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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...
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.
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!