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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.
Of course they are, what else would they be doing, just letting the world pass them by?
On the flip side, it isn't like we've seen massive DSL advancements recently (At least ones that have made it to consumers).
I guess if I had an apartment at the CO that might work out well.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
This is actually a good thing. There are millions of homes in the rural U.S. that have copper phone lines to them that will NEVER get fiber. Anything to get even old timey DSL out to them will be a good thing. I myself would love to move a couple of miles outside of town on a couple of acres.
--- Keep the choice with the user..
more and faster bandwidth out of existing technologies
should read; more and faster bandwidth out of existing infrastructure... win/win? - consumers get more bandwidth, telco can charge higher rates.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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.
Considering that my dad has had 100Mbps+ VDSL2 in South Korea for almost a decade, I fail to see how DSL speeds are *technically* a limiting factor. Sure, there are line quality issues, etc., but the capability has been there for years. Giving us an even better theoretical upper limit is meaningless if Big Telecom continues to overprice and under-deliver.
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.
How much RFI will this cause on radio frequencies?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Back in the 1990s, I was working in Kentucky for an ISP and doing assorted contracting work.
I had a case that was rather similar what you're describing, only ours wasn't run that way because of incompetence -- we were connecting up all of the offices of the Department of Public Advocacy, and for one location the state had decided that rather than get a new line to the DPA offices, as they were in the back of a shopping mall that already had some government offices in it, we'd get fibre pulled between the two offices. Mind you, this was frame relay and fractional T1 days, before DSL, so a new drop was pretty expensive. (I want to say it was around $500/month for just the line charges for a T1, not including the port charges to the ISP tht you were connecting through).
So, when we went there for the install, someone had already pulled the fibre -- I went on the 3 hr drive down there, got soeone to escort me to where I needed to go, and plugged in all of our gear, then went and set things up on the DPA side.
All was fine for a year or so, then we got a call that things were down -- we tried everything that we could over the phone with non-IT folks (it's an office of lawyers), so I was sent on the 6hr round-trip with spare fibre patch cables and such.
A quick check in at the DPA offices showed nothing wrong over there, so I went over the other end of the bulding. I don't remember what the name of the department was, but it was a sort of family services type thing (where people got food stamps, stuff like that). I went up the counter and told the person behind the plexiglass that I was with DPA, and we had equipment in their wiring closet that I needed to get access to.
To which she replied, 'DPA is around the corner'. And I said no, I work for the DPA, and I need to get into your wiring closet. And she kept repeating that DPA was around the corner. I asked for her to get someone else. And I waited 10 minutes or so for someone else to come out front. Once she showed up, I spent a few more minutes with the 'DPA is around the corner' response until I *finally* got through to her and convinced her to let me into their closet. (mind you, this would likely have been considered 'social engineering' if I did it today, as I showed them no ID, being that I had none that said I did work for the DPA).
When I finally got to the closet, I saw that our box had no lights on it ... I traced the power cord down to a power strip that someone had removed all other things from, and taped over those outlets and written 'BAD' across it ... yet left our fiber tranciever plugged into it. I think I was in the room for all of 5 minutes -- it took me *way* more time trying to talk them into letting me in the room than to actually diagnose the problems *including* the time spent in the other offices.
So ~6.5 hrs to fix a problem, because the other office didn't care at all about our gear in their closet, as it would've taken them less than a minute to have moved everthing that was plugged into the known-bad power strip.
So I'd have to say -- no way in hell should you run cable to a private office. If nothing else, that office might close or move, and who knows what might be in there next (or if the new tenents want to remodel it).
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
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.
I am in California, which means my telco used to be pacbell. They were known nationwide for splicing copper beyond all rational splicing. Good luck getting any signal to my house faithfully.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The problem with DSL isn't the copper, it's the ancient switches and terrible cheap-ass wiring that makes up the millions of 'last miles' to peoples homes that suck so bad that you'll never get decent speed across them. Cable has the large advantage of new cables as well as how much they can push.