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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.
DAMN... at least once every 10 years pick a broadband solution and BUILD IT ALL THE WAY OUT. To every last house in the US. This never ending cycle of new technology coming out and being bult out to the edges of the big cities and then the next new technology hits and they stop where they are go back to the center of the big cities and start building out again.
Just once. Get something other than dialup and satellite all the way out to every last house in the US.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
I'm stuck in copper-land thanks to the phone monopoly in my town, and the copper we have can't reliably transfer data at faster than 8Mbps. 15Mbps was great when it worked, but the disconnects were frequent. The residents in my town are never going to see gigabit speeds over our copper infrastructure. The phone company has no reason to improve it. There is no fiber alternative, Verizon pulled out of our state. Our cable TV monopoly is equally disinterested in provided higher speed service. This is probably a significant challenge all over the United States. We need to find a way to revive competition and get these legally-sole-provider-in-the-region companies to offer improved service.
DirecTV forced cable companies to up their HD offerings by making over a hundred channels HD in one go after launching some new satellites. Before that, none of the cable MSOs would bother. We need a similar antagonist in the ISP space.
These limitations might keep the others from getting too scared;
"The drawback with G.fast is that it will only work over short distances, so 1Gbps will only be possible at distances of up to about 100 meters. The technology is being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, though transmission speed is slower at that distace. "
OK. So long as G.fast is an improvement over what they're using now, that's a good thing. But until/unless I can get 1 gbps at my desktop, I don't think they should be allowed to advertise it as "Gigabit Internet."
This is the typical phone company thing... "buy Internet service from us!" How fast will it be at my house? "Um, we have no idea!"
"1 Gb/s over copper" is something that's existed for a looong time.
1 Gb/s over a single crap twisted pair copper on the other hand...
"These limitations might keep the others from getting too scared; "
That isn't as much of a limitation as you seem to imagine. The majority of costs are "last mile". This means you can take fiber to a city block (more or less) and still get 1Gb to homes (or offices). In many cases this is far cheaper than fiber to the door.
It also means a possibly-viable alternative (competition) to cable. I know LOTS of communities that would like to have a competitor to cable.
Ya no... that's not how it works at all.
It's called a Fiber Mux: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiplexing
We do the same thing with your data when it's on copper, it's just a different kind of signal, in that case we use a DSLAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dslam
(which is just another kind of mux)
If someone has hacked into your ISP to the point that they have control over the fiber muxes, you have a hell of a lot more to worry about than them listening to your phone calls.
Also, keep in mind that with copper, all they have to do is walk out to the pedestal behind your house and attach alligator clips to the right pair of wires and a spare speaker. And people DO do that, we've caught them. Hacking our muxes would require them to breach dozens of layers of security. It would be quite a feat.
That's strange... I'm just north of the border, and small out of the way places can get satellite from companies like xplornet.
Looking a their site; for 69.99 CAD, you'd get 5Mbps down, 1Mbps up; with 50GB transfer limit. That's not all that bad really, especially compared to what you have now. Granted satellite is going to have markedly higher latency, and doesn't really compare to regular broadband... but for someone in your case (where regular broadband doesn't reach) its very decent.
If it is really only good to 100 m, then it seems like a significant problem. My pole drop to first jack is 40 m. In even a decently compact residential street that would only get you 6 lots out from the node not including their pole drop.
G.fast is faster than VDSL2, but this 1 Gbps to the subscriber is very unrealistic. 1 Gbps speeds will only work for customers ultra close to the wiring closet.
But let's face it, even 200-300 Mbps is ultra fast internet (copper or not).
35Mbps down, 3Mbps up from GVT in Brazil already here. In my case, I couldn't get a stable connection with one modem they supply, had to get the better modem, at about 400 meters external cable run plus another 100 meters internal cabling, in this distance, G.fast might pump my top theoretical speed (as detected by the modem from 50Mbps to maybe 200Mbps).
Prices up to 35mbps are very affordable, the next step (50/5) has a large price jump.
So the issue isn't the technology here, it's cost (AND RANGE).
In our case, telcos are already moving towards 100% fiber.
While VDSL2 is (and G.fast will be) very range limited, GPON and P2P fiber can handle up 10 Km fiber runs with performance to spare, allowing for less wiring cabinets across town in a pure fiber network vs today's mixed fiber/copper networks, back to my telcos case, they were forced to design the network with a maximum cable run of 600 meters to every customer they service, requiring one wiring cabinet (in reality a tiny remote POP).
If the same network were designed from scratch using GPON only, they could have opted for up to 3Km to each customer, resulting in 1/10th in the number of cabinets, also GPON / GEPON fiber splitting allows ultra dense cabinets, with a 20 fiber strands handling two thousand customers (compared to 2000 copper pairs for the same two thousand customers). Copper cabinets for 1000 users is the size of a double door refrigerator, while GPON for 2000 users is less than the size of a mini bar.
So I'm not sure there will be too many business cases for maintaining copper networks, except in rare cases of extremely dense networks with top notch (recently laid) copper.
Finally, VDSL2 modems already use way more power than GPON subscriber units, I bet those G.fast modems will be small power hogs !
This tech is coming to the action way too late. Fiber will take over.
It's not a deal, just switched to dsl from this. There is a $3-400 setup charge, contracts run typically 3 years, and it's $25/mo or so penalty to break early. Which probably would be okay if you saw those speeds. Have a look at their throttling policy, after 55mb you'll see about 3% of this for the next few hours. Also, many things are blocked or effectively blocked until 2 or 3 am ... Such as Apple authentication servers. If you have say, an Apple TV it won't be able to access iTunes libraries on your Mac due to this. That latency... For something like Slashdot, not an issue, but ads or media streams like Facebook will open hundreds of connections to CDNs to get images etc., which compounds the effect of delay, particularly where multiple DNS resolutions are required. I used an aggressive squid proxy and dnsmasq, both setup with ad filtering to make it useable.
The service would be alright for those who live rurally and understand the limits of satellite, but the throttling and filtering of services makes it a viable option only for the most remote and desperate.
!Equality through palindromes semordnilap hguorht ytilauqE!
Ubiquiti M5 family of products, there's the plain Nano M5, the more powerful NanoBridge M5 and finally the Rocket M5 (plus a high gain antenna).
Operation on links that long are very dependent on low levels of interference (specially other radios on the same frequency). Since this is an unlicensed frequency, if it works today, there zero assurance it will still be working a month from now, but being very cheap, it's usually a great cost x risk tradeoff.