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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.
My dad lives around 4 route-miles from the CO and not only can't get DSL, he can't even get decent POTS as the entire cable (not just his pair) has severe power line hum on it and the phone company (now Frontier) refuses to fix it. He uses it for fax and it works...sometimes. For voice he uses his cell, but as this is an in-between area for GSM carriers, that tends to be flaky as well.
Meanwhile, as I've already said, I'm around the same distance from my CO, and the company (CenturyLink formerly Qwest formerly US Worst) refuses to install DSLAMs or anything. Oh, and the cable that comes to us is also rotting in the ground so there are periodic outages, the last one killing of the the 3 bonded T1 lines that we have for internet (that we have to give away for free) since we can't get DSL. Its starting to seem like the cable company might be more reliable than the phone company, and yes, that thought sends a chill up my spine. Oh, and I'm in Phoenix, only 6 miles from downtown, not the sticks.
So excuse me if I don't buy any of these things: just because the tech is developed doesn't mean anyone will actually deploy it.
Now only if the fiber providers weren't massive cocksuckers too. I've been trying to get fiber into our small office suite for 5 weeks now, after it's already in the god damn building. But, in their infinite wisdom, they put the fiber transceiver in the back of the first subscriber in the building, rather than the common wiring riser. Then, when they get subscriber #2 (me) they want us to run wire into the back of a law firm's suite where their idiot install tech put the fiber transceiver. The law firm doesn't want us digging around in their closet, and we don't want to be either. What happens when subscriber #3 in the building wants fiber service? Is this lawyer's office now the building's wiring riser?
When we asked them about this, they said we had to cancel our order and place a new one for them to relocate their equipment to where it should have been to begin with, and restart the clock on getting our connection. In the meantime, we're stuck with a shitty LTE connection that cannot handle the traffic that our tiny office needs. Meanwhile the telco is jerking us around because that's what telcos do, because they don't give two fucks, and we have no recourse.
Competition fixes this kind of shit, when I can tell them to take their fiber service and shove it up their fibrous ass because they aren't the only game in town.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
And G.Lite did reach moderately wide usage, but it was rapidly outdeployed by ADSL2 and ADSL2+ (and some VDSL2...) which offered a lot more in noise resistance and speed and hit the market only 3 years later.
I'm convinced that most of the problems with US broadband aren't political. They're simply a result of the typical American just being a moron.
No political change is going to turn idiots into geniuses.
I live in a rural village of about 2,000 inhabitants, and I have 30/6 mbit/sec DSL at around 30 €/month. In fact I guess that most "cable companies" are running DSL to your home and then send the TV signals within the DSL. I know that most phone companies do. If you order a T1 or E1 with them, you get a DSL modem with a T1/E1 port.
Not really, Fiber is the same cost to put in the ground and you can get fusion splicers for around $1500 these days. The cost is all in putting the cable into the ground. If you are touching the earth, that's the expensive part. Permits (which understandably people want to leverage Title II to assist with repairs/upgrades/deployment) can actually be 1/3rd of the cost. next 1/3rd is labor and last 1/3rd is the fiber.
There is a cultural split here, many people want things for the cheapest possible amount, or will switch for the next "deal" in 1-2 years because it saves them $5/mo and comes with a gift-card, but they have to take the day off for an installer to come by, costing them more than their savings in lost wages. Some people flat out value their time at $0.
The community of Slashdot may be willing to pay $70/mo for google fiber plus $100/yr for Prime, $96/yr for Netflix, etc. The cost per home to wire for fiber is about $2500, if you think the cell phone subsidy model in the US is an issue, try getting someone to write a check for that. Shared tenant buildings like Apartments are quite complex, including in NYC as the telco can get access to the building riser/copper but would have to install fiber. Who is responsible for the in-building wiring in that case?
AT&T has fiber about 1200 feet from me but the only speeds offered are 768k and 1.5M down. I would be willing to pay for a FTTH install, but there is no way for them to figure out how to do it. Last time I got a quote for a build, it was about $60k to build fiber. Moving easily becomes an option at that point.
It's not farmer john you have to worry about, that long strech of fiber likely already exists, and they can give right of way much easier. It's the Township, County and Road Commission that has got to get paid for permits and labor costs, not the cost of the fiber.