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Alcatel-Lucent's XG-FAST Pushes 10,000Mbps Over Copper Phone Lines
Mark.JUK (1222360) writes The Bell Labs R&D division of telecoms giant Alcatel-Lucent has today claimed to set a new world record after they successfully pushed "ultra-broadband" speeds of 10,000 Megabits per second (Mbps) down a traditional copper telephone line using XG-FAST technology, which is an extension of G.fast (ITU G.9700).
G.fast is a hybrid-fiber technology, which is designed to deliver Internet speeds of up to 1000Mbps over runs of copper cable (up to around 250 meters via 106MHz+ radio spectrum). The idea is that a fiber optic cable is taken closer to homes and then G.fast works to deliver the last few meters of service, which saves money because the operator doesn't have to dig up your garden to lay new cables. XG-FAST works in a similar way but via an even shorter run of copper and using frequencies of up to 500MHz. For example, XG-FAST delivered its top speed of 10,000Mbps by bonding two copper lines together over just 30 meters of cable.
G.fast is a hybrid-fiber technology, which is designed to deliver Internet speeds of up to 1000Mbps over runs of copper cable (up to around 250 meters via 106MHz+ radio spectrum). The idea is that a fiber optic cable is taken closer to homes and then G.fast works to deliver the last few meters of service, which saves money because the operator doesn't have to dig up your garden to lay new cables. XG-FAST works in a similar way but via an even shorter run of copper and using frequencies of up to 500MHz. For example, XG-FAST delivered its top speed of 10,000Mbps by bonding two copper lines together over just 30 meters of cable.
What is the latency?
All my telco worker friends grumble about being forced to praise their customers' horticultural skills on their site visits.
So in real life, around 20m, give or take 12m.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
That is going to barely make it from the pole to the house. Tack on how much the gear will cost and this is cheaper than pulling fiber? Pull the fiber and be done with it 2 strands of single mode from the 70's would still get me any speed available today, sure it might need C/DWDM to do it but it's doable with standard gear.
No sir I dont like it.
The rest of us still do local caching proxies and QoS hackery to make the most of our 2-3 Mbps.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Because you know they upgrade their networks right away
Even in areas where all the cabling is buried(which definitely isn't all of them) how much do you save by putting some fancy and expensive widget within a couple hundred meters of every customer's location? Aside from the joys of managing a zillion touchy network devices out on the poles in all winds and weathers, you'd better hope that there's no secondary market for such gear or people will be harvesting them faster than you can install them...
Or are we going to have to put up with an idiotically asynchronous connection like we already do with DSL (768K) now?
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Other than just wanting to sound super awesome is there any reason why they aren't using Gbps instead of Mbps? It's sort of like saying a new car has a top speed of a bazillion picometers per second.
Or are we going to have to put up with an idiotically asynchronous connection like we already do with DSL (768K) now?
You probably mean Asymmetric.
I would think consumer and small business Internet access will keep on being asymmetric for the most part, whatever the technology.
Most users on those markets are consumers and not producers of data, which means more downloads than uploads.
Combine that with bandwidth being ALWAY scarce, you will have Engineers , network architects, product managers
and management designing their products taking that into account.
The market need for a symmetrical or a reverse ratio of uploads to downloads on the consumer segment is minuscule.
At this point, I can't even use the speeds that the ISP claims to provide because all of the content sources that I attempt to use can't seem to saturate my existing bandwidth. This is especially noticeable with video streaming services which seem to be unable to keep up despite the fact that the advertised bandwidth of my connection far exceeds the required bandwidth of the video. I get more stuttering videos now than I did in 1998 despite the fact that I have 2,000 times more bandwidth now than I did then. So what difference does it make if I get 10Gbps over my current 30Mbps?
as soon as you get out of the shade of the equipment cabinet, it's dead, Jim. yeah, that'll work. dig up the shrubs to put a 2 cubic meter cabinet and power stand next to the house. oh, yeah, I'm going to pester the phone company for this now.
plus 106+ MHz impacts aviation radio with interference. if the cabinet blocking your dryer vent doesn't get you, the 737 in your living room will.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I thought I read somewhere that it was 10,000,000 kbps, or was it 10gbps?
Metric conversion for those who prefer simpler numbers.
Oh, and that's a furload of Libraries of Congress per time period.
Does a balcony count?
Technologically exciting, realistically irrelevant. It has become abundantly clear that the telcos do not want to upgrade their networks no matter how much the cost of doing so drops.
Range too short, higher frequency and therefore more sensitive to interference, and I doubt that is symmetrical (upload speed might be ridiculously low). Simply take the fiber to the home (FTTH) and period.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
.. there's shit tons of fiber where I live, only it's under the streets but doesn't reach premises. No incentive or obligation to hook it up to cramped four-story 19th century buildings, where most of the flats are rented.
Simply put no one will pay for doing whatever complicated digging and stuff to do in the building just so I can upgrade speed. And oh, you often have a succession of building less than five meter wide, in a one-way street.
Regular DSL speed is high. VDSL is perfectly useless : needs to be less than 1km away from the central.
The DSL qualifies as "high bandwith" and is nice, only the upload speed is 1Mbps. That's frustrating and slow, but upgrading such connections is considered a low priority. Not enough flats in the building makes it low priority for fiber deployment as well.
Whatever, I'd be happy with anything that increases the upload speed by 100x.
The 10GBASE-T IEEE 802.3an standard supports 10Gbps Ethernet up to 100 meters over shielded CAT6 or 55m over unshielded CAT6 twisted pair.
The much better Ars Technica summary article says that yes, 30m for 10Gbps, but 1Gbps over 70m. Gigabit DSL would be a game changer.
I'm not aware of asymetric Ethernet standard, for instance. Fiber to the home is basically last mile Ethernet, and in some markets where residential ISP just sell DSL service without bothering to limit speeds (and where caps are unheard of) you are really able to get a symmetric connection. Other providers may artifically limit the connection to an asymmetrical one like 100/10, 100/30 or 100/50.
Why we are now measuring thing in units we never use, bits, is pretty beyond me.
We use bytes, K bytes, M bytes, G bytes and T bytes.
Using bits with a lower case b is a byte / 8 and can be useless and misleading to the average viewer.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
it's* nice
it's = it is
Learn this. This is fourth grade English.
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
The last mile of copper in the US is in an abysmal state. Telcos like Verizon are laying their fiber network and abandoning their low-cost copper network.
In Princeton, NJ we can barely make reliable, noise-free, voice calls over copper. T1s over copper are similarly disappointing.
I doubt pushing even higher speed data over this terrible infrastructure will result in a satisfactory experience - and the minute you need to replace a cable, why not lay fiber?
Note that many of the /. readers do not speak english, and the Google translator is very, very bad. Is even worse in my case as example, because many ideas in my native language (brazilian portuguese) are very difficult to express using english, even when you know how to write in english. So, unless you know that the commenter is from a country where english is the native language, take a break.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
The only thing liberals seem to have in common with fascists is their belief in the primacy of the State. Other than that they have little in common. You've focused on that one similarity to the exclusion of the differences.
I can't even get fast speeds on dial-up since they connect from 24000-31200 even on 56k modems. :( Also, no DSL because COs are too far (over 20K ft.). :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
ATT: But no one asks for faster speeds...
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Could swear 4 wires can carry Ethernet
wow, too bad the exchange box is a mile down the road