Slashdot Mirror
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."
I know this guy though having attended conferences with him. I know he is not a scam artist. I also think he is brainy enough to do this. He is not a fly by nighter but a serious communications theory researcher with a track record. As I've just emailed to my supervisor, "It's not every day a communications theorist makes the mainstream media". John Papandriopoulos is easy to find on google.
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 the premise that this tech is based on 3G multicast is wrong too.
Dr Papandriopoulos paper suggests the algorithm works by iteratively lowering power, and therefore reducing crosstalk. The reduced crosstalk allows faster protocols like VDSL to be used on the copper that was previously only capable of ADSL2.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
You underestimate the cost of replacing the last mile technology... there are millions of miles of copper out there and it isn't going anywhere soon. BT's 21cn replacment for example is going to take until 2011 to update their network (if on schedule, and AFAIK it's behind already), cost many hundreds of millions and *still* relies on copper for the last mile (it merely makes ADSL2 deployment easier). And most countries' networks aren't even coming close to that level of investment.
If this means they'll be able to go to ADSL3 at 200Mb/s then I'm all for it.
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