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Bell Labs Fighting To Get More Bandwidth Out of Copper
jfruh writes You might think that DSL lost the race to cable and fiber Internet years ago, but Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs is working on a host of projects to extract more and faster bandwidth out of existing technologies. The company's G.fast technology aims to get hundreds of megabits a second over telephone lines. Other projects are aiming to boost speeds over fiber and cell networks as well.
On the flip side, it isn't like we've seen massive DSL advancements recently (At least ones that have made it to consumers).
Here's a Slashdot piece from 1999 talking about how G.Lite is coming to displace ADSL sometime soon.
A now-ironic editorial tag asks whether it might be deployed before 2020.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is exactly what it's for: apartment buildings. There are lots of places around the US where DSL is on-prem, and it's supposedly cheaper than fiber or running ethernet.
DSL sends radio frequencies over twisted pair. Lots of carriers on lots of different frequencies. Radio stations actually interfere with it, for this reason some DSL systems are known to perform better in the daytime! DSL also puts out broadband radio noise.
Coaxial cable leaks too. When I lived on Long Island, I used to be able to receive it with an antenna! But it generally leaks less.
Fiber to the home is a much better option, but many locales are not being built out for it and will never be. Where I live we have ATT fiber to the neighborhood, and the last 1000 feet are copper. And it's slower than coaxial cable.
Bruce Perens.