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