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Aussie Claims Copper Broadband now 200x Faster
SkiifGeek writes "Winner of Melbourne University's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence, Dr John Papandriopoulos could soon find himself the focus of a number of networking companies and government agencies interested in wringing more performance from existing network infrastructure. Dr John developed a set of algorithms (US and Aussie patents pending) that reduce the impact of cross talk on data streams sharing the same physical copper line, taking less than a year to achieve the breakthrough. It is claimed that the algorithms can produce up to 200x improvement over existing copper broadband performance (quoted as being between one and 25 mbit/sec), with up to 200 mbit/sec apparently being deliverable. If the mathematical theories are within even an order of magnitude of the actual gains achieved, Dr John's work is likely to have widespread implications for future bandwidth availability across the globe."
My dreams of building a top-notch deathmatch LAN using old rolls of 1970s speaker wire from my basement could finally come true.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So is this like coating the series of tubes with an improved surface so that the trucks get better traction?
.. but I think I'll wait for the consumer verdict to come in as to if this actually works. Theory and practice never tend to be the same, with theoretical bandwidth limits never reaching their peak.
:)
Hope for the best but expect nothing.
m != M ...or is it just me? MB and Mb...let's use them correctly. [/rant]
(Up to 200 mbit/sec) / (Up to 25 mbit/sec) = 8x improvement...
Search RapidShare and MegaUpload!
can it compete with fiber?
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
Both linked articles are a little scarce of details, but it's an interesting concept.
One thing though, is this the point at which companies should either get rid of the existing technologies and invest in newer, more stable, scalable and flexible telecommunications hardware & wiring? To me it is very much like the software-development stage where it's best to rewrite everything from scratch, than to patch the existing codebase (sorry, code-head, no better analogy available; sue me). Is there a risk of over-using what we have instead of just biting the bullet and (the telcos) investing in newer gear?
ilovegeorgebush
The growing availability of wireless technology makes the wired world an interesting evolutionary dead end. The speeds that are described are impressive (if you consider only 4x the speed of 802.11g impressive), but the future is not in copper wires. The only technology that has any future these days is wireless.
So thanks, Mr. Aussie guy. You've breathed some life into the geriatric hobbling of copper. I hope you get a big payout, because you've basically done the equivalent of developing the world's fastest webserver running on Windows 95.
I'll believe it when I see it.
PhD student advertises thesis on slashdot! News at 11.
how dare slashdot use a hunter s thompson quote at the page footer? maybe taco likes to think that he's hip but the truth is that hunter thompson stood firmly against the weak good for nothing liberal mindset that is pushed on slashdot as the only way to do things.
Am I the only one who feels a vaporware smell? Tiny details, huge promises.
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
"Dr John's work is likely to have widespread implications for future bandwidth availability across the globe."
Given what I've seen in the past and knowing how greedy telecommunications companies are, I doubt the above statement.
200 millibits per second. Wow, that's slower than the 300 bits per second modem that I had on my Apple II!
Had a few beers with him. Here is his homepage.
Even if this is true - and I'll allow those with a better background in this field to explain why it probably isn't - isn't this suspiciously similar to a scam from a few years back where this guy was peddling a supposedly similar gain in transmission speed over telephone lines? He had this elaborate setup to supposedly demonstrate it that he wouldn't let anyone examine closely?
I must be remembering some of the details wrong because I can't find the article - I remember that it was on slashdot as well as elsewhere, maybe 3 or 4 yrs ago? The guy attracted all kinds of venture capital and then was convicted of fraud, IIRC.
Anyway, even if this is true, I think he'll have trouble getting support for this reason.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
"Dr John developed a set of algorithms..."
Hope the calculation wasn't on Excel 2007
Yes!Networking article with anti-Microsoft... only on Slashdot.
and here comes the off-topic mod.
The 200x speedup is only if you consider 1Mbit broad band. My DSL provider's top plan is 6Mbit. So 200Mbit would be a 33x speedup. Modify that by an order of magnitude as the submitter states, and we're looking at a 3.3x speedup or 20Mbit. That's still a nice gain, especially considering it comes with little additional infrastructure, but it's not as wildly fantastic as the article might lead you to believe.
And we learned, in Electrical Engineering, that the theoretical maximum bandwidth for a phone line was 2400 bps.
Using basic bandwidth calcs for voice (500 to 4000hz?) and imposing a modulated signal inside that, the distortion created by the physical arrangement of the wires would cause the limit.
I'm glad that some people aren't scared off by theoretical physical limits.
(That was in about 1986, A Hayes 1200 baud modem was an amazing piece of equipment and cost about $700)
So pessimistic, has everyone who reads Slashdot become so downtrodden that they can no longer appreciate the work of another person (regardless of their status as a student).
Geek Post Subject: Comcast Throttles Bandwidth, Breaks Contract
Geek Post Comments: I can't believe Comcast! They promised me an unlimited 200mbit connection and all I am getting is 60mbit! I want what I paid for, who cares how fast my connection was 3 years ago! I demand my 200mbit connection, and at $50 per month!11!
Geek Post Moderation: +5, Insightful
200x faster net access, that's remarkable if its true.
On a related note, I note that hospitals are quietly getting ready to increase their budgets for coping with an influx of wrist related repetitive strain injuries and severe myopia. Not to mention a lack of sleep.
So now the ISPs, etc. have another excuse for not upgrading the infrastructure.
yay for broadband across old copper(!)
I would much rather have them lay fiber, than try to squeeze more bits down the aging copper. But they won't. They'll just carry on trying to survive as long as possible without upgrading, which isn't good for the customer in the long run.
Oh, the irony... "Anonymous Coward: If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear!"
I suspect that his algorithms require very very careful analysis of the cross-talk environment to remove its effects. The result is a very high-gain function on the high-frequencies to correct for crosstalk and modulation effects at high bandwidths. That's fine in a controlled environment, but won't work if the amount of crosstalk varies dynamically. Temperature, wind, rain, ice, humidity, and squirrels all change the crosstalk characteristics.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
The slashdot summary and linked articles are rather short on details. A little googling located some details:
NOTE: I did a quick skim of it and had not seen any empirical evidence of the advance; seems to be entirely theoretical. I don't mean to lessen his accomplishments, but my experience is that reality usually has unforeseen factors. I certainly hope he IS on to something here!!
(*) I didn't know anyone used the <blink> tag any more. :/
I think there are more people who confuse bits with bytes than people who confuse thousandths and millions. Unless, of course, on the Verizon staff.
i don't want more bandwidth - I want less latency. I have enough bandwidt to do anything I want except maybe watch HDTV real-time, and I don't care about that.
:(
But I hate waiting 5-10 secs for the server I cliked on to respond - partially due to all those redirects and things - but also the 120 ms across the Atlantic and 300 ms across the Pacific is a big contributor. That is like 6 times slower than the speed of light.
Where are all those optical routers
He is a postdoc or a research fellow now. If his contribution is so substantial, I would see him on the faculty list somewhere.
His work is in the field of channel capacity computation. The paper has very limit impact due to its model and its assumptions.
Sorry, there will be no 200x DSL. :-)
^(oo)^pig~
Amusingly enough australia has piss poor adsl, baring in mind Mr sheen (AKA John Howard the PM down here) has just decided to spend billions making the problem worse with a useless wireless solution their is a distinct sense or irony implicit here. Maybe Dr John should suggest to Mr Sheen that he put his considerable cleaning prowess into practise.
War is the statesman's game, the priest's delight, the lawyer's jest, the hired assassin's trade.- Shelley
Not for distance. You're still subject to the 18Kfeet (max) limitation imposed by the resistance (gauge) of the wire.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
The Slashdot summery implied this was some serious work, then the linked article is a local newspaper bragging about some PhD student applying for a patent. Big deal.
When 56k modems were first being developed they quoted over a 100kbs due to compression. In reality if you downloaded ascii art with long strings of identical characters it would do well over a 100kbs by compressing them but on anything remotely normal you got the standard 44kbs ish. Whats the odds this will amount to similar?
Well, I would hazard a guess that this is his home page and that links to a far more informative paper.
Can we try to keep the same level of respect when writing about other nations, as you do your own. For instance "(US and Aussie patents pending)". US is a formal designation, whereas Aussie is not. Please either write "(Yankee and Aussie patents pending)" or "(US and Australian patents pending)". Thank you.
he has a sign, "Will Research For Bandwidth"
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing. Emo Philips
... I remember reading articles in 1997 saying how 56k was the top-whack copper could provide.
Ah, I see how it is. Downmodded by a sheep lover. *nods sagely*
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
... the most meaningless phrase in American Marketing.
Anytime I see "up to" in a marketing statement I interpret this as meaning "you'll never get as good as"...
Now the telecom companies will just cut the number of lines they service and split it out to 200x as many people, effectively keeping the same speed for everyone, but cutting maintenance costs at the same time.
And you know, if they decide to pass those savings on to the consumer, great! But I have a sneaking suspicion that they'll just keep the profits so they can broadcast "RECORD EARNINGS FOR XYZ TELECOM THIS YEAR!"
I did a quick scan of his paper (http://jpap.andriopo.ulos.org/papers/icc-2006-dsl.pdf as posted by others). This is not my area of speciality by any means, and I would like to hear from someone more knowledgable. My thoughts were that it sounded a lot like some of the papers in the mid 90s about how Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) would solve backbone issues, for instance timing of responses and bundling of packets into dedicated direction channels. I would be interested to see if and where this theory will be used. Will it be used to connect backbone to workstation?
It seems a bit unlikely this one guy has made 200x of progress over what scads of EE's and Shannon and Nyquist and innumerable PHD's have worked out over the years.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is like claiming that someone "proved bumblebees couldn't fly". No, they didn't prove or claim to prove any such thing. What happened is someone did a static analysis of a bumblebee because that's the best they could do then, and discovered that if you treat a bumblebee as a glider it's not going to fly.
That's not a surprise, is it?
As the previous response to your message notes, when you analyse phone lines subject to ALL the limitations of ALL the hardware involved, they're limited to about 35k. The only way they got up to 56k was by changing the hardware at one end. Changing it at both ends is how you get higher speeds than that.
[quote]Verizon has the idea going with fiber.[/quote] Sure, go with Verizon. IF YOU WANT TO SELL YOUR SOUL TO THE DEVIL. (and also your information to third parties)
You mean like those that might be implemented in software?
Can't wait for the anti-software patent zealots to get a hold of this!
Oh, that's right, you're cutting all of your copper.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
200mbit/s... So, in 5 seconds you get a bit.
____________________
M=10^6
m=10^-3
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
Laugh all you want, but if we could improve satellite Internet we wouldn't need to upgrade so much copper?...
He was in the right place, and it musta been the right time...
New Zealanders are the ones that people make sheep jokes about, not Australians.
1.21 jiga-bits!
Those of us who think they know everything annoy those of us who do.
Only the last sentence is correct. The first two are incorrect.
You're confusing "bit" as a symbol (as in, kbps) and "bit" as a unit of entropy.
When a bit is fractional (eg 1.8), it is not "a probability of transmitting the desired bit correctly". It means that on average the receiver expects her "uncertainty" (equivocation) to be reduced by 1.8 bits.
Here's an example. Suppose I hold a playing card. You are unsure which card it is out of the 52 possibilities. Given that each is equally likely, you have 5.7 bits of uncertainty - log2(52). Now, suppose I tell you that the card is a diamond. Your uncertainty dropped to 3.7 bits. (13 equally likely possibilities.) The message "the card is a diamond" therefore contains 2 bits of information, since this is how much your uncertainty dropped by. Note the change in uncertainty is only loosely related to the number of 1/0 symbols conveyed.
Actually it's possible to transfer 10 gigabits over cat 5e. It requires fairly heavy DSP though, and cat 6a for a 100 metre run. That's still unshielded though.
s/m(?=bit)/M/g