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Alcatel-Lucent Gives DSL Networks a Gigabit Boost
coondoggie writes "Alcatel-Lucent and Telekom Austria have completed the world's first trial of G.fast, new technology enabling gigabit broadband over existing copper networks. The technology is only intended for distances up to 100 meters or 0.06 miles. But at that distance and less it helps copper keep up with fiber." It works, says the linked article, "by continuously analyzing the noise conditions on copper lines, and then creates a new anti-noise signal to cancel it out, much like noise-canceling headphones."
Nobody's going to roll this out unless Google or another larger player starts rolling it out and making the existing 6 Mb/s connections unpalatable to consumers.
We'll probably see this in about 10 years.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The noise-cancelling scheme sounds interesting. The hardest part though is figuring out what exactly is noise - so it sounds like they would have to either invert the intended signal to cancel it out on the path to the noise measurement, or they would have to periodically turn the signal off so they can get a clean measure.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Wow, so as long as you're in the same building as Alcatel Lucent, you're all set. You know, I think 802.11ac goes over 1 gigabit/s and reaches 100 meters on a good day. Maybe they should just go with that. I can't wait until fiber puts all these awful DSL companies out of business along with their ancient technology. AT&T really needs to go and TDS is pure evil too. Those are the big 2 around here. Time Warner's fiber backbone and 15 megabit coaxial-based internet for about $38/mo crushes them and yet some people are dumb enough to still go with AT&T and their legendary support and "pay 4x the value for your own modem up front and install it yourself" policy. You can actually get 50 megabit download speeds on a connection for under $100 around here too. Good luck with that, AT&T.
With gigabit ethernet, you can go 100 meters with cat6 wiring.
So, all this provides is the ability to use a single pair instead of two pair...at the expense of having equipment to terminate it at each end.
This has zero applications for delivering broadband. Nobody is within 100 meters of a DSLAM.
I'm running on 10/1 cable modem in Central Florida. I can't get DSL at the house - it's not available for any price.
Lightning strikes blew up a bunch of landline phone connections in the neighborhood recently, including mine. I saw the tech working on the repair at my box, which is two doors down from me, about 150 feet from my house. I took him a bottle of cold water because I wanted to get a look at the inside of the box. Chatted with him for a few minutes while he was swapping cards and drinking the water.
The phone company has *fiber* running to the box, along with 110 volt DC to power the equipment. The box then connects landline phone service to 24 houses in my neighborhood over copper. The tech smiled as my eyes got big. They could put in a VDLS2 DSLAM at that location and I could get 100 megabit symmetric. The tech said, yep, but it'll never happen.
What would it cost? $20,000? If I could get half of my neighbors to chip in, I bet we could BUY the damn equipment for the phone company. Yeah, lightning would probably blow up the the DSLAM unit itself every year or two, but I think 24-port DSLAMs are about $1500.
(Heh, captcha is "spurned")
The phone companies have long since proven they aren't going to make any further substantial investment in their copper networks, and are simply determined to milk them for as long as possible. They are in fact actively trying to shed their copper networks and go wireless, which has less regulation and higher profit margins.
The odds of AT&T/Verizon making a huge investment in technology that will be lucky to last a couple of years (fiber scales to 10 Gb fairly simply, and cable can probably get close with future revisions of DOCSIS), in a domain they are actively withdrawing from, is pretty much zero.
Anything slower than 20Mb/s is positively criminal
As someone with an ISP in the DSL game. WTF? So Gigabit at 100 meters? Isn't this really just Gigabit Ethernet over a single pair? And really, who is within 100 Meters of their DSLAM. That would cover maybe four homes.
Those 17 people within 100 meters of the hub are going to be thrilled!
The point is to make the best use of the likely-decades-old "telephone wire" going from the "pole," "telephone box" (for underground wires), or in some cases, "neighborhood fiber box" to the customer's "internet box" (e.g. DSL modem).
This wire is typically no better than "CAT-3" and frequently far worse, electrically speaking. If it's older than a few decades, it's probably chosen for low cost and voice-grade capability. It may also be run close enough to other wiring that it will pick up noise that is tolerable on an analog-era POTS line but problematic on a digital line.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Depending on local and state politics, political pressure and "public shame" can overrule bean-counters.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
When FIOS came to my neighborhood, most people cheered. I didn't. Not because I didn't want the higher speeds, but because I was concerned about the bigger picture. The baby bells (mine being Verizon) were ordered by the courts to share their copper with competing companies. My understanding is that they were under no obligation to share their fiber. As a result, they've been ripping out copper everywhere they can to replace it with fiber.
I understand that the copper infrastructure was aged and probably a pain to maintain... but to me (at the risk of sounding like a socialist) that was simply justification for my locality to take it over to lease to communications companies. What I now have is 2 choices for internet connectivity (Verizon and Cox Cable) where under DSL I had at least 8. Yes, the DSL was slower (depending on your distance from the CO) but I'd have traded slower internet for greater freedom had the choice not been taken from me.
I don't like Verizon, and I only like Cox a little better. When DSL Extreme was a reseller for FIOS, I loved it because I really liked doing business with DSL Extreme, but Verizon yanked their reseller agreement forcing lovers of the FIOS service to either move to Verizon or abandon their Fiber for cable. I went to cable. A new technology such as this along with its continued development to perhaps extend its range is a wonderful thing, however for me, it is a hope denied because my internet infrastructure was essentially chosen for me. I am probably standing against a tidal wave to caution people to think long an hard about implications of putting yourself at the mercy of a small number of communications companies. It is important for them to do so however... if only for the fact that besides financially holding us over a barrel, they monitor us.
Just wait for big DSL providers to announce.
"As response to cable companies we now offer 1Gbps speeds over existing copper line, however there is little or no demand for these services"
I can hear AT&T ignoring this technology as fast as they can.
Great, now all the ads for DSL will be for "Up to 1 Gb/s download speed [tiny print]Actual speed will vary"
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
I work with this kind of equipment. The problem isn't the last 100 feet... we've got tech that will do 100mb @ 30,000 feet relighably. If we could get that to people they'd be thrilled. The problem is the trunks leading to the DSAs. They cost upwards of a million dollars a pop to install, which is barely cost effective in city centers... but get out in rural areas where cable companies don't even bother to serve and you have as few as 12 people off a remote. Sorry, but that's only going to get 2 T1s feeding it if they're lucky. Gigabit speeds to and from equipment fed by a 3mb trunk is useless.
The real problem with broadband is the link between the CO and the remote. This goes for DSL and Cable. solve that problem and rural broadband will explode. Cable doesn't even have facilities in those areas so it would have to be over phone copper. Get gigabit speeds on 10+ miles of unshielded copper pairs... that's the goal. Good luck.
There's a ton of people on VDSL2 that get between 5-7Mb. Usually in the 2500-3000 meter range. It would be interesting to see how much of a boost these technologies could lend. Getting 30-50 Mb with a simple DSLAM and Modem swap would be game changer.
can't one just have a x.y table of bit-pattern on each end of the copper line and then just send a smallish lookup
address to the table to say:"okay bob, you got the big fibre optic connection on your end. now could you
please lookup the 8-bit (*or whatever) pattern in table located at x=1A and y=07 and send that?"
so if both ends have a coherent table (same table) then a smallish data packet can reference a huge pattern?
fyi, i'm a DSL supporter. also my physics are just not up to snuff 'cause i can't seem to understand that
dedicated copper wire could be slower then air (wifi).
I work for a univerity that just overhauled our DSL system with VDSL2. One 24-port DSLAM (VDSL2 with ADSL2+ fallback) costs us $4K......without any educational pricing. We are getting stable 20/5 connections within 5000 feet. And our copper plant is 40+ years old!!!
For everyone saying things like this don't matter: look again.
The huge cost of improving the networks is putting cables in the ground. The closer you get to the customer, the more expensive it gets.
Vectoring (the noise-cancellation technology) allows 100-120 Mbps at 500 meters. G.fast allows even faster speeds, but closer to the customer.
This is basically the path to fiber for DSL networks. Just like cable operators have a hybrid fiber-coax network, DSL providers also introduce fiber step by step.
100 meters is the same max range for gigabit ethernet, again in copper, and you can already run 10GBE on cat 6a.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6_cable
The noise-cancelling scheme sounds interesting.
If you'll read TFA a little more closely than the OP did, you'll find that the noise-canceling thing is NOT how they got the 1G-ish single-pair link to work.
What the noise-canceling thing is about is when you have TWO OR MORE pairs bundled into a single logical link. Then it figures out what the cross-talk between the individual pairs looks like and cancels THAT out. This lets the individual signal pairs run as fast as a lone pair and the total bandwidth of N bundled pair be N times the bandwidth of one, rather than substantially less.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I was at a meeting with an alcatel rep in NZ. after telling us about this fantastic technology (was talking about their antinoise system, not the gigabit part quite yet tho) they have a major flaw. He was talking about the technology and how it is coming out across the board - to even extend their ADSL and VDSL range so that longer loop length performance can be increased. Eg. if VDSL only goes 500m, with antinoise it might be reliable up to 750m.
The noise comes from other lines in the same trunk cable with multiple pairs running down a street. - not specifically general interference like AM radio stations.
The antinoise system is an extra component where the alcatel dslams in a rack talk to each other via a seperate daisy chain cable running between them. This means if you have multiple ISP's colocated in a single telephone exchange, and one isp doesnt use the alcatel compatible antinoise system, or if they did, dont want to hook up the inter-dslam antinoise cable, the whole system wont work.
Basically these extra cables that run between the dslams tell each other what they are doing so the antinoise signals can be generated. Without them, it just becomes a big mess of noise like they currently are.
So one ISP in a telephone exchange that doesnt use alcatel antinoise model dslams will cause havoc and render the antinoise system useless. So really it suits incumbants where there are no other isp's providing service down other pairs in a trunk cable or no other isp in the same exchange unless they both use the same model dslams and agree to interconnect their antinoise data cables.
One thing i do find interesting - they are working on a system where they can use a trunk cable with say 48 pairs inside of it. Alcatel have a commercial telco product that will send 100 volts at no more than 55ma DC down a pair. They bond 8 to 32 of the pairs together and can get about 150 watts worth of power at the other end - 2 or 3km away. A couple of the other pairs use bonded VDSL links to provide 100mbit+ to the far end where they put another dslam. Its like cabinetisation and bringing the dslam closer to you, by bonding pairs and providing power over the remaining ones inside the trunk cable. THIS is where the mini dslams can be installed easily and work well to serve a small group of houses with a maximum dsl loop length of 100m to 300m. If they wanted they could add a PCM pair gain system at the roadside end and use all the pairs in the trunk cable. Then dedicate 2mbps of the VDSL link or use PCM over copper to provide the telephone service to the houses, freeing up even more pairs for the bonded VDSL and cabinet power supply.