Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Broadband Over Copper To 300Mbps

alphadogg writes "Alcatel-Lucent has come up with a way to move data at 300Mbps over copper lines. So far the results have only been reproduced in a lab environment — real products and services won't be available for at least a year. From the article: 'Researchers at the company's Bell Labs demonstrated the 300Mbps technology over a distance of 400 meters using VDSL2 (Very high bitrate Digital Subscriber Line), according to Stefaan Vanhastel, director of product marketing at Alcatel-Lucent Wireline Networks. The test showed that it can also do 100Mbps over a distance of 1,000 meters, he said. Currently, copper is the most common broadband medium. About 65 percent of subscribers have a broadband connection that's based on DSL, compared to 20 percent for cable and 12 percent for fiber, according to market research company Point Topic. Today, the average advertised DSL speeds for residential users vary between 9.2 Mbps and 1.9Mbps in various parts of the world, Point Topic said.'"

Comments

Gigabit

[Falconhell]

The problem with all copper lines is capacitance,
which acts as a low pass filter. The longer the line the more high frequencies are lost, which in effect takes the "edges" off of the pulses, making differetiation difficult. No ammount of technolgy is going to change the laws of physics. (:

All kinds of tricks are use such as QAM and different forms of compression to cram more down a copper pair.

All POTS work on 2 wires. Even if one has several pairs coming into the premises it is unlikely that there will be enough spares all the way to the exchange.(Would you put in double the ammount of copper needed on the off chance that it might be needed later.

The extra incoming wire are mainly for spares in case of faults.

Here in .au I have ADSL2 which at my current location provides 15mb/s.

Re:VDSL2

[kent_eh]

I suspect that even in the UK (which has a much higher population density than the US) the majority of people live more than 1km from an exchange ...and this assumes that the copper is relatively new and has clean connections ....

It's not distance from the CO building that matters, but from the DSLAM, which are easy to deploy in any densely populated area, and relatively cost effective.
The ~1.5 Km range is from one of these