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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."
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.
**replying to myself. just ran speedtest.net and got 15 mbit down, and 2.6mbit up. I am on the standard internet plan. 30-40kbit, comeon...lets try to be somewhat accurate on this website please. I can also attest to pulling torrents down at similar speeds, so I do find SpeedTest.net to be an accurate indicator of bandwidth.
I am being accurate. And I ran any number of bandwidth checks, even ran them periodically and logged them so I could try to reason with their tech support people. They wouldn't believe me, claiming it was my problem. Not that it mattered: it was like trying to argue semantics with chimpanzees, but it cost them a good customer when U-Verse rolled around (oh, they screwed with me in other areas as well.) I once asked a tech if I was some kind of a test case to see just how much a customer could or would tolerate. He just shrugged. Actually, their on-site guys were pretty sharp, and always tried to give me what I was paying for. It was the phone support and provisioning people that gave me the most grief.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
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.