VDSL Demoed

coaxial writes "According to Techweb, STMicroelectronics and Telia Research AB demonstrated VDSL (Very-High-Bit-Rate DSL). Supposedly it will allow 60Mbps and be available by 2001. " I've heard rumours of demonstrations to be down at Comdex in couple weeks. Need to keep my eyes open for that.

Comments

DSL: Bah, humbug

[davie]

From the article:
VDSL technology has an aggregate capacity of up to 60 Mbits/second over short distances...

DSL is a pipedream until the distance-sensitivity problem is solved. I also read (I think it was on C|Net) recently that there are a lot of complaints about poor implementations (braindead admins, most likely) and less-than-acceptable throughput.

For what it's worth, SWB just rolled out ADSL in our area (NE Oklahoma) and we're about 2k ft. too far from the C.O. SWB tell me that they will be upgrading to a technology that will allow them to move the service points out closer to the customers some time next year, but I'm not holding my breath. They keep promising cheap, fat pipes, but we're still stuck with $150 a month ISDN (128K) or $1,000+ a month T1 (yes, I know T1 is sym. therefore better) if we want bandwidth.

Is it just me, or are the telcos and telco/cable people (since AT&T swallowed up TCI) just stringing us along so they can squeeze every possible penny out of T1, etc. before they make consumer broadband a reality?

Re:AGGH!

[Jordy]

What is a decent overcommit for high-speed users anyway? I've been hearing anywhere from 5:1 to 100:1 but nobody has good solid evidence one way or the next.

Nationwide the average ISP pays roughly $1000 per megabit for bandwidth to their upstream provider. There's additional costs involved in the circuit between the CO and the ISP, the circuit to their upstream provider, and tech support and what not.

But you can figure out for yourself roughly what the ISP needs to overcommit just to break even on bandwidth. 1.5 Mbps ADSL in Bell Atlantic territory averages about $40/month which means the ISP must overcommit 37.5:1 to break even on bandwidth.

Subtract roughly $5 per customer in tech support costs, 15% profit margin and it comes out to about 40:1 overcommit rate.

Of course that still doesn't include equipment, adminstrative costs, software development costs, management costs, etc.

It also doesn't take into account the 'free' outbound bandwidth which ADSL users can't use which you can use for web hosting and what not in attempt to recoup some money.

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Bandwidth not so a plenty...

[Wiggins]

...I am glad to hear things like this are going to be demoed and such. ANd it is great that it will roll out by 2001, but the fact that I have no options for highbandwidth period and live in a fairly populated (no not New York, or S.F. or Dallas) but this is a silly subject to get excited about until someone comes out and says yes you to can have high bandwidth, and actually mean people who live in cities with under 1 million people. Until that day I will only hope, and be unimpressed.

AGGH!

[Signal 11]

God, not another "Wonderful technology YOU can't have(tm)". Only about 20% of homes in the US can get any form of DSL. Now they're talking about giving them another kind of DSL? How about focusing your efforts on reaching the other 80% of the market that wants it instead of the 20% that already has it?! *grumbling*

How many of you begged and pleaded with your local telco to get DSL? How many of you called up the PUC, or the CLECs in your area? How many of you honestly did the number crunching to see if you could get a frame relay to your house? Probably alot of you.

Great technology.... (bastards). Sorry.. I just get really emotional sometimes (bastards). *sigh*

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My DSL provider is terrified of SDSL bandwidth

[schweda]

I'm not sure why this is exciting news.

Nevermind the obvious facts that (a) DSL is only available to a small percentage of the population due to the distance-from-CO requirements, (b) that getting DSL installed is a nightmare (Ameritech [for example] has to come out, install the line, then Rhythms, then you need to sync up properly, etc. etc.), (c) DSL pricing is still widely variable (I pay 49 bucks a months for 1.04/1.04 SDSL, yet a buddy of mine pays 185 bucks a month for 384/128 ADSL), (d) providers offering xDSL take anywhere from 4-12 weeks to actually the DSL working (because of, ahem, Ameritech fscking up the install, missing install dates, calling for additional $$$ for construction) -- nevermind these obvious facts, what makes this such uninteresting news is that unless VDSL uses some revolutionary sort of technology that means less expense for the telcos or that it somehow obviates the infamous "truck-roll" it'll only add more confusion to the already confused and expensive DSL market.

Not to mention that VDSL would probably only be affordable if it forces some sort of upload/download cap on the average home-user.

To me, a home-user, VDSL screams out a couple things: extremely fast downloads of MP3s and extremely fast downloads of warez, period. It means I can run a bigass server on a fat pipe.

So what?

I got an upload cap on my SDSL service (49 bucks/month which includes 1 gig upload w/additional uploads at 20 bucks a gig.)

Everyone is trying to limit everything -- downloads, uploads, the number of minutes for streaming video, etc. etc.

And what all this means is that everyone is terrified of bandwidth because bandwidth is expensive. So, please, you're gonna taunt me with VDSL but say, well, I'm capped to 20 gigs a month or capped to 10 mins a day of broadcast quality video, or use some weird-ass PPPoE protocol so that, well, it's DSL but it's not 24/7?

Please. Forget it.

Is the backbone ready for this?

[Greyfox]

Even with 2 gig lines on your backbone, it wouldn't take an lot of 60 MBPS users to fill it out. Up until a couple of years ago, the backbone consisted of 45mbps lines. In a few places, more than one, but still 45mbps lines. Though by the time this technology is even possible for the consumer, the backbone will probably be able to handle terabits per second.

But even if the backbone can handle the load, what about the telcos themselves? As someone recently pointed out, they're not going into DSL wholeheartedly at least partially because they want to protect their lucrative T1 business. You can easily squeeze T1 and faster speeds out of DSL and small to medium businesses are going to start waking up to that fact if they haven't already.

Fortunately, there's some competition in this area. US West has been blowing me off for about a year on the DSL issue. Just recently I checked Covad's web page and found that they would cheerfully install a line to my house, so I ordered one from them. Yay, competition!