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."

Comments

400M ?

[ak_hepcat]

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.

Re:400M ?

[Thorfinn.au]

That means a mini DSLAM in a street pillar connected by fibre to the exchange, this gets the speed they need for the connection without the need to replace that last "mile". Still a significant cost to put in but saves about 80% on a full fibre retro-fit to the house/business

Re:400M ?

[ScrewMaster]

Me. I've just had vsdl service installed, which utilizes QWest's FTTN(Fiber To The Node) service. The DSLAM is about 2 blocks away from my house. I'm getting 20mbit down/5 mbit up. It's awesome. I see it as the future of DSL, simply bridging the last mile problem from fiber nodes.

I'm on U-Verse, and have been very pleased with it. U-Verse is also VDSL, and while it's no gigabit connection it works very well. Somewhat ironically (well, irritatingly) there's an AT&T VRAD right across the street from my house, not fifty feet away. But I'm not connected to it: I'm running from a box down on the main drag, maybe a mile away. I'm currently on the 12 mbit/sec plan (saved a few bucks) but I get about 15 which is fine for me, and when I first got it I was rated at 18 mbit/sec, and was getting a solid 22. Not bad for phone wiring. Plus which AT&T gives me a 2 mbit/sec backchannel, which I find very useful (compared to the 30 or 40 kbit/sec up I got from Comcast, when I was on their 20 mbit/sec plan!) And it's consistent, usable bandwidth in both directions.

Re:400M ?

[ScrewMaster]

**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.

Re:400M ?

[ledow]

Because running 5km of fibre for you (and 5km of fibre for the other people on your exchange which is presumably in the best location they could afford to put it, so we're talking everyone in a 5km *RADIUS* of the exchange, which means 20-30km + of cabling at least in some sort of web or star configuration) and a handful of people is a extreme loss. It would have to be fibre - we have nothing else that can really go that distance - and it would probably need repeaters for that length.

So they run the cable, dig up, say 20km of road / install 20km of poles / repeaters/ shielding, etc. just to get a fibre into a box somewhere nearer to you in order to do DSL or whatever they need (you to a nearby exchange doesn't matter, because there's no end of cheap, easily available hardware and wiring that can already be used to get you connected to that fibre). If you live in a rural area, say that connects 20,000 or 30,000 people. How much do you think that's actually going to bring in each year versus their outlay, repairs, upgrades, etc? It wouldn't cover the interest on a loan of the amount required to do the work in the first place (so they are theoretically better off by just leaving that money in a bank account, earning interest instead of costing it).

It's not a question of technologies - 5km is a huge distance - over radio for more than a handful of people at the bandwidth you're wanting is ludicrously difficult (and just fills the airwaves for even more miles around, making it harder to do more) or you'd have amateur radio networks doing it all the time at those speeds. Plus, you'd never get a license for it. Over cable, that's a huge amount of digging, burying, pole-installing, raising, repairing, planning, obtaining permission, and an awful expense in copper too (people are stealing copper cables over here for things like that because of its scrap value). Over fibre, you have all the same problems but only get no theft value, almost-infinite upgradability, conversion costs and extreme fragility as differences.

It's mostly quite sensible business reasons - it's ridiculous to expect a company to make a loss unless it's forced to (like some British ISP's are in order to fulfill their telecoms license obligations). That's a governmental problem - to force them. If they *are* forced to, they can't give you the same as everyone else because the technologies don't cover the same distance, and your maintenance / installation costs are ridiculously higher so you'll get slower / more expensive broadband. They won't get any fans by doing it, they'll just get people moaning that it's not as reliable / fast as other people's inner-city service again. Years ago, 56k was the standard, if you didn't have that, you were "deprived". Now it's 2Mb. By the time an installation is settled, it'll be 4Mb or 8Mb or whatever. They wouldn't recoup any money on their investment before they were digging it up again to replace everything.

Don't blame your ISP, or the scientists for not giving you the technology (that amount of combined bandwidth over that wide an area is all but impossible), blame your government for not subsidising what is now seen as an "essential" service. Get it classed as a utility, then it's in the same category as not having running water, or sewerage, or electricity. Until then, there is NO business case to ever do it. Without a business case, no business will do it, and no bank will fund them to do it, and no business that ever does it would ever be shown gratitude. When the government starts subsidising or enforcing it, then you'll have the service they lay down, and probably no more, and it'll be a cost burden on every other ISP user in the country.

It's like demanding that you get access to the city center by vehicle in the same time and same cost that a city-dweller can. Yeah, it can probably be done, but there's zero business case for it at all (in fact, there's almost infinitely more business case for you to get to the city centre in five minutes than for you to get br

And yet, I'm stuck

[Night Goat]

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.

Re:And yet, I'm stuck

[corbettw]

though there is political argy-bargy about it

I think there's something wrong with your new, high-speed network. It seems to be getting lots of line noise coming across as random characters on your Slashdot posts.

Re:And yet, I'm stuck

[AnonymousClown]

Interesting.

ABC.net.au huh. That's what, the gold version of ABC radio?

Noise

[Anne_Nonymous]

"advanced noise cancellation"

So that rules out most of the internet and email then, eh?

Re:And here in the US

[Anonymous Coward]

And with a 25 GB cap, you'll get several seconds on full-on internet!

4 pairs

[Dan East]

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.

Re:4 pairs

[LoRdTAW]

I doubt most of the copper POTS wiring out there is cat 3. The phone wire used in most homes is the old 4 conductor cable that did not have twisted pairs. Nowadays I believe most of the four conductor phone cable is indeed twisted and meets CAT 3 standards. I bought some at home depot not too long ago and it was 4 conductor CAT 3 twisted pair with RED/GREEN and BLACK/YELLOW pairs. The non twisted pair might still be sold so no guarantee there.

And that is just the home wiring. Who knows what crusty old non twisted pair cable lurks between homes and the central office.

And getting back to the grand parent poster:
1000BT is an IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It not only defines the data layer (how the bits are transmitted) but also the physical link which defines the electrical interface.
DSL is different than the 802.3 standard both at the data link layer and the physical layer. So its an apples to oranges comparison. Gigabit is Ethernet and DSL and other broadband technologies are completely different.

Re:how exactly does 'creating virtual ones' work?

[Dan East]

They can do this using two or more pairs. Most likely it has to do with harmonics, impedance, alloys and compositions and things with molecular structures that my primitive intellect cannot understand.

Direct link to graphic

[rsborg]

https://gigaom.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/dslphantommodeexplained.jpg

Docsis 3

[papasui]

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.

Re:As long as it's Adsl I don't want it

[Lehk228]

most cable connections are asymmetric too, and my experience has been that around here the warez monkeys love their cable modems, so i get consistently better gaming latency out of my 1.5 / .75 ADSL than my brother gets at my parent's house on a 20 something / whatever cable connection. sure he can download a game in the time it takes to microwave some dinner, but online play is worse, and less predictable. i am within 10ms of the same latencies every day

Re:As long as it's Adsl I don't want it

[ScrewMaster]

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?

Interesting. You'll find that most gamers MUCH prefer DSL over cable, since you're heading into a central hub and get right on to the fiber, rather than sharing a typically oversubscribed local node.

I currently have VDSL, fiber to the VRAD, and it's the best I've ever had for gaming. That kinda surprises me, actually.

Missing the point

[LostMyBeaver]

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.