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Groundwork Laid For Superfast Broadband Over Copper
itwbennett writes: Telecom equipment vendor Adtran has developed a technology that will make it easier for operators to roll out broadband speeds close to 500Mbps over copper lines. Adtran's FDV (Frequency Division Vectoring), enhances the capabilities of two technologies — VDSL2 with vectoring and G.fast — by enabling them to better coexist over a single subscriber line, the company said. VDSL2 with vectoring, which improves speeds by reducing noise and can deliver up to 150Mbps, is currently being rolled out by operators, while G.fast, which is capable of 500Mbps, is still under development, with the first deployments coming in mid-2015. FDV will make it easier for operators to roll out G.fast once it's ready and expand where it can be used, according to Adtran.
Meanwhile, Ars Technica has an article about how Verizon is letting its copper network rot in order to passively encourage customers to switch to fiber.
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They keep coming up with faster and faster methods to deliver data and the ISPs keep artificially lowering speeds and data limits. As long as Comcast and the like run the show none of this will go to use for the end consumer.
Why are we still flogging the dead horse?
FTTH will always outperform copper, without exception, and it's gaining traction quicker than the telco would embrace G.Fast
Because copper is already ubiquitous. It's literally deployed to every home in America. And outside of dense large municipalities (think small to mid-size towns), comprehensive FTTH deployment is not financially feasible. A copper-based broadband solution is the only short-term means to bring universal broadband to most places, and it shouldn't be overlooked.
...and deploy all of that fiber you've been getting paid for since the 90's.
ALU's "10 gig copper" technology is something like 10 meters length. that's way out on the tail of the straight line of speed vs distance that's been pretty much unchanged since the days of ADSL 7 meg. if you can't get out of the shadow of the field cabinet, what good is it?
show me 150 mbps at 7000 wire feet, and I will pester my engineers to buy a trainload of it. it's got to be pretty clever to beat what appear to be the laws of physics.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I learned on Slashdot that Verizon is evil for not investing billions in upgrading their network to fiber. Now you tell me they've already upgraded half of their customers to fiber. Since they ARE upgrading their network to fiber, that's now evil. I'm confused.
I'm sure Verizon is evil of course, but are they evil for upgrading to fiber or for not upgrading to fiber?
Interesting, the VOIP service is not regulated as a utility, and consumers have a bit more rights/protections with the copper service.
Thanks Verizon! Attempting to kill off POTS is showing dedication and appreciation for your loyal customers.
How much public money went into wiring up the country with copper anyhow? It's almost as if the telco's will take every single government handout they can get and will revel in their natural monopoly status. But when it comes to providing a basic service that they can't turn quite as much of a profit on? Drop it asap.
It's all about wanting to get out of the local communications office (CO) business. It's a lot more efficient for them to dump those COs and all the maintenance headaches that go along with it including very expensive lead acid batteries and all the associated real estate that goes along with it. There's also maintaining the phone lines inside your house which can be problematic with rodent damage or house settling. With FIOS based services they drop it off at the house and your wiring inside the house isn't their problem, you also supply the power for their point of presence at your place so they're not footing that bill either. At least that's the case in my area.
If these folks have true power outage concerns with bad weather they should invest in a home generator, ala GENERAC.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
But how fast in reality? DSL speeds begin to drop precipitously past several thousand feet, _especially_ for these newer modulation techniques.
I'm moving to a new house, and despite being in San Francisco I'll still be 12,000 feet from the Central Office. And because San Francisco is an epicenter of NIMBYism, it's taking eons for AT&T (the incumbent telco) and Sonic.net (every Bay Area geek's favorite ISP) to get regulatory approval to roll out FTTN because apparently nobody wants a handful of more utility boxes to ruin their line-of-site across miles of barren concrete sidewalks. (Although, some people suspect AT&T is dragging their feet in order to starve out Sonic.net, because once AT&T finishes the approval process Sonic.net will be able to breeze through.)
My only other option is Comcast, but I'd rather burn in hell then be their customer again. I'd like to try Monkey Brains microwave service, which is cheap, fast, and reliable, but because of San Francisco's hills I don't have line-of-sight to any of their repeaters, and Monkey Brains is a small outfit that is expanding at a snails pace.
I'd gladly take fiber, if it were available.
The problem is, it isn't for the vast majority of the population.
Verizon and others are just letting the copper rot. There is no alternative. If you're lucky, you have a cableco co come in and provide a usable service. Luckily, I live in a Comcast territory and have had exactly zero service issues in the last 8 years and a speed increase every other year. Copper? Verizon sold this area to Frontier and you're still lucky if you can break one megabit on their DSL. Please, you wouldn't have to passively encourage me to get fiber if it were available. I'd already be on it.
If the telcos weren't so busy spending every last dime on C-level executives, lawsuits, advertising, and slithering out from underneath their commitments, even good old Verizon could have rolled fiber to everyone in their footprint. Even the ex-GTE areas like mine that had a stellar copper network before Verizon consumed them and left them for dead.
I live in downtown Seattle, and I have a 0.192 Mbps connection. That is the fastest connection I can buy on my block because Comcast doesn't offer service and due to our distance from the CO and the 50+ year-old phone wiring. I still have a lot of friends that are using dial-up here in Seattle. If CenturyLink, the phone monopoly in this city, won't upgrade to give people even 1.5 Mbps DSL why would they upgrade to provide 150 Mbps? No, we're going to be stuck with sub-megabit per second connections in this country.
Screencap of my DSL modem status page:
http://upstate.net/jen/centurylink_dsl.png
We use to have AT&T DSL service @ 6Mbps. Not fast on the grand scheme of things but reliable and consistent, and we always got the bandwidth we paid for. At some point though, we started noticing intermittent connection problems and speeds started dropping like a rock, down to 1Mbps. Just when I was about ready to call and say "What's up?", an AT&T salesperson called me to let me know they were almost finished installing fiber in my neighborhood and would I be interested in switching to U-verse at a special introductory rate and no installation charge. It was pretty clear they were either not maintaining their DSL service or actively killing it to get people to move to U-verse.
From Merriam-Webster:
1a : to undergo decomposition from the action of bacteria or fungi
b : to become unsound or weak (as from use or chemical action)
2a : to go to ruin : deteriorate
b : to become morally corrupt : degenerate
1b and 2a sound like they fit perfectly what Verizon is doing to their copper infrastructure.
You got buried!
But seriously, Seattle is a dump. I don't know anyone with faster than 1.5 Mbps Internet connection at home. I use copper.net dial-up until I moved a couple of months ago. This place sucks and the Democrats that rule here really hate the Internet.
Same source. More accurate term would be deprecation. 1b, 3a and b seem appropriate.
deprecate
verb \de-pri-kt\
: to criticize or express disapproval of (someone or something)
deprecateddeprecating
Full Definition of DEPRECATE
transitive verb
1
a archaic : to pray against (as an evil)
b : to seek to avert
2
: to express disapproval of
3
a : play down : make little of
b : belittle, disparage
— deprecatingly adverb
— deprecation noun
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
... what about distance? I can't get DSL due to 20+K ft. distance with COs. Also, the copper phone systems suck even for dial-up (can never get to close to 53K speeds). :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Yes.
Both. Their evil-ness doesn't stem from whether or not hey've upgraded to fiber. It stems from abusing their monopoly position to slow down upgrades (both fiber and copper) as a cost-cutting measure. If there were a competitor in the market offering DSL/FO/cable service and Verizon dragged their feet on upgrading to fiber or neglecting to maintain their copper, they would hemorrhage customers and lose a lot of money. But in most areas they have a (government-granted) monopoly. They can take their sweet time upgrading to fiber, and there's nothing their customers can do about it. They can let areas with older copper lines rot, and there's nothing their customers can do about it.
Case in point, the city I live in was one of the first which contracted for Verizon to provide FIOS. They rolled it out to half the city, then got into some sort of disagreement with the city and stopped. If there had been a competing cable/fiber service, they would've had a huge incentive to resolve the dispute as quickly as possible and get back to work. But they were the only game in town so they dragged it out. For six years, the houses two blocks down the street had FIOS and I didn't. Then after an election, the city council changed, Verizon got what they wanted, and resumed rolling out FIOS.
Meanwhile, the city I work in has Verizon DSL as the only provider of business Internet. Cable companies provide cable internet to residences, but apparently they're prohibited from providing it to business. So again, Verizon is the only game in town. They have absolutely refused to upgrade or maintain their copper lines. The fastest DSL speed we can get is 3 Mbps down / 768 kbps up. For this "privilege" we pay $100/mo. Most of the phone lines are of such poor quality they can't even get you that speed, and 1.5/512 or 1.5/256 is the best they can do ($50/mo). The service is such a poor value that most companies in the area just get the lowest-tier 1.0/128 service for $40/mo to minimize how much they have to pay for any Internet. Others have signed on to cellular companies' 4G data services and willingly pay per GB for overages - because it beats having to get reamed in the rear by Verizon.
Both are evil.
Mostly because it's a decade overdue and they seem to be doing their damndest to make sure the fiber doesn't actually benefit the customer.
Well that's your problem right there, you're a moron. No one learns anything on slashdot, people just come here to make stupid arguments and pretend this is a source of information instead of a chance to pretend you know more than someone else.
Meanwhile, 2b describes the company itself.
Lol . That was funny. Even though you just called me a moron, it was still funny.
I always thought "CO" was Central Office, not Communications Office.
While I'll be the first to complain that FIOS has a hidden 15W+ tax (could be more than $20/year), which Verizon could easily have solved, the Ars Technica rant seems to be almost entirely about their 8 hour backup being insufficient and nobody having a clue how to deal with it.
Verizon's FIOS ONTs operate on 12V batteries for backup, and even HAVE A JACK ON THE SIDE LABELED FOR 12V AUX POWER.
A $25 (5W) solar panel, a diode, some wire and a few brain cells are the ONLY thing you need to give your FIOS service unlimited runtime during a power outage. Yes, it'll keep working just fine during your 14 day power failure. And these monocrystaline panels will be good for 30 years.
http://www.amazon.com/Instapar...®-Black-High-Efficiency-Mono-Crystalline-Solar/dp/B004FWXWGS/
With less time and effort than these people put into their vitriolic rants to Ars, they could have what they claim they desperately want, but can't get at any price.
And in a pinch, 8xD batteries, connected together with aluminum foil and tape, will keep it going for a few days after the backup battery dies.
The claims about Verizon letting lines fail, to push customers to FIOS seems to be rumors spread by a few unhappy customers (I had my phone line go down for a few days, too, long before FIOS existed!) and perhaps some sub-contracted installers who don't actually have any way to know jack about Verizon's plans and policies.
The pushy and misleading telemarketers working for Verizon certainly deserve a major slap from the FCC or FTC, but the Ars story barely talks about that.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Verizon is evil for lobbying to make their FIOS service excluded from the regulations that covered their POTS lines. Trying desperately to force people onto the unregulated FIOS is just the cherry on-top.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Thanks for explaining why you showed up; but we already knew that.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
I think this is only supposed to be used for street-to-house connections. It was only a few weeks ago that Slashdot also had a story about this same tech and the G.Fast labs. Don't know where the story is now on the site, but pretty sure they only mentioned street-to-door in that article.
how can you "reduce noise" (or SNR) without changing the physical parameters or the noise itself ?
I'm sure Verizon is evil of course, but are they evil for upgrading to fiber or for not upgrading to fiber?
Both. Their evil-ness doesn't stem from whether or not hey've upgraded to fiber. It stems from abusing their _MONOPOLY_ position
Gotta stop you right there !
Verizon may be abusing their monopoly position but why you only accuse Verizon of evil while not placing the blame on the government which gave Verizon that goddamn _Monopoly_ status in the first place ?
This is America we are talking about where Monopoly supposed to be ILLEGAL !
Very well put.
Yes.
Answering Yes to that kind of question leaves your reply ambiguous.
I don't get the point in these super-super-fast speeds over copper. In the UK right now we're aiming for FTTC which leads to speeds of 20Mbps - 50Mbps. 50Mbps should be enough for anyone. :-)
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
I'm currently working on a project for Cox Communications in which they are chemically dissolving the foam inside of the coaxial cable conduit & then air blowing fiber through the newly created space inside the conduit. Pretty cool stuff. This avoids the costs associated with permitting, digging new trench & burying separate fiber conduit & they can use the DWDM hardware they already have on hand instead of buying new systems like this.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Of the two, mostly they're evil for not rolling out fiber: for halting the national rollout after winning ridiculous concessions giving them more monopoly power, and for dragging their feet on completing the neighborhoods they committed to roll out. The regulatory concessions they won to roll out the fiber apply both of the old copper network and the new fiber network. One copper concession was to shut down the competing-ISP market for DSL, where vz would hand off to the old-school ISP over ATM. I still have a copper DSL line for backup, and I looked into the price of getting a second and found out it had _doubled_ since I ordered the first line a decade ago.
They are evil for not maintaining the copper network anywhere, including in places where they haven't rolled out FiOS. They're still getting monopolist concessions in exchange for providing "universal" service, but they don't even provide first-world service to all areas of NYC, ex. DSL goes down every time it rains, this surprises no one, and tens of service calls don't get it fixed. They're not herding people from copper to fiber. They're herding them from copper to wireless. Somehow, even though there is competition, the profit margin for vzw is apparently way higher. Go figure that one out, rand-ites.
That would be great if they actually offered Fibre in allot of areas where they only offer copper line service. The fact that they refused to roll out fibre 15 years ago when it became feasible and put the breaks of the monopoly of the cable companies being just about the only credible broadband providers. I call broadband at least 10Mb/sec down. xDSL for the boast part is not really broadband when most of the time you are lucky to get in the range of only 3-4Mb/sec or at best a single HD stream with little to no headroom. NOT BROADBAND! Sad that Google is the one actually rolling true broadband but at the cost of our privacy. AT&T rolled out their hybrid system and it really sucked. Both have milked the consumers best they can with the decrepit copper infrastructure. They now find themselves in real danger of loosing completely the race for the consumers business in areas where they have overlap with one of the cable providers. Cable companies were smart to adopt technologies capable of providing a real and credible broadband service to consumers. I suspect that the horses have now left the proverbial barn and in the next 5 to 10 years we will likely see one or more of the regional bells selling to the cable giants do to a complete lack of ability to compete in any meaningfully profitable way.
Whoosh.