Lowly DSL poised for gigabit speed boost
cnet.com
cnet.com
It's got to do with how the low quality telephone cables attenuate high frequencies. They're typically thin wire (0.4 or 0.64mm gauge) designed for a voice signal with a bandwidth in the kHz ranges, and then these DSL technologies use tens to hundreds of MHz, which works to some extent over shorter distances but the higher frequency you go, the more quickly attenuate over longer distances.
Then you have electromagnetic interference between different subscriber's lines, which can make a huge dent in performance (literally as high as 40-50%). Vectoring is a technology that tries to model the noise and send signals to cancel it out to reduce this. It's fairly effective, but not completely.
What you get is the requirement to basically have a node, fed with fibre and electricity (unless they're back-powered from houses, which was suggested for G.fast) that only services a dozen or so houses. With the cost of the capital works required, it's debatable whether it's not worth spending the ~$800-$1200 per house (this is actuals from the Australian NBN rollout) to just complete the fibre all the way, which could then in the future be upgraded to 10Gbit without any capital works (just swapping the terminating hardware in the exchange and at the customer premises - no requirement to touch any of the cabling).
Until you realize that there are 5m houses.
Thank you to the engineers for still trying, though.
I can't be sure about this, but I've read somewhere that FiOS has stopped new deployments. In a lot of these places, CenturyLink isn't available and everyone hates Comcast, so the few independent ISPs around may benefit along with their customers.
At my new place, I have the choice between cable and fiber. Verizon is the fiber provider, and they'll happily sell me up to 500Mbps if I want to pay for it, and they deliver. That's symmetrical, too, as of a couple of months ago.
I'm not a fan of big ISPs, but I don't think it's quite as bad as you say either.
I don't mean to cheerlead for Verizon here, but the fact is that higher speeds aren't made pointless, even if they're not quite as good as they could be.
You can rag on Verizon for being anti net neutrality, but they are the only significant deployment of fiber to the home in the USA.
The head of BT's R&D group gave a presentation in Cambridge yesterday. Slide 15 of his deck shows real world speeds ranging from 700Mbps-1000Mbps for vectored G.Fast obtained in a live suburban environment: http://cwbackoffice.co.uk/Presentation/PrestigeLecture_21.10...
One way to get around customers not being home is to make Fibre rollout opt-out. Then only wire Fibre to the outside wall of every customers house. At a time that suits them they can organise a tech to come out and complete the connection.
You can't dig up peoples' gardens without permission! That suggestion also requires 2 separate truck-rolls, and still relies on someone being home for the appointment to complete the connection. Of course it can be done - is being done - but relying on the customer increases the cost.
It would be interesting to see a graph of distance/speed comparing it with regular DSL.
http://www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpinfo/publications/revie...
If the loop length is .34-.5 miles (which is quite good) with no impedance mismatch or bridge taps or other various copper faults, then you would/should be able to sustain 10+ Mbps on an ADSL2+ connection.
My guess is that the distance is further than it seems, and the line may not have been reconditioned from phone to internet purposes.
Anyway I bring it up because distance is the biggest determinant of bandwidth when it comes to copper, and if the distance is great then there is little that fixing copper faults can do to improve internet speeds at your parents' place.
[1] (Common and very likely) The DSLAM they installed there is a fiber node and feeds only VDSL over < 50 ft wire to the crossbox. ADSL also feeds into the crossbox, but not from the new DSLAM. It still travels from the CO (central office) and may still be 1-2 miles of wire away.
[2] (Uncommon and less likely) The DSLAM has VDSL and ADSL cards in it. In this situation the DSLAM can support high speed VDSL to very close residents and ADSL to further residents. The CO is no longer the source of ADSL signal, and this is typically a nice reduction in loop length for people.
In your shoes, I'd get in touch with the ISP and see if you're CO fed or not. If you're CO fed, there's little that can be done to improve the speeds =(. You could ask if it's possible to do pair bonding to improve your speeds. Just beware, switching to pair bonding means you'd need to lease/purchase a new modem that can do bonding and the ISP would have to roll a truck to wire up the 2nd pair.
Hope that helps!
There were a lot of rectangles and squares, but there were also some weird shapes, strange cutouts, or long stretches. I think there were even some islands of coverage A surrounded by coverage B.
You can be fifteen feet from the CO, but that doesn't mean that's the one they ran your lines from.
When people speak of grand global projects to better connect grossly under-served communities around the world to the internet, I suggest, you mean like San Francisco and New York?
I'm not sure where these rural areas in America are, that are poorer and or with less population density than Appalachia (North Dakota? Wyoming?), and that have nothing over a few mbps, but it certainly blows my mind that they still exist.
If the issue is specifically with DSL, then I find it hard to justify that it should continue to exist in rural areas if it lags so far behind cable.
How about in Russia, Canada, US, China, Brazil, Australia, India, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Congo, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Indonesia, Sudan, Libya, Iran, Mongolia, Peru, Chad, Niger, Angola?
Those are the largest countries in the world. Presents a drastically different challenge wouldn't you say?
This is why the previous Australian Government set out to build a wholesale-only fibre network that the private carriers could competitively deliver services over, to reach 93% of the population (the remaining 7% is a combination of satellite and fixed wireless). This was to fix a problem that had been created by a past Government when the old Government-owned monopoly carrier had been privatised into a single huge anti-competitive company who doesn't do any upgrades unless somebody else does - such as when another company put in an HFC network, the monopoly (Telstra) overbuilt almost the exact same areas with a competing network, not touching anywhere else...
Unfortunatley the new Government is dismantling the new plan, and replacing it with a token FTTN effort to "save money" because of a fallacious "budget emergency", even though financial modeling shows that the FTTP plan actually had a better chance of making a profit (which was to be re-invested in expanding the fibre footprint and upgrading the network). Strangely enough, it's the party who created the Telstra problem last time they were in power...
Why shouldn't at least New York and Bay Area be comparable? Rich and hyper-dense.
--submitted from an 4 megabit connection in SF.
But the real reason for the difference isn't really density. It is government telecom policy. The countries that deployed fiber have, for the most part, either heavily subsidized it via direct subsidies or tax breaks. In Sweden's case, for example, forced state run utilities to build the backbone for the telecoms.
The US expects the telecom investment to be 100% privately funded. That means it has to be profitable enough to attract capital investments.
Unlike say Sweeden, were everyone has to use the single telecom provider's network, in the US there is no such mandate. Verizon's FIOS network has to compete with the cable companies network (which is vastly cheaper). Fios is only getting around 25% of people who have potential access to sign up. The Singapore network probably gets 90% or more.
If you really want fiber in the entire USA. Give Verizon, ATT, Century Link, and the other incumbent local loop carriers huge tax incentives to do it. Otherwise it'll happen slowly when people are willing to pay a premium for higher speed.