Alcatel-Lucent Boosts Copper Broadband To 100Mbps

Mark.JUK writes "Telecommunications giant Alcatel-Lucent has today become the first-to-market with VDSL2 Vectoring technology which, it claims, will push the top broadband internet access speeds of existing copper telephone lines over 100Mbps and without needing to bond multiple lines together. Vectoring is essentially a 'noise cancellation' method (similar, in principal, to the technology found in some headphones) that works to cancel out background noise / interference (i.e. crosstalk) and can thus boost performance and reach (coverage) by between 25% and 100%."

Comments

What about latency?

[Hentes]

The biggest problem of copper is latency not bandwith.

Re:What about latency?

[Pharmboy]

The biggest problem of copper is latency not bandwith.

In the consumer market, bandwidth sells, latency doesn't.

Re:What about latency?

[mehrotra.akash]

Gamers?

Re:What about latency?

[thoughtspace]

Huh? Signal through copper is 66% of speed of light.
Isn't the latency due to routing which affects all media?

Re:What about latency?

[Bruce Perens]

Those gamers really notice the velocity factor, do they?

The problem isn't copper, it's bufferbloat.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

There really is no difference in latency between copper and fiber. Fiber runs ~200km/sec which about 2/3 the speed of light. Copper is very similar. Switching equipment causes latency.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you'd RTFA, you'd see its fiber to the cabinet then copper to the home. So if you live far as shit from the cabinet, it might add 1ms of latency vs fiber over that same span. Not exactly back breaking.

Re:What about latency?

[trum4n]

Their mom pays the bill, so nope.

Re:What about latency?

[joib]

2/3 of the speed of light (in vacuum) is actually about 200000 km/sec. Otherwise the parent poster is correct, though. There is no big difference between the speed of signal propagation in fiber vs copper.

Re:What about latency?

[kent_eh]

Routing and signal processing.
If they're doing a lot of processing as part of their noise reduction, there could be a significant delay added (in each direction)

Re:What about latency?

[cardpuncher]

The biggest problem of oversold bandwidth is latency. The technology is irrelevant.

Re:What about latency?

[stardaemon]

I suspect most latency when using copper comes from error correction. You could try having your ISP lower/zero your interleave value..
That can shave off 10-20ms, but it requires that wires aren't crap..

Re:What about latency?

[jpstanle]

I don't know what planet you live on, but here on earth waves propagate through copper transmission lines at a speed on the order of about half the speed of light. The latency due to a copper cable with a .66 velocity factor over a 10km run is about .050 milliseconds. Considering the latency of the IP network that you're connected to is probably at least 50 ms to even the closest nodes, I doubt a 0.1% increase is going to bother you.

The biggest problem of copper is not latency, it's that you have to lay the fucking cable.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Propagation speed in copper is actually slightly faster than that of light in fibre.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot: Stating opinion as fact since 1997.

Get a clue you chimp.

Re:What about latency?

[Shatrat]

Maybe, I doubt it though. FEC processing on optical signals adds less than a millisecond (I think the numbers I've seen are around 100 microseconds on both ends).
I'm not saying that what they are doing is anything like FEC, but the magic of ASICs can make hard math happen really quickly.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

She asks her son for which one to choose. So yep.

Re:What about latency?

[quantumphaze]

If you live far as shit away then you will only get ADSL speeds anyway. VDSL throughput quickly drops after 100 metres.

Re:What about latency?

[Bengie]

Propagation speed in copper is actually slightly faster than that of light in fibre.

^^
This

Re:What about latency?

[hedwards]

Judging from the fact that low latency connections aren't available here, I'd have to suggest that it isn't selling. Whether or not it would is another question.

OTOH, we don't have bandwidth over 6mbps available here at all, so perhaps it's just greed and incompetence. Either way, I'd be more than happy to deal with the latency if I could get 100mbps of bandwidth.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's exactly the point of their new technology, RTFA u nerf.

Re:What about latency?

[trum4n]

And then gets the cheap one...

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd say the biggest problem - with any last-mile technology, not just copper - is implementation. Implementing a new technology which will improve the user experience costs money, and telcos have shown a strong distaste for investing their own money in their infrastructure.

The biggest problem with copper is that DSL is basically used as a method to remain profitable without doing significant infrastructure upgrades.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or in some families. X is cheaper than Y. And look 10 is bigger than 6 see so it must be better.

In many families the PARENTS make the decisions. Not the children... I know this is a shock to some people...

In my family it would be *ME* making the decision. Not my kids. My kids could plead their case. So nope...

Most latency is due to the use of improper use of TCP backoff and bufferbloat. So that way they can sell you 10MB cable with a 15 boost. Yeah I get 15 *once* and awhile. But not enough to make it interesting. Then 90% of the time I am hitting some server on the other end of the country and have gone thru 30 routers and never see 10 most of the time anyway. The only reason you see it with bittorrent and the like is because the large number of senders filling your pipe.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

My mom stopped paying for my Internet about 15 years ago and I still consider myself a gamer.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you really think most gamers are kids?

Re:What about latency?

[trum4n]

It was a joke, old man.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mentally, yes.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Far as shit = 100 meters

Perhaps you have never heard of this measurement?

Re:What about latency?

[trum4n]

Wow, no one can take a joke anymore. I am really sick of all the angry people. Get off the internet if you are going to be a jerk.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

the big problem on ADSL is, as someone else said, bandwidth sells, latency doesn't. so they turn on frame interleaving for all connections, which boost latency by 40-60ms.

for some company it's possible to request that they disable interleaving on your connection.
  i know in canada, bell and vif will do it (everyone is a bell reseller) if you whine enough

Re:What about latency?

[compro01]

VDSL2 offers 50Mbps out to a kilometre or 100Mbps at 500m.

The local phone company uses a maximum loop length of 900m with FTTN and FTTP getting rolled out in the near future.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Fact-like typing detected. Slashdot, the home of the Space Nutter religion, likes its opinions and fallacies. Facts are not welcome, high-school physics is regarded with suspicion.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know what planet you live on, but here on earth waves propagate through copper transmission lines at a speed on the order of about half the speed of light. The latency due to a copper cable with a .66 velocity factor over a 10km run is about .050 milliseconds. Considering the latency of the IP network that you're connected to is probably at least 50 ms to even the closest nodes, I doubt a 0.1% increase is going to bother you.

The biggest problem of copper is not latency, it's that you have to lay the fucking cable.

In this case the cables (the twisted pair copper) are already there. They are the legacy phone lines that anyone who is not on coax/fiber IP phone is still using for their standard phone connection and regular DSL for their internet. What this means is that the local phone company can now offer very high speed internet and video WITHOUT changing the copper wire infrastructure they built 60 years ago. DSL's limit is about 3 miles over twisted pair copper. I would be interested to know how far this ADSL2 can reach and still maintain 100mbs speeds.

If it's less then the 3 miles (most likely) then the latency is about the same for it as regular DSL.

The best part of this news is it solves "the last mile" problem faced by the phone companies for triple-play delivery to the home and does so with out having to replace all that copper with fiber or coax.

Re:What about latency?

[overlordofmu]

All the worlds a game, and the men and women merely players.

Re:What about latency?

[Cimexus]

Say what? Copper itself doesn't have inherently more latency than fibre (in fact, the propagation speed of a signal in copper is slightly faster than light in fibre). I suspect you are referring to frame interleaving commonly used on xDSL connections. Which can be turned off. My ISP allows you to change this setting from the toolbox on their website ... first hop latency reduces from ~20 ms to ~9 ms if I do so. Once you're past the first hop the additional latency to the destination will obviously be the same regardless of the last-mile medium of delivery.

A true fibre connection would reduce this first hop to almost zero, admittedly, so would still exhibit less latency - true. But I think it's a bit of a stretch to call an extra ~9 ms of latency a "problem of copper".

Re:What about latency?

[Bengie]

100us sounds a bit high actually. When I run a high-resolution ping on my home network, it claims 0.01ms pings from my computer to my wife's through my Netgear 3700 home router. That right there is only 10us. So, from the time an application instructs the OS to ping a computer to the time the other computer receives the packet, is about 10 millionths of a second, on home-grade equipment.

I should hope fiber is faster than that.

Re:What about latency?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

No, not velocity factor but rather the problem of copper POTS having crappy channel characteristics and bandwidth, which means that you have to do heavier and heavier signal processing to squeeze ever more diminishing bitrate improvements out of them. And this signal processing takes time, i.e. adds latency, there's no way around that. Case in point; pinging from work to home (250 miles, 10 hops) is on the order of 25 ms. That's with fibre all the way into my basement. (50 Mbps up/down for ca $35/mo inc. IP-telephony.) My DSL way back when was on that order just for the first hop. So that cut my latency in half right there. Now whether that actually matters in the greater scheme of things is another thing entirely. (It's not like the days of modems with 200-300 ms) And it doesn't detract from the buffer bloat problem when links begin to saturate, but that's a different problem.

Re:What about latency?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what you mean. On my 20mbps Qwest VDSL my ping is routinely between 31-37ms for CoD and WoW. I've never seen it higher than 50. On comcast I was routinely getting in the 60s.

Re:What about latency?

[Shatrat]

I believe there is a range and 100usec is the high end, I was being generous.
I think I've seen as low as 7usec with slower 2.5 gbps lines using normal FEC (not higher bitrate Enhanced FEC). I'd have to dig through operations manuals to confirm.
This is on optical transport equipment that costs as much as a house, not consumer grade routers which aren't going to have FEC at all.

Re:What about latency?

[tlhIngan]

Gamers?

Too stupid and buy cable connections because they offer "bigger numbers".

Go to dslreports.com and see - the cable provider forums are constantly filled with "high ping" and "lag spiking" complaints. Of course, they refuse to try DSL because their 15/1 connection outclasses the 3/.5 max that they can get via DSL. There are those who use both - DSL for gaming (constant latency), cable for fast downloads.

Bandwidth sells - it's easy to show pages/movies/downloads arrive faster. Latency, not so much. Heck, most cable providers advertise "more speed for better gaming performance!" rather than low latency.

Re:What about latency?

[CubicleView]

I think the ratio of "jokes" to interesting posts on /. is a "joke"

Re:What about latency?

[Bengie]

ahh. So 100us would be the "extreme" case. Interesting info :-)

Just in case... I wasn't trying to say you were wrong, but I found it strange to have that much of a latency difference between my copper networking and a high speed fiber link. The 7us range sound quite fast for a bunch of error checking/correction.

Re:What about latency?

[macpacheco]

Latency isn't a copper issue... Between 100Mbps copper and 100Mbps fiber you should get the same latency.
Now if you compare a Gbps PON (fiber) access with a 10Mbps ADSL, then of course the ADSL will have much higher latency.
I have a 12Mbps/1,2Mbps ADSL2+ link and I can ping the ISP's router with less than 10ms delay.

Re:What about latency?

[Grishnakh]

In the consumer market, bandwidth sells, latency doesn't.

Then why does anyone have high-speed internet connections? You can get far, far, far more bandwidth with the USPS than you can from any network connection. Of course, the latency is terrible, but you said that it isn't important.

Re:What about latency?

[Grishnakh]

Too stupid and buy cable connections because they offer "bigger numbers".

Go to dslreports.com and see - the cable provider forums are constantly filled with "high ping" and "lag spiking" complaints. Of course, they refuse to try DSL because their 15/1 connection outclasses the 3/.5 max that they can get via DSL.

Maybe that's not the cause at all, and it's because the only DSL provider in their area is a shitty telecom company like Qwest that has horrible service, constant outages, and when they used to have DSL, they had nothing but problems from that company, so they refuse to ever be their customer again, and this only leaves the local cableco as a broadband choice.

I'm not a gamer, but I did have DSL years ago with Qwest and you could not pay me enough money to be their customer again. I've had Cox Cable ever since then, with relatively few problems. Luckily I don't care that much about latency; as long as Skype works (I need it for work) and my connection doesn't go down, I'm happy.

Re:What about latency?

[ThatsNotPudding]

The biggest problem of copper is not latency, it's that you have to lay the fucking cable.

Followed up closely by its subsequent theft.

Re:What about latency?

[Bruce Perens]

Good point about signal processing. For my home modem, with 11000 feet of copper (long enough to limit my bandwidth), there is indeed a high ping time of 41-45 ms. But that ping is not to the DSLAM in Albany, California. It's to the ATM call termination in Pleasanton, a good deal farther away. I can't really tell how much of the problem is the modem and DSLAM, and how much is elsewhere in ATT's network.

Re:What about latency?

[Bengie]

What's wrong with cable connections? I get a 6ms ping to a city 30mi away, 20ms ping to Chicago, and 45ms to New York.

If you know someone with DSL that gets more than 10% better, let me know. I bet most have worse. Latency isn't a cable technology issue, but and implementation issue.

Re:What about latency?

[petermgreen]

As others have said at least in the case of DSL the latency doesn't come from the copper line itself. It comes from the signal processing used to squeeze relatively huge amounts of data down a line designed for analog voice.

In particular when using forward error correction techniques (which are pretty much essential when you are running close to the limit of a channels capacity) it often makes sense to interleave frames. That way if there is a burst of noise it's impact will be spread across multiple frames and will be correctable whereas in a single frame the same noise burst would have been an uncorrectable error. However interleaving frames necessarily adds latency.

It's possible to turn off interleaving on ADSL but afaict most providers are reluctant to do so.

The biggest problem of copper is not latency, it's that you have to lay the fucking cable.

The biggest problem with copper is the low bandwidth and high interference susceptibility of long copper runs, especially long runs of cheap phone pair. Cable TV coax offers more bandwidth but that bandwidth is shared and much of the cable's bandwidth is taken up by cable TV services.

Re:What about latency?

[AliasMarlowe]

Look here boy, my mom never paid for internet. I've always paid for it myself, starting in 1984 or 1985 (don't remember, it's been a while). Latency and bandwidth with the 1200 baud modem were quite adequate for Trade Wars (on a BBS, not many internet games then), I'll have you know.

Re:What about latency?

[dadragon]

My ISP is not a Bell reseller. Indeed, Bell is a reseller of the local DSL provider here.

Re:What about latency?

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

Yes, well it's been a few years since I worked for the wireline division at Ericsson... :-) but as long as it's ATM transport I think that buffer bloat won't be much of a problem at least. Since ATM is basically a (half-assed compromise of a) telecoms standard it doesn't allow for much buffering, as that would hurt call quality. It should be low latency end-to-end. If you know that you're only going to forward IP, then you could start adding more buffering, but I don't know if that's routinely done (and I don't have my old buddies at work to ask). I know it wasn't common when I worked closer to the field, i.e. buffers in ATM-switches were very much managed with a low max latency in mind.

(In fact I remember one of the first trials of IP-over-ATM I witnessed where the network totally died from a related phenomenon. When the buffers in the ATM switches started to fill it would drop frames as they would be too late to deliver anyway. Only problem was that the frames are too short, all IP-packets have to be sent on multiple frames, so all but one frame of a packet would make it to the end. However, since the IP-packet couldn't be reassembled, it would be dropped and TCP would then resend the entire IP-packet again. Leading to additional load and overfilled buffers. The network was in effect busy forwarding the same frames with the same data over and over again... The "quick" fix was to tell the switches about IP so that if it found that it had to drop one frame of an IP-packet, it would drop the rest of them as well. No point spending any resources on forwarding them. Anyway it's a pretty useless standard for datacom, I'm happy to see it go the way of the do-do.)

Too little, too late

[Anonymous Coward]

I have fibers to my house now...

Re:Too little, too late

[Yaotzin]

What? This is great for all the people who don't have fiber and can't afford to connect their house with it. I'm capped at 25Mbit/s because of this. Wouldn't mind a 400% increase of speed.

Re:Too little, too late

[hedwards]

And there are those of us that would be grateful to get 25mbps, around here the ISP only offers 6mbps tops if you go with cable or 5mbps with DSL. And that's assuming that you're in a neighborhood where they care about providing a halfway decent connections, some of the neighborhoods top out at 1.5mbps.

Re:Too little, too late

[Yaotzin]

I'm in Sweden, the ISP's here have invested slightly more in the backbone or whatever the cause may be. I feel I need to add though that I mistyped, 25mb/s is my maximum theoretical speed. In reality, it goes up to about 12. Although, I don't really need more, but wouldn't mind it. Anyway, I'm aware of the situation many people find themselves in (mainly in the US, Australia and NZ it would seem). It's a good thing they continue developing connection over copper though. If they can't be arsed to fix the connections up to at least ADSL2 standards, then fiber will surely take a long time coming. A good deal of apartment houses in Sweden already have fiber as it is, pulled in with cable, and have had it for many years. Just recently they've started using it, allowing for 100/100, 200/200 and in rare cases even higher speeds.

Speed

[Wowsers]

Throttled down to what?

Re:Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey they won't throttle it down, they will just give you a 1G cap, and then bill you $100 for each Gig over that.

Re:Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's AT&T, currently exactly your max.

They're in a class action for a decade of throttling that no limit line to 450kpbs

DSL is like the herpes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Can't get rid of it and for some reason some people are intent on spreading it :(

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[razorh]

And what would you suggest, when your only options are DSL or Comcast? I personally will never give Comcast another penny, ever. I would do without internet access before I'd pay them anything.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[trum4n]

Nice rhetoric, but the internet is the only thing comcast is good at. Last time mine was out was Snowmageddon, and it's as fast as a tazer chased cat.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[Anonymous Coward]

My choice for internet is DSL (Frontier, formerly Verizon) or 3G. Every couple years Insight does a door-to-door survey to see if there is enough interest to hang cable down the road but everyone already has DirectTV or Dish, so they all say no.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[razorh]

That may be so, but in my case they have screwed up too many times in the past (going back 15 years or so) to ever get my business again. It's not about how good their internet service is, it's about my feelings for them as a company and how I have been treated by said company.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[trum4n]

I know how you feel. For me it's Verizon, AT&T, IBM, Dell, Sony, Microsoft and the government.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[hedwards]

Comcast is capped and when they had my business they managed to be out several hours every single afternoon. Even if they have fixed their service, they're still capped and barely any faster than DSL. On top of which, I'd be sharing bandwidth going to the ISP.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[trum4n]

I get 34mbps down, about 2mbps up. Pulled over 250gbs last month. No cap, and its fast enough for me. I saturate every server i try to download from. I'm glad everything done by the big distros is on torrent. It's nice downloading a distro in a few min.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[Anonymous Coward]

Frontier is absolute garbage. Fucking 1.5mbps that actually translates to 120kb/s these days and performance is getting worse. When DSL in my area was managed by Epix at least then I saw 60ms, these days I'm lucky to ping 90-120ms I have the same problem, Time Warner Cable comes through every now and then and no one will subscribe to get cable ran because they're all stuck on frontier and DirectTV or Dish

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[WindBourne]

Yup. Nobody wants DSL. Yeah, sadly, companies like comcast keeps DSL alive.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[WindBourne]

I just left comcast. They plain out sux. They had outages all the time in net.

Re:DSL is like the herpes...

[Bengie]

"On top of which, I'd be sharing bandwidth going to the ISP."

Just like DSL and FIOS.
DSL: Dedicated up to the dslam
FIOS: shared at every point. --Best not because of best bandwidth, but fiber generally has fewer issues and is easier to troubleshoot. Much more reliable
DOCSIS: hybrid of shared and not shared. Implementation dependent.

Small print

[Anonymous Coward]

*must live in the phone exchange

Principal/principle

[Anonymous Coward]

Principal "first in order of importance, main" (source http://oxforddictionaries.com/definition/principal)
Principle "a fundamental truth or proposition..."

The easiest way to remember which to use is that principal has an 'a' in it.

Good luck

[netwarerip]

Yeah, this is all well and good if you live next door to the CO or in a city with new copper. Anyone living in the vast majority of 'older' cities and towns on the east coast is dealing with copper that was installed before the 1960's and has no shot at this kind of speed.

Re:Good luck

[Anonymous Coward]

Bell Canada has a VDSL2 rollout. They bring a DSLAM into neighborhood cabinets, and run fibre to that. They call them RDSLAMs (R is for remote).

I'm 1500 ft. from my remote, as the copper rolls.

Mind you, you'd have to be insane (or uneducated) to use Bell Canada (or Rogers) for Internet service.

Re:Good luck

[slackbheep]

Or live in one of the areas they have a nice strangle hold, like the vast majority of the NWT, for instance.
There is no middle finger big enough.

Re:Good luck

[Guspaz]

Bell's VDSL2 rollout also includes installing remotes in the basements of MDUs (apartment/condo buildings) to serve them and surrounding buildings. I'm 147 feet from my VDSL2 DSLAM.

It's an easy win; you install a small RDSLAM in the basement and run some fibre to it, and suddenly you can offer VDSL2 internet and HD IPTV to 250 new potential customers. And hey, if the neighbouring buildings are close enough, multiply that by a few times.

Re:Good luck

[compro01]

Sasktel does the same thing with a 900m maximum loop length.

They're also rolling out FTTP, starting Real Soon Now, supposedly covering everywhere in all the major cities by 2017.

Re:Good luck

[witherstaff]

Don't worry the telcos were given hundreds of billions and agreed to roll out fiber to the home in many cities and states. I'm sure that'll happen any day now, I mean they promised!

Re:Good luck

[rogueippacket]

This. TELUS does exactly the same in the West. You don't NEED fiber to the home when your DSLAM is that close, and in most cases you can even avoid laying new copper. The technology just gets a bad rap when incompetent ISPs try to sell you xDSL service through a shoddy local loop, and then refuse to roll a truck to fix it.

Re:Good luck

[rogueippacket]

Don't worry, it is actually cheaper to trench fiber now than copper, so you will see this happening if you haven't already. I can't speak for the States, but new subdivisions in Western Canada actually have fiber being run to them from day one instead of copper lines. Profit motive is a great thing, and the international demand for copper has made this a reality. What you will not see is fiber being rolled out to existing neighborhoods - it is usually much cheaper to upgrade the neighborhood's cabinet to provide better service over the existing copper lines. There are some exceptions, of course, but this is the general trend.

Principal?

[TeknoHog]

similar, in principal, to the technology found in some headmasters

Fixed that for you.

Att should use this to up there poor bit rate on U

[Joe_Dragon]

Att should use this to up there poor bit rate on U-Verse and up all users to 4 or more HD streams.

Coming soon to Canada...

[Pope]

With a 40GB/month cap!

Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[Anonymous Coward]

The post isn't lying. Caps are so stupid up here.

Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[Anonymous Coward]

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Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[sgt scrub]

Your unhappy because you will only be able to taunt people in the U.S. for having a 20GB cap and 1/20th the speed?

Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[TrevorB]

My 100Mbps last mile copper line here in Canada (Shaw Cable - been active for the past half year) has a 500GB/mo cap. There's talk of a 250Mbps with 1TB/mo cap (or unlimited) options coming out later this year. The price isn't exorbitant too, too much for college kids, but $99/mo with digital cable isn't *that* bad.

It's not all horrible up here.

(And yes, Teksavvy should have the right to offer the same Internet service without cable on the same copper at a fraction of that price)

Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[Pope]

Heh :) I have 15 (now 25, I think?) Mbps cable through TekSavvy with no cap, running on Rogers' lines. I've heard good things about Shaw's cable offerings out West, but there's zero chance we'll get anything like that from Rogers in Ontario anyway.

Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[Anonymous Coward]

I get 30Mbps in Quebec with a ridiculous 120gb cap from teksavvy going over Videotron.

Re:Coming soon to Canada...

[Hamsterdan]

Not that far from the truth...

Cable in Quebec
http://www.videotron.com/service/internet-services/internet-access/ultimate-120

150-160$/month with only 170GB download/30GB up.

At least the upload speed's nice.

standard service is still around 50$, 8Mb down/1Mb up, with a ridiculous 50GB limit. And with only 2 ISPs, it's not going to change that much (almost all the other ISPs are resellers, and are subject to the same limits, thanks to CRTC)

And since they also own TV stations and are tv providers, that's not about to change, especially with Netflix and such

Re:Att should use this to up there poor bit rate o

[Anonymous Coward]

Where bit rate?

Re:Irrelevant?

[thegarbz]

Copper is mainly used for last mile delivery not for backhaul. The majority of latency issues which come into play only if you're really a hardcore gamer are to do with routing and switching. Fibre does not fix this problem, actually it may make it worse as routers are purchased which provide more bandwidth with bigger buffers which further contribute to a the bufferbloat phenomenon which affects and degrades routing.

Furthermore your typical ADSL connection to a local game server is 20-30ms. Unless you're the type of gamer who makes their primary career from p4wning n00bs, reducing this figure by 5ms isn't going to provide you with much of an advance. Not into games? What else is there? About the only other really low latency service (and by this I mean service where 20ms becomes significant) is supercomputing, and for grid projects likely to use home internet connections and consumer hardware this isn't an issue.

So my question back to you: Why is it a problem? What are you hoping to fix?

Re:Coming soon to Verizon...

[Anonymous Coward]

With a 5GB/month cap!

Could be great for FIOS MDU users

[DeafDumbBlind]

Verizon uses VDSL as part of their FIOS service in apartment buildings if they can't get access to run fiber to the apartment. This usualy limits bandwidth to about 30Mb downstram and 4 or 5 Mb upstream.
If they switch to VDSL2 then I may finally get the full 35/35 speeds I'm paying for.

Re:Irrelevant?

[HopefulIntern]

I am lucky to get 30, usually sit at 40-50 and thats only on foreign servers (ironically), to UK servers its usually higher than that.

Upload Speed

[Techman83]

So what about upload speed? Really, that is the achilles heel of all of these technologies. Also how many people are going to live in the zone that gets 100mbps or will it be like where I live, suburban area Perth with a cable run 4km from the exchange (don't mind that the exchange is abount 1.5k away via the road) and getting ADSL1 speeds, but paying for ADSL2+ (which is actually cheaper as it's not provided by the semi privatised monopoly called Telstra).

Re:Upload Speed

[Guspaz]

Upload speeds on VDSL2 aren't automatically fixed like they are on ADSL. Different VDSL2 profiles use different splits. Personally, I've got 25 megs down, 7 megs up, and I've bonded two of those to get 50 megs down, 14 megs up.

The distance issue just requires them to push the remote DSLAMs closer to the customers. In my case, Bell Canada has installed the VDSL2 RDSLAM in the basement of my building. I'm 2400m from the CO, but only 45m from the closest DSLAM.

Re:Upload Speed

[rogueippacket]

There is an important distinction to make when looking at upload speeds for any access technology. First of all, there is your train rate - this is the rate you are getting to the local cabinet. ADSL offered very little in terms of upload train rates, but VDSL2 is much more generous. For example, my VDSL2 at home is 60 Mbps/25 Mbps. Now, you also need to consider your committed rate, which is usually determined by your Layer 3 gateway inside the service provider network. My committed rate, right now, is actually 35 Mbps/3 Mbps. Some people call this "bandwidth throttling", others call it "quality of service", but what it comes down to is even though I'm talking at 60/25 to the cabinet, my service provider is only selling me 35/3.
Remember, the service providers built their networks to support the previous access technologies - DOCSIS v2 and ADSL. Nobody (well, almost nobody) complained about poor upload rates then, so why would the ISP all of a sudden decide to double, triple, or quadruple your rates just because the technology supports it? I doubt the local cabinets could even handle the traffic demand that would place upon it, and so long as that bandwidth could be used for new customers, what incentive is there to make a change? You will get your increased rates, but the ISPs will need to lay much, much more fiber before this happens.

Re:Upload Speed

[Solandri]

VDSL and VDSL2 don't have a bias for download (or upload) bandwidth. Your carrier can choose anything from fully symmetric to heavily asymmetric, but the technology itself doesn't care. Bandwidth is not arbitrarily pre-allocated like with ADSL.

Re:Upload Speed

[Savantissimo]

The backhauls are uniformly symmetric links, as are all the other links in the network aside from the ADSL/VDSL. The upstream bandwidth in the network is just going to waste. It's just the dog-in-the manger attitude of the phone companies that is throttling the rates. Even if it would cost them literally nothing, they see no reason to give it to you unless you pay more.

Re:Irrelevant?

[Hatta]

Not into games? What else is there? About the only other really low latency service

What about remote desktop?

Re:Irrelevant?

[slackbheep]

Yeah yeah, lord it over me why don't you =p
I live in the northern ass end of Canada and pay $129/month for my internet connection(100gb/month $13/gb for additional usage), which promised 25mbps while providing just shy of two, and leaving me with a ping of about 90-150 to a typical server in southern Canada or the north end of the States. I pray this is not the sign of things to come, but we both know Bell, Rogers and co will charge these prices with a grin elsewhere if consumers can be convinced to pay.

Irrelevant if it won't be deployed

[blackanvil]

All these wonderful high-speed Internet connections do us no good if the telcos refuse to deploy them. I live just a few miles out from DC, and I can't get any broadband because Verizon refuses to install it.

And distance?

[Camaro]

I would be interested to know if the technology to boost bandwidth on copper might also help push bandwidth out further. A lot of us rural folk still don't have a lot of choices when it comes to broadband and all of them are expensive.

Re:And distance?

[Guspaz]

Not really, there hasn't been any real advancements in long-distance DSL since ADSL2's annex L (Re-ADSL2), which cranked up the power a bit to extend the range.

ADSL, ADSL2, and VDSL2 all behave about the same after a certain point. VDSL2 can do 250 mbps symmetrical at source, but after 1600m, it performs the same as ADSL2+, and eventually, the same as ADSL. All these newer DSL standards are really doing is crank up how much spectrum is used, enabling faster speeds at the distances short enough to be able to use those frequencies.

Vectoring helps eliminate crosstalk between multiple DSL lines sharing a bundle of wires, but probably won't make all that much of a difference on long loops, simple attenuation is the enemy there. The real answer to pushing DSL out farther is to push the DSLAM closer, and run fibre to the DSLAM.

Re:And distance?

[cthulhu11]

I live in a distressingly urban area, but am still too far from the Qwest CO/site to get ?DSL* faster than like 5Mb/s down. A technology being available doesn't mean that it will be deployed in any useful fashion.

Baseband's been doing it for 16 years...

[DarthStrydre]

..100Base-T. Albeit not over incredibly long distances.

Conversely on that broadband cable line already coming to your house, each 6MHz channel can support a downstream rate of 42.88Mb/sec using QAM256 (with some of this as overhead). Devoting that entirely to "Internets", the usable frequency range of that cable (typically) is from ~54MHz to 750MHz which represents 116 channels. 116*42.88 = 4974Mb/sec, or ~5Gb/sec of useful data in one direction. Cut that in half, and allowing for upstream inefficiencies (QAM64 instead of QAM256), you could theoretically get ~2.5Gb/sec down, ~1.75Gb/sec up over that one cable using current tech.

Of course you'd need multiple cable modems on the receiving side (or a killer DOCSIS 3 device supporting 58 down, 58 up channels) and the corresponding hardware at the head end. This is not unfeasable, just impractical.

And with Comcast you'd reach your bandwidth cap in just under 7 minutes...

The point is that the claimed level of performance of DSL can be trumped by a single entry level DOCSIS 3 cable modem (152Mb/sec down, 123Mb/sec up) using just 4 channels each way.

Re:Baseband's been doing it for 16 years...

[Bengie]

Toss in sCDMA on DOCSIS and you gain 128xs the bandwidth per channel. Now, can CDMA device process data fast enough becomes the issue, but it should scale with faster processors.

Yawn...

[bwalzer]

VDSL2 only gives good speed if you have short high quality loops to a cabinet. You end up with lots of cabinets attached to a fiber network. All the effort to achieve this is better spent extending the fiber the last little bit to the building which allows for fewer and better placed cabinets. As a result VDSL2 is only good for things like apartment buildings with no provision to add fiber. It is more or less a stillborn technology.

Re:Yawn...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about other countries but our major DSL provider here in Belgium has upgraded most of his network to VDSL2
It uses the bandwidth for offering 2 HiDef IP-TV channels (one for recording and one for watching) together with Internet subscriptions up to speeds of 30Mbps for the heavier subscriptions.
Perhaps this is possible here since we are a very densely populated country.

I personally have no experience with the provider since I have a subscription with the competition which has the same offerings via Coax.

And more bandwidth is better for internet smut :p

Re:Yawn...

[rogueippacket]

On one hand, you are correct - you need a superb loop to a nearby cabinet, and these cabinets must be attached to a fiber network. On the other hand, trenching new fiber to an existing home is prohibitively expensive, and then you need to replace the entire cabinet anyway to support fiber subscribers instead of copper! There are a few exceptions to this, such as aerial fiber, but this is rarely an option. If installing a new cabinet is not an option, an ISP will usually opt for wireless. Not entirely ideal, but a new realm of possibilities exists with LTE.

Re:Yawn...

[Rising Ape]

From the estimates I saw for the UK FTTC/FTTP rollout, doing full FTTP everywhere was estimated at about five times as expensive as just running fibre to the street cabinets and using VDSL2 from there.

what you call noise is what i call music!

[jsepeta]

the static sounds between modem handshakes could forever be lost, corrupting data packets along the way

Duh...twisted pair to coax is no comparison

[Chirs]

The amazing thing is that they're able to pull this out of measly twisted pair.

Re:Irrelevant?

[HopefulIntern]

I live in a city in the UK which supposedly has some of the fastest broadband in the country. Yet, i rarely touch 1mbps (usually between 500-700k). This costs me £20 per month. It is uncapped, but I dont know why I bother paying extra for that, not like I could possibly max out my allowance anyway.

At least you dont have to live around a bunch of people who are getting 20-50mb and rubbing it in your face.

Re:Irrelevant?

[Anonymous Coward]

1 Mbps is NOT the same as 1 MBps

Abbreviations are case-sensitive. 1 Mb is one mega-bit whereas 1 MB is one mega-byte. There are 8 bits in 1 byte, so your bandwidth is actually 8 times smaller than what you were thinking it was. Memory is always measured in bytes because memory is byte-addressable (you can't store just 1 bit in your RAM), but information is sent over wires bit-by-bit, so bandwidth is always measured in bits. This means TFA is advertising download speeds of up to 12.5MB/s, not 100MB/s.

Anyway, your bandwidth sounds very reasonable. Where I live AT&T says they can't offer more than 6Mbps downstream, which comes out to about what you're getting. I don't typically see more than about 350KB/s though.

Also, the 20-30 and 40-50 figures used in our parent posts were talking about pings in ms (milliseconds), not bandwidth.

Re:Irrelevant?

[SpinyNorman]

About the only other really low latency service (and by this I mean service where 20ms becomes significant) is supercomputing

Well, there's program trading. There was a story a couple of days ago of a new $300M transatlantic cable being laid whose sole purpose is to reduce transit times (latency) by 6ms from the current 60ms. The consumers for this are hedge funds/etc doing program trading - the article said that a large hedge fund might make $100M/yr extra from a 1ms data advantage.

Re:Irrelevant?

[ifrag]

local game server is 20-30ms

Unfortunately game servers are typically not that "local", at least for most of the people on it. I usually find around 90+ms are as far down as they go for me anyway. But as long as it doesn't get too far past 100ms it's hardly even noticeable.

Re:Irrelevant?

[catmistake]

In theory, latency is caused by routing and switching. In practice I have found most latency issues are caused by using slow, faraway, or non-optimum, or misconfigured DNS servers.

Just remember

[Anonymous Coward]

that you have to be damn close to the DSLAM to get those speeds. So unless you are close to the exchange or have a building wired up running last mile FTTN and then VDSL on the end, most people are out of luck.

I suspect only new buildings will be wired up like this as retrofitting places will not be a capitalist companies best interest, unless you are doing what you are in Australia with the NBN.

Re:Irrelevant?

[WCLPeter]

This means TFA is advertising download speeds of up to 12.5MB/s, not 100MB/s.

And with latency, network congestion, and signal quality that means an internet user with a 50GB cap will blow through their entire months allotment in around 90 minutes. With the cost of overages being so absurdly don't be shocked if you start seeing the telco's and cableco's be super eager to spend the money to get this into homes quickly.

Its a veritable cash cow waiting to happen, especially as hi-def streaming sites get more and more common (which would be even more the case if you could 100Mbps speeds became common).

not very impressed

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not very impressed by this announcement as my current VDSL2 line (powered by a Alcatel-Lucent DSLAM) is already trained in on 61 / 14 Mbps:

attainable rate upstream: 14499 kbps
attainable rate downstream: 61357 kbps

Re:Irrelevant?

[thegarbz]

You playing video over your remote desktop? It is still largely bandwidth intensive. I have not problem on ADSL2 doing a remote desktop session at high resolutions. I had no problem on my original ADSL session on a service where I was lucky to get 70ms. There is very little in a remote desktop session that requires reduced latency. If you're the type to complain about your mouse cursor not moving damn bloody instantly, then maybe remote desktop isn't the solution you seek, or pick a different protocol.

VNC for instance renders a box on the local display and a mouse pointer as a remote graphic. The impact of this is that you could move the mouse and click a button even if the remote mouse is still lagging behind your cursor.

Re:Irrelevant?

[thegarbz]

True, but this is not directed at them. The average home trader can't keep up with the trading floor anyway. 99% of brokerage services have quotes delayed by 15 minutes, the 1% which don't cost so much that you should have a direct tap into the local stock exchange anyway.

Another reply to the parents post was right. Fibre already covers the low latency market, so it's not like there's no other option. But my reply in general was that bandwidth is for average home user the biggest problem and I for one look forward to not having to wait for FTTH to boost my 25mbps connection.

Re:Irrelevant?

[thegarbz]

Latency in browsing is not something I consider latency as even with a poorly configured DNS server the latency is often small compared to the time it takes to load the page.

Think direct connections, VoIP and games come to mind as latency sensitive with consumers, and once a direct connection is established routing definitely takes up the most of it unless you're playing on a server half a world away.

Alas it won't be here...

[ResidentSourcerer]

Telus, our local POTS provider runs these cute ads on TV flogging their high speed internet. About twice a year I go to their web site and plunk in my phone number to see what package I can buy.

At present, the best they can do for me is...

56kbit dialup.

And from a few friends, they can't support this becuase of line noise, it it usually runs about 40kbit.

So I still have to use a satellite link with its 200 watt continuous power consumption (on the power supply -- may be peak only) and 800 to 1600 ms latency.

The advantages of rural life.