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Closing In On 1Gbps Using DSL
angry tapir writes "DSL vendors are using a variety of methods, such as bonding several copper lines, creating virtual ones, and using advanced noise cancellation to increase broadband over copper to several hundred megabits per second. At the Broadband World Forum in Paris, Nokia Siemens Networks became the latest vendor to brag about its copper prowess. It can now transmit speeds of up to 825M bps over a distance of 400 meters."
Um. great, how many people are within 2 city blocks of the local wire center?
They need to be working on extending the speeds out past 15,000 feet (5,000M) if they want folks to get excited.
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I was going to be the first to comment but I'm more than 500 meters away from my phone company's nearest DSLAM, so I have to wait for them to build another one halfway in between.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
just replace copper with fiber and stop pushing dead horses. no one is located 400m from a CO. all this technology is worthless for the real world. ADSL2+ cant even do 24Mbps in the real world as its supposed to.
Unfortunately, I still find myself with a 2 Mbps download speed tops. This technology needs to be actually utilized! It's killing me to read this stuff and then never see it in action.
We still have to bend over, take it, and say thank you to our local (well, heck... AT&T) phone companies for the PRIVILEGE of having 8megabit/s downstream....
Competition anyone? or are we just such mindless sheep that "it's good enough, 'cause my granddaddy only had the pony express"
Argh....
The distance between my house and the nearest telco connection for DSL is about 500m. There is only one housing development closer and they were built long after my home went up. My speeds were twice the advertised rates due to this close distance as they were ramping up bandwidth so as to hit the minimum by the end of the line. That advertised rate? 2000/256.
Hey, I mean it's great an all that they are doing research to come up with faster DSL usage. Unfortunately while the speeds can be theoretically (or even practically) possible, we're still bottlenecked by price and desire of the telcos to push speeds out that fast.
After inquiring about business class and faster speeds, I wanted 768k upstream at least, and being told they don't offer anything that fast nor did they plan on it at any time in the near future I had to go to business class cable. While the business class cable is rocking fast, the downtimes are more frequent and the latency is unpredictable (well, it's predictably going to be poor during peak use times).
How about we first pass some legislation which forces the telcos and cable companies to give back to the consumers what they took when they built out their infrastructure all those years ago to give us wicked fast speeds we have yet to see--and no, 50mbit "speed boost" for 15 seconds doesn't count.
I can do better with my carload of 3 TB hard drives! Latency's a little slower, but no asked about that.
Someone please explain how this works. Is this some bizarre artifact of the signaling protocol, such that the only way to overcome a design flaw is to use some incomprehensible technique treating physical wires as virtual wires? How can that possibly be better than just natively signaling faster on the wires?
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
"advanced noise cancellation"
So that rules out most of the internet and email then, eh?
They are using 4 pairs to achieve that 825 Mbps speed.
Note that 1000BASE-T also uses 4 pairs to achieve 1000Mbit over a shorter 100 meters. I'm curious what maximum range 1000BASE-T will actually work at (100m is guaranteed), and if it were to work at 400m, what the bandwidth would be.
Better known as 318230.
825Mbs @ 400m ... I'd rather not live INSIDE the CO, thanks....
Yes, very interesting and realistically just a way for the big telcos to not have to upgrade the wire and instead upgrade the modem and equip at the CO. Take a look at the graphic here.
Looks like today's announcement is the extension of existing work last year, but using 4 copper wires (ie, 2 phone lines).
What's interesting is noone mentions latency, and whether this actually will increase responsiveness or just throughput.
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I have the same piece of copper that they gave my house when it was built 20 years ago.
They are not willing to dig just to upgrade it to give me gigabit DSL. If they were, they'd just drop in fiber and get the massive headroom that the barely-utilized bandwidth of glass wires gives you, coupled to easily-upgradable yet current state-of-the-art lasery bits on the end.
So I'm using the TV cable for 30 mbps broadband right now, and wishing that the Corporation Commission would use its power to dissolve the LATA's monopoly so another can walk into the neighborhood and string that glass.
https://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dslphantommodeexplained.jpg
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I briefly had ADSL and it was crap compared to cable modem. People forget the ASYMMETRIC part of DSL. In my usage I really felt this when using the net. Lots of lags etc. I switched to a cable modem and it was night and day better in my usage. Granted this was many years ago so perhaps it's better now?
And yet with AT&T's awesome service, I can only get 768Kbps. Thank goodness they have great customer support... [sarcasm]
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
I'm deploying docsis 3.0 networks today that can reach 200 mbit today. Only real limitation is the money to upgrade the gear and shifting around tv channels to free frequencies. Expect to see major pushes in 2011 by all carriers.
Telcos are trying to speed up their bandwidth to provide what cable the company already provides - video. Cable companies are trying to decrease the bandwidth needed to provide video so they can provide faster internet. Either way, I would prefer an internet connection over video service. Whatever technology is in place, I don't think it will be very long before TVs get content from a Cat-5 (or 6, or whatnot) connection over a coax one.
Their methodology requires multiple phone lines bonded and being used with parity in order obtain these speeds. Most houses dont have multiple phone lines. Which means they have to send techs out to install said extra wires. WHY THE FUCK WOULD YOU BE SO STUPID?? Send the techs to install fiber. Now you are future proofed to 10g speeds AT LEAST. Verizon's gpon can deliver 10g right to your house. I'm sure in a decade when gigabit becomes a sluggish speed... 10g can EASILY be deployed. The next step after that is also just as easy to deploy.
That means I'll soon have 825M bps down and 1M bps up to look forward to.
I'm now living in a major urban metropolis and I've got the same crappy DSL internet that I had in rural Canada in 1995. 5mbps. On that basis I conclude that whatever the powers-that-be are doing to stimulate innovation, it's been a failure. Utterly. Sigh.
All this sounds like an argument Tony Abbott and his crew will use against the NBN in Australia. If it were up to them we'd all be using the "reliable" 3G network here for our internets...
http://nerdsforallcom.socialgo.com/home.html
Most ISPs like to sell speed and hope that you dont use it much.
People who live within slingshot range of the telco can get faster speeds...how about better tech to get any sort of half ass decent DSL further than a couple of miles? There are millions of us out here who don't live in the wilds of alaska or anything like that, just normal rural areas or suburbia, who can't get jack shit for any sort of broadband except really flaky pseudo "broadband" from various fail wireless schemes like satellite and "wifi" type stuff. The only other option is a restricted telco "data plan" with ridiculous caps and "tethering" is banned and so on..
Yes, I read the article, faster speeds at still dismal ranges on copper. I mean, WTF, nations over yonder in euro land can provide it way out in the sticks, and still "make profit", but for some reason it "won't work" here. Effen telco cartels...
How about "no food for YOU" if you live more than two thousand meters from a real farm? I bet we'd get broadband the next day with a similar arrangement.
Its sad that I still only have 3mb DSL, I would really appreciate increased speed in my area....
TekGoblin
For gaming, all that matters is ping. You need little bandwdith by today's standards. I've yet to see any evidence that DSL is reliably lower ping than cable. I know it can be much high ping, I've had that myself. When I was with Speakeasy, they actually switched the connection up to Seattle before the first hop. There are DSL switches, just like Ethernet, and Covad switched it up there for them. A low ping to a site for me was 150ms with that connection. Compare that to my current cable connection which pings like 24ms to Google.
Also oversubscription isn't such a problem these days. Cable companies have built fiber out quite far, and as such can segment down the network a whole lot. Plus the new equipment can operate on multiple channels (DOCSIS 3 is actually done through channel bonding). So you can have multiple frequencies that different customers are on, which of course don't share bandwidth.
Finally there's always oversubscrtiption at various levels, even with DSL, even with big lines like DS-3s. It is just a question of doing a good job with it. A good or a bad job can be done with any technology. DSL doesn't mean no problems. It could be more or less as big a problem as cable when they do it wrong. Peopel have connections to a DSLAM, which is in a non-fiber area and just has a couple DS-1s or a DS-3 back to the central office. They've got too many people, the backhaul gets overloaded, speeds are slow. Seen it happen with Qwest more than a few times.
It is not a matter of DSL vs cable, it is a matter of implementation. Implement either poorly and you'll have problems. Implement either well and it can be good.
I was paying for 1.5Mb service, it never peaked over 1.3, when it dipped below 100k for over a month I ended up spending nearly 8 hours on the phone, disconnecting my entire network 3 times, buying a new 80$ modem and screaming at the support monkey, and then got offered to have it looked at for an 80 dollar charge
meanwhile the phone exchange box LESS THAN A QUARTER BLOCK FROM ME is still wide open with a copper rats nest hanging out of it still sits there in its condition
THEN only then after I switched to cable and called to cancel my service ATT offered me 10$ off a month of service and to come out and look at it for free
FUCK DSL, screw ATT, its worthless, and its not competitive in the price market anymore
825Mbps? you asshats cant even deliver 100k, get real
Where I live, HI SPEED BROADBAND!!!(tm) is sold as 2.5 Mbps. I have a TV tuner card on my computer. I receive digital TV broadcasts, wireless, from 2Km away (soon to be 15 Km away) without problems at 19.1 Mbps. Sure its omnidirectional and I don't get to pick content, but its the highest data rate coming into my computer (the 19.1 Mbps is effective, the actual data rate is 32 Mbps, but with forward error correction, etc. the effective rate is 19.1 Mbps). Its clean MPEG video at 1920x1080 in dolby surround. 9 gigabytes per hour. If they were sending software, I could fill two DVDs in an hour. I could broadcast Ubuntu to a whole city in 30 minutes. What the hell is with ADSL?
VDSL2, VDSL was crap which is why half baked solutions like SHDSL came into existence. If Slashdot guys can't get this right, then who is it providing information to the masses that for years talked about 3 and a quarter inch disks and call the computer "the cpu"?
And VDSL2,3,... is the short term future. Any time there's a nasty hack like DSL to cope with delivering over existing lines, at some point, it becomes necessary to replace the old, aging cables with something that is capable of lower noise. When this happens, I hope for your sake that they either replace it with fiber or 8-pair cat-6 (or better). Electrically isolated Ethernet is also a hack, but at least it's a clean hack. There just is no substitute for running a clean, environmentally secure solution like fiber.
For outdoor data requirements, fiber is the ONLY solution. When you stop demanding it, the service providers will start thinking you're happy with their hold-me over hacks.
The 30 up exists simply because it doesn't cost them anything extra to provide it. The fact is, they can oversell the up by a factor of 10 and probably no one would ever notice it. It's because 90% of all fiber traffic is downstream. That's because while there are some people who are sharing their entire movie and music collections with the masses, most people are watching youtube, hulu, etc...
So, while you get 30 up, and when connecting to others on the same provider's network, you're getting 30 up, the provider is simply throttling the overall up at their data center where they host servers for other businesses.
Remember the provider isn't paying for 10 terabit up and 500 gigabit down. They have a large group of switched fibers. They still run much of it over OC-(insert big number here) networks as Sonet is for the time being a hell of a lot easier to load balance and provide redundancy on than using massive Ethernet load balanced trunks.
So, what are they going to do with 9.5 terabits of unused upstream anyway?
Also remember that with the exception of P2P traffic, upstream between providers is becoming less important since Akamai, Google, etc... are distributing content all over the Internet anyway. If you're a provider with so much as 4U of rack space to spare, Google or Akamai will gladly install a caching server that will offload insane amounts of traffic from you. So if you have 100,000 users all watching the same viral video on youtube, after the first time it's viewed on your ISP, the video is probably located on a server at your ISP.
On a DSL technology, if you can provide 100% of X at distance Y. Then you can provide z% of X at distance z% of Y...
Well not precisely, the loss of speed is at least logarithmic if not exponential as distance increases. There are tons of reasons for that, but DSL is theoretically provide maximum bandwidth at a specific speed based on copper installed in the 50's.
If you're in a location where the wiring is cat-5 instead of cat-3 (or worse, from the 50's), then your SnR is much higher over longer distances and therefore you can receive closer to the potential bandwidth of the circuit at longer ranges. If your provider has installed Cat-6 STP (some places have it), then you can get almost potential speed at much longer ranges... well assuming the shield is grounded.
So, if they can deliver 1 gigabit at 400m, then they should be able to offer 30Mbit at 3-4km.... MAYBE. Either way, it has very little to do with specific distances as opposed to specific SnR introduced from environmental factors (sadly line capacitance is one of them, and therefore distance IS a measurable factor).
I don't need 825Mbps in a lab. I currently pay $45/mo. for 12/1.5. What I need is faster speeds at lower prices.
a town a hundred miles from here has uverse already. The local cable company is offering plans upto 107Mbps (www.suddenlink.com) I am still on an AT&T 6/768 DSL connection. Holding out for uverse.
AT&T has been doing massive amount of fiber work around town lately so I'm hoping that it's not to far away.
Well, I don't know what the hell he asked.
:
I'm a yank and I speak American which is a descendant of English. Thanks to language reform, it IS a different language and we can NOT share a common dictionary with England.
I have been to different parts of England quite a few times. People from Manchester, York, London, New Castle etc... not to mention Ireland with places like Cork (Zeus help us all), I am convinced that the only one left who speaks Queen's English is in fact the Queen and some other stuffed suits.
British itself isn't a language since British would refer to a common tongue spoken by the masses of people contained within even the tiny little area including England, Whales, Scotland, Northern Ireland (sorry for including you guys, it's geographical).
English as a language simply refers to a language group. Just like Great Britain is a name that linger from the days when England was an empire, but has little meaning anymore. There's just a powerless Queen on a powerless throne, recognized by a few countries who don't have to do anything except print her face on some money which they'd have to print anyway, but would spend LOTS more money designing if they had to think of something else to put on it.
English is simply a name which stuck with the language. While English and Norse were once a common tongue, understandable with a little effort by both people, the evolved differently. We now call Norse Icelandic (hehe) and we call English.. well English.
It may sound painfully nerdy, but it might be time for a movement to start referring to English as "Common" instead of English as the geographic connotation is obviously no longer applicable. Common would simply refer to a group of languages that are understandable by people on an international level. The group would include
- Most forms of American (Louisianan, Texan and other forms of Redneck is probably not included)
- Most forms of English (New Castle and Manchester is not included)
- Some forms of Irish (Cork... well let's not talk about them)
- Some forms of Scottish (Don't know if that's a geographical thing)
- Most forms of Australian
- Singlish (Singaporean national language)
- Chinglish (English spoken with the lack of ability to reproduce sounds due to their lack of existence in Chinese, there are now more who speak it than there are American's who speak American, or English who speak English).
- Kenyan (which is actually what I feel is the cleanest dialect currently.)
- Kiwi (That's an awesome language)
- South African (Try living in a country so far removed from the rest of the "western world" for so long without eventually having your own language)
- MANY other English dialects which have arisen since the English language group has become the common International tongue.
Take a tiny little country like Norway for example. There are 4.7 million people here. They have scores if not hundreds of different dialects. There are THREE different written languages. Yet, they refer to Norwegian as a top level grouping which includes the two main languages. Beneath that, they clearly differentiate the dialects. Oslo is kind of like "Queen's English", but there's formed a great diversity in it due to half a million people speaking it now. Trondisk which refers to a language similarly difficult to understand as Texan is to Americans. Bergen and Stavanger which actually apply entirely new sounds and some new spellings to some words and have even reformed the correct spellings of some of them to coincide. There's an entirely different language which instead of looking a lot like Danish looks a great deal more similar to Swedish called Nynorsk and a bastardized offspring of that called Nunorsk.
I can go on for ages about the Norwegian languages, but the point being that while we call them all Norwegian (except for Lapp), they are in fact many different dialects which in some cases can be (and
....when forever they said that 56KB was the limit over copper? How does one jump from a rigid 56KB barrier to current DSL speeds after such "fact" being spewed? HOw did the 56K limit get broken despite such assertions that this was physic law, it couldn't be broken.
No one in the US should care about this, you all have 7mbps DSL anyway, trust me it's not going to improve.
instead of a Texan... he'd be on here trying to identify where I live to hunt me down and teach me the finer points of the Texan language.. which requires props produced by some guys names Smith and Wesson.
But, you seem to be offended that we would try and take something away from your identity by removing the name of your nation from a language which I for certain don't speak.
Think of it this way... do we call Norwegian Danish just because for the most part it comes from there, and people who speak Norwegian still understand Danish (sometimes) and vise versa? The Norwegians even spell almost everything identical to the Danes with the exception of changing a letter or two... it's common that a word in Danish is the same as the Norwegian word except the Danes will use the letter G where the Norwegians will use the letter K. It's similar to how I prefer color vs. you who prefers colour.
We speak extremely similar languages you and I. In fact, my dialect has been heavily influenced by your language because I have lived here in Norway which until recently has preferred the English descendant of our common tongue. Thanks to American TV (which I don't watch... though I don't want TV at all), the Internet, and the fact that Microsoft Word uses American by default, it appears that the Norwegian spoken version of the common tongue has become more similar to American as of late.
Language is not an identity. It's a means of communication. The "English" identity for the language does in fact impede it's adoption by.. what's the English word for people who don't eat "bangers and mash" or "spotted dicks" or "butties" and other sexual or anatomical components we shouldn't insert in our mouths? Was it savages? barbarians? I can't ever get that right.
Identification of a dialect of the common tongue is beneficial so people may understand the slight differences which can be dangerously misinterpreted.
For example, if you were in England and you announced you were "Going to smoke a fag". Someone might join you and offer you a light.
In Texas, again, a republican might join you.. and he'll offer to let you use his gun.
Your version of English chooses to use a great deal more verbs as nouns. For example, instead of using a Lifter, you use a Lift. We use a device which alters our elevation called an elevator. We eat "mashed potatoes", you eat "mash".
Additionally, you order a Joe Baxi... we don't even know who the hell that is.
Of course, we torture the hell our of our language as well, and unfortunately you have the poor luck of adopting many of our disasters thanks often to the existence of MTV and adolescents. I apologize deeply from my heart for the 30% of my countrymen who are not only literate, but also intentionally read more that just hunting publications and sports pages, assuming they'll allow me to represent them in this cause.
The fact is, the English and American languages are as different as the Norwegian, Swedish and Danish languages, yet we still call them the same thing. You an I still understand each other and may even adopt more similar traits of each others languages now that communication is easier. But we've have 200 years to evolve our languages in different directions and to suggest that the American dialects are in fact still English is highly offensive to me.
If we were to start suggesting a language should be named based on the geography of its roots, then we can just call it Danish and be done with it.
Does that mean putting a second microphone up into 4chan and then propagating reverse white noise?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Why do they have to dig?
Didn't the phone company plan far enough out to put manholes in so they could pull new wire in without messing up people's driveways?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
So I can exceed my download cap in like 60 seconds?!
Jerks, I hate you so much.
The bandwidth problem in my neighborhood appears to be more to do with the inability of my ISP to buy sufficiently powerful equipment to properly handle the load, not my connection to it.
I suspect my scenario is more representative of the actual problem in many cases, at least in the US.
AK_hepcat, come on man... see my subject-line, & seriously give it some thought man!
(Now, if you're having a "bad day" & you're feeling pessimistic @ the world, well, then have @ it man... we're all entitled to those types of days after all, but it seems like you're having one of those is all!)
OASIS said it best: "All around the world... you gotta spread the word! Tell 'em what you heard, it's gonna make a better day!"
Which is what this site & others like it are ALL about really.
(NOW - There's a thought for the day, yea?)
APK
P.S.=> I mean, hey - they're making progress, and eventually, they'll probably get it down perfect for larger distances, & imo @ least? It'll probably mean repeaters/amplifiers to make up for "signal attenuation" (which is probably part of the problem, 'signal/wire resistance-over-distance')... apk
Lets see, we are 18000 feet by wire from a central office (measured
by PacBell) and the wires were installed in 1947 or so.
And no new wires are going to be installed.
So bonding wires-that-do-not-exist over
a few hundred feet is going to help how?
Seeing is believing. I couldn't even get AT&T (formerly Bellsouth) to provide me with POTS that wasn't noisy and useless.
/. Dissent will not be tolerated. Think like us or perish.
I bought and drank the DSL cool-aid for years. First the sDSL, where I paid a fortune for 320 kbps bidiretional, then later aDSL from the telco at 3mbps down, 784 kbps up. I looked forward to Uverse. When we finally got it in our neighborhood I cheered. And called. And discovered that for some reason my apartment building was the only in our multi-building complex which for some reason couldn't get it. I spoke to 2nd level tech support. They agreed with me that it made no sense and they sent someone out to check the wire (they really sent him; he started measuring in my apartment). No, it wasn't a database mistake, my building for some reason (bad underground wire?) just won't get Uverse.
So the telco lost a $150/month customer. I dropped multiple phone lines and a business grade DSL connection with multiple static IP#s. And went with Charter Cable. They've got fiber to the neighborhood and cable to the home. Now I'm paying $65/month for 16mbps down and 1.5mbps up. Not as good as some of my FiOS friends, but good enough for me. I've got two phone lines from Vonage, but I'm already experimenting with my own VoIP to cut that cost further. I just tested and right now I'm getting 23.2 mbps up and 2.12 mbps down, while listening to KUSC classical music in the background. Imho, it's time for DSL to quietly die.
It seems strange to me that as an ESL teacher I have been told by students of China, Taiwan and South Korea of speeds in excess of this like 3 or more years ago, upwards of 1 - 2 Gbps and here we are trying to sound cutting edge at approaching merely a fraction of this. I mean do they think we don't know? Is it arrogance or blind ignorance that says they have to invent for themselves something that all they need to is assimilate that which has already been done? I just don't get it at all!?! I've heard tell of movies within minutes and realtime, seemless online gaming such that they now have to 'rehabilitate' kids off them by means we can only conjecture. Yet here we are expected to be in awe of discovering what must seem like obsolete technology.