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."

Comments

Finally!

[Rob T Firefly]

My dreams of building a top-notch deathmatch LAN using old rolls of 1970s speaker wire from my basement could finally come true.

Re:Finally!

[CastrTroy]

Just imagine the network you could build with Monster cables.

Re:Finally!

[Gilmoure]

Dude, lamp cord; it's really cheap!

Metaphor please

[CRCulver]

So is this like coating the series of tubes with an improved surface so that the trucks get better traction?

Re:Metaphor please

[Omnifarious]

Your post is labeled informative, but it is so filled with jargon that is missing any nice links to references that explain it that I find it quite unhelpful.

Re:Metaphor please

[Von Helmet]

Well, if you're using like, then it's actually a simile.

That being said, I think the appropriate metaphor for your post would be "flogging a dead horse".

Re:Metaphor please

[Belacgod]

So the technology in TFA will allow us to flog dead horses 200 times as fast? Won't our arms get tired?

Re:Metaphor please

[ozmanjusri]

Your post is labeled informative, but it is so filled with jargon

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.

Re:Metaphor please

[arivanov]

Quote from the article: one wire is wirelessly pushing its signal on to another wire (a phenomenon known as crosstalk), a microprocessor could use the noise from the crosstalk to do error correction on original signal...

Err... That is exactly what I described (without even reading the article).

IMHO not patentable due to being bleeding obvious. The sole reason it is not being done at present is that till recently it was impractical. You just about handled one wire with one chip. Handling a bundle and running a "cool" algo on them was simply beyond what the electronics could do.

As far as the likelihood with 3G: 3G does something quite similar using the signal in a feedback loop. As a result echoes from buildings and reflections from earth (aka multipath) which in other technologies decrease your signal to noise ratio are used to increase the signal to noise ratio.

For example you have the following sequence of bits: 1 1 1 0. Once you get past the first 1 you get the same sequence arriving reflected from a different source. As a result you get slightly better signal to noise on the next 1 1. After that you have a 0. It overlaps with a reflected 1. As a result you get garbled input. If you use a delay shift register and optimise where do you need to add your signal from 1,2,3,4 units of time before that to yourself you can actually eliminate this and improve your signal to noise based on reflections instead of garbling the signal. In addition to that the output of the filter is used also in guess what - power control: telling the mobile to adjust its power.

What this chap is doing is doing the same by applying signal from wire N to the signal from wire Y as a digital filter. Which means exactly what I said - in order for this to be of any use all wires in the same bundle should be handled by the same ASIC. I should probably do the math but they should probably also run the same line protocol. If you have a third party provider running an ADSL in the middle of your "precious" DSL2 bundle this nice scheme fails.

Pity actually, while not particularly original this is a cool way of using a well known existing way of improving signal to noise ratio (including the power control part of it).

Re:Metaphor please

[wsanders]

Summary: You have to do a bunch of math, like, real fast, and it might not even work if all the signals don't go through the same thingy.

In other news...

[EveryNickIsTaken]

PhD student advertises thesis on slashdot! News at 11.

Re:Obligatory ...

[smilindog2000]

Not true... information theory shows that a fractional bit is a probability of transmitting the desired bit correctly. A true source of random noise generates no bits, but a highly noisy channel transmits fractional bits per noisy bit sent. Fractional bits are well-founded mathematically.

Re:Famous scam?

[femto]

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.

Details? Here are some links.

[martyb]

The slashdot summary and linked articles are rather short on details. A little googling located some details:

• Dr. John Papandriopoulos' home page.
• Links to his Publications and Research (*)
• The actual paper has not been released yet, but here is a precursor to it: Low-Complexity Distributed Algorithms for Spectrum Balancing in Multi-User DSL Networks (PDF)

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 &ltblink> tag any more. :/

Re:Obligatory ...

[WombatDeath]

Rubbish!

0 = one bit
( = half a bit

1 = one bit
' = half a bit

You need to use an appropriate font, obviously.

I don't know what you people would do without me to solve these little problems for you.

Re:Sounds good, but...

[Tony Hoyle]

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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