ITU Standardizes 1Gbps Over Copper, But Services Won't Come Until 2015

alphadogg writes "The ITU has taken a big step in the standardization of G.fast, a broadband technology capable of achieving download speeds of up to 1Gbps over copper telephone wire. The death of copper and the ascent of fiber has long been discussed. However, the cost of rolling out fiber is still too high for many operators that instead want to upgrade their existing copper networks. So there is still a need for technologies that can complement fiber, including VDSL2 and G.fast. Higher speeds are needed for applications such as 4K streaming, IPTV, cloud-based storage, and communication via HD video, ITU said." Meanwhile, I'm hoping Google Fiber, FIOS, and other fast optical options scare more ISPs into action along both price and speed axes.

Comments

Re:Go ALL THE WAY OUT!

[Charliemopps]

way to not understand the industry at all. lol

All phone and data services have a cost to deploy, cost to maintain, and a maximum distance from the head office they can serve.
DSL is cheap to deploy, moderate to maintain and can serve a moderate distance from the CO
Cable is cheap to deploy, cheap to maintain and can only serve a very short distance from the CO requiring a lot of repeaters and such.
Fiber is enormously expensive to deploy, Enormously expensive to maintain but can serve very long distances from the CO

Last report I saw on Obamas broadband initiative was that it cost $80 BILLION dollars to increase the number of people that could get broadband from 96% to 98%. The remaining people would cost hundreds of billions more to get broadband to, because they are up on mountains or out in the Dakotas. And that's just regular DSL and Cable. How much do you think it'd cost to do fiber? More than our GDP that's for sure.

The problem isn't cities. In cities even copper can do gigabit service easily. It's the rural areas that are the problem.