to compete with Verizon / Adelphia. They started pulling their own fiber (this was a year before Verizon announced FIOS. Of course Verizon still hasn't announced FIOS for our town.)

The freakin PINHEADS only offer 1Mb or 2Mb internet - via FIBER. Heck, DSL in this area is as fast or faster.

DSL technology already exists that can offer higher speeds over longer distances than Verizon (and most other ILECs) currently support, but verizon (and other ILECs) just won't deploy it. Instead, they continue to install obsolete technology.

Poor topic

[cheezus_es_lard]

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

This is really great news but...

[Bryansix]

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.

Sailing effect

[telepilot]

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...

Re:Sailing effect

[moderators_are_w*nke]

This story has been annoying me all day. Fibre does indeed have a much greater upper limit, so this whole story is complete fud. The following is a direct quote from Professor Andrew Tanenbaum (and he knows stuff) from his book 'Computer Networks' (3rd Edition, Prentice-Hall 1996):

"With current fibre technilogy, the achievable bandwidth is in excess of 50, 000 Gbps (50Tbps) and many people are looking very hard for better materials. The current practical limit of about 1Gbps is due to our inability to convert between electrical and optical signals any faster."

This was written in 1996. We've come a long way since then. Copper is simply not in the game.

Monopolies overrule market forces

[JonTurner]

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).

Title is wrong! Article is apples vs. oranges

[MasterC]

The article title "Copper wire as fast as fiber?" is blatantly wrong. Flashy to make a better, more controversial headline.

The article title implies that a copper wire can have more bandwidth than a fiber. Read on:

He points out that a bundle of 50 Cat 3 twisted-pair wires (the kind that might be used in the last segment of the phone network) has 10Gbps of available bandwidth to distribute to the fifty homes at the end of those wires. By contrast, fiber to the home has only 2.5Gbps to distribute to its homes.

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.

Re:*scratches head*

[Daniel_Staal]

It's the width of the tubes that matter, since the current is all the same speed inside them. ;)

Couple of concerns

[brendanoconnor]

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

My own test

[k4_pacific]

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.

Electric signal propagation speed in copper

[tygt]

From http://www.copper.org/copperhome/HomePlan/puffs_sm oke_pulse_electrons.html, which is the copper trade group and hopefully reasonbly accurate and not overly optimistic, I find:

Such waves would travel at the speed of light except that they are slowed down slightly by the effects of the insulating material surrounding the wire. Speeds of one-third to more than one-half the speed of light are typical.

OTOH, http://www.itarchitect.com/article/NMG20010416S000 6 states:

In more ordinary media, such as certain commercial single-mode optical fiber products, the propagation velocity of a signal is 68 percent of c or 205,000km/s ... In comparison, electric waves or signals in commonly used copper wire travel at speeds between 55 percent and 80 percent of c.

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....

Probably aren't buying connectivity.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Probably aren't buying connectivity.

[russ1337]

>> 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.

As long as a neighbour has seeded the torrent you're after, it'll be freakin awesome!

The copper pushers have forgotten

[Perdo]

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.

Said the fiber optic line to the twisted-pair...

[Anonymous Coward]

...in a Jimmy Cagney voice: "Nyah! You'll never catch me, copper!"

you get what you pay for

[Quadraginta]

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.

That would be very cool.

[Kadin2048]

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.