11 ms·

Alcatel-Lucent sets record of 10 Gbps over traditional copper telephone lines

279 points by Deinos 12y ago

TrainedMonkey 12y ago
"In contrast, XG-FAST uses an increased frequency range up to 500 MHz to achieve higher speeds but over shorter distances. Bell Labs achieved 1 Gbps symmetrical over 70 meters on a single copper pair. 10 Gbps was achieved over a distance of 30 meters by using two pairs of lines (a technique known as “bonding”). Both tests used standard copper cable provided by a European operator." 30 meters with bonded pair for 10 Gbps. While this is pretty cool, due to distance limitation we are not getting telephone line modems that can outstrip fiber optics.
- te_platt 12y ago
  Not to mention the fact that telephone lines are bandlimited at about 3000 Hz.
  - wmf 12y ago
    That only applies to voice calls, not DSL.
    - quink 12y ago
      It does apply if you've got a pair gain system sitting in the middle, but you're essentially right.
    - te_platt 12y ago
      It applies to any call outside of the local loop. From the dsl wikipedia entry: Because DSL operates above the 3.4 kHz voice limit, it cannot pass through a load coil. Load coils are, in essence, filters that block out any non-voice frequency. They are commonly set at regular intervals in lines placed only for POTS service. A DSL signal cannot pass through a properly installed and working load coil, while voice service cannot be maintained past a certain distance without such coils. Therefore, some areas that are within range for DSL service are disqualified from eligibility because of load coil placement. Because of this, phone companies endeavor to remove load coils on copper loops that can operate without them, and by conditioning other lines to avoid them through the use of fiber to the neighborhood or node
- nardi 12y ago
  > While this is pretty cool, due to distance limitation we are not getting telephone line modems that can outstrip fiber optics. From the article: "XG-FAST can help operators accelerate FTTH deployments, taking fiber very close to customers without the major expense and delays associated with entering every home." So you actually are getting a modem, hooked up to your telephone line, that goes up to 70m over telephone cable to the street, and then fiber the rest of the way. Makes a lot more sense than literally doing fiber to every home.
  - sjtrny 12y ago
    Hardly. You are forgetting that most people's copper cabling is degrading quite rapidly or is already of very poor quality. Furthermore the number of nodes required on the street due to the 70m limitation would be a lot higher than with FTTP.
    - XorNot 12y ago
      Exactly - this changes nothing. You'd still be paying workcrews to go street-to-street digging things up and running things through conduit. At the point you're doing that, the marginal cost of getting them there is much higher then the cost of the equipment or cabling they'd be installing.
      - Turing_Machine 12y ago
        Running cable on poles or pulling it through conduit is much, much, much cheaper than fiddling around in someone's attic or crawlspace. The appointment has to be scheduled (i.e., the homeowner has to be there), you have to worry about the three hundred pounds of boxes they've got stored in the way, the crawl space or attic may be brutally hot or cold, have wasps, raw sewage, mud, or any number of other hazards. It's a slow and expensive job.
        sliverstorm 12y ago
        Not to mention legal hooplah and potential billing. Digging up the streets requires permission from the city, and maybe you send them a bill for some of your services. Digging up people's front lawns requires permission from every homeowner, and if you are offloading cost you have to bill each homeowner...
- jpmattia 12y ago
  > While this is pretty cool, due to distance limitation we are not getting telephone line modems that can outstrip fiber optics. I doubt anyone is under any illusions that the copper is going to outstrip fiber. However, it is still an important result: There are many places that are stuck with old-fashioned twisted pair and it takes literally an act of gov't to lay down fiber. Rather than leaving that population out in the cold, this result gives hope that they may have cutting edge connectivity. The real issue is commercializability, which has not been Bell's traditional strength.
transfire 12y ago
How in the world can this be cheaper than running the fiber 100 more feet?
- tcas 12y ago
  Because every household has copper phone cables run to it already. You can run fiber to the trunk and have high speed communication using existing copper lines. > XG-FAST can help operators accelerate FTTH deployments, taking fiber very close to customers without the major expense and delays associated with entering every home
  - cdr 12y ago
    How many of those existing copper cables are of high enough quality that they can support anywhere near that speed though? The copper lines in my parents' house are so bad they can't even support a second phone line, much less decent networking speeds.
  - mrmondo 12y ago
    The copper running to most homes is up to 100 years old and heavily degraded, most houses can't even get ADSL1 speeds let alone ADSL2 or vDSL
- ajb 12y ago
  Lawyers fees.
  - ajb 12y ago
    Hey, I wasn't joking- well, not that much. You will get more disputes when you deploy across someone else's property, especially if you break or uglify something. That's a serious reason for stopping on public land.
  - deleted 12y ago
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- nucleardog 12y ago
  You can dig up an alley and re-string from poles with little hassle. Digging up everyone's yard, replacing lines that might now be running under garages or driveways, and just generally having to operate in people's yard is a lot more work. Especially multiplied by tens or hundreds of thousands of homes. If you can just trench an alley and run fiber to the nodes then re-use the existing copper for the last 100m that's probably a huge cost savings.
ajb 12y ago
Although this is spun to sound like a breakthough, it's basically a cost reduction measure. G.fast and this new XG.fast are there to avoid the hassle of negotiating with each householder as to how new fibre gets deployed on their property, when it's a lot easier to negotiate with the municipality all in one go.
- gardarh 12y ago
  Cost reduction being a key factor! The greatest breakthroughs provide something for the masses at a lower cost than previously possible. An important part of engineering is leveraging existing infrastructure to improve service quality. As an example of this it has been technically possible to put fibre into every home for years but apparently not feasible, price-wise. Speed is speed whether it's copper or fibre.
PaulHoule 12y ago
Great, one more excuse why Big Telecom won't give us FTTH in the United States.
- gilgoomesh 12y ago
  Actually, this invention requires Fibre to the Curb. The only section that would remain copper is the curb to wall-socket link. And in the long term, you'd probably pay to replace this yourself with fibre since (if other high bitrate copper solutions are any indication) fibre would be lower power, lower maintenance and more reliable.
- snowwrestler 12y ago
  I just want some competition in high speed connectivity. I don't care if it's fiber, copper, wireless, coax, power line, or sewer. If this makes it cheaper for me to get 100 Mbps or higher, sounds good to me.
WatchDog 12y ago
30 meters seems pretty useless, even for a FTTN setup, it would surely be simpler just to run fibre all the way then build nodes every 60 meters or so.
- zephjc 12y ago
  Like others said in this thread, copper up to 70m to a switch box, then fiber from there on out.
3rd3 12y ago
What is the theoretical limit (for comparison)?
- quink 12y ago
  Whatever the theoretical limit is, they're pretty much right at it at this point. Similar to how ADSL2+ was near enough at the theoretical limit of what the frequency spectrum it used could do given the attenuation it was asked to do it at. For the same frequency ranges as ADSL2+, VDSL2 delivered pretty much no improvement. What VDSL2 did do is expand the frequency range up to 17 MHz/30 MHz, depending on the profile. So the question you might want to ask is "How high a frequency can we use?" and in that case the real question you're looking for is "How short a piece of copper do you have?". And the answer to that is very quickly becoming "a very short piece of copper indeed". Either that or a lot of copper that's ideally also very thick... which, considering most copper was rolled out with the aim of providing a low attenuation at 3000 Hz over at most a low number of kilometres isn't often the case. tl;dr: How long is a piece of string?
- ajb 12y ago
  Depends on a number of factors: the major one is the length of the wire, but also what gauge of wire, how well twisted it is (phone wires aren't very twisted due to not expecting to use the high frequencies), the radio environment, local radio interference standards (telephone wires are leaky at these frequencies), how many of your neighbours also have DSL (although this is improving due to crosstalk cancellation mechanisms in the newer standards), how many watts the local operator is prepared to put down the wire...
- rayiner 12y ago
  The bandwidth of an electrical link is a function of bandwidth (the range of frequencies present on the cable) and the encoding (bits per second per hertz). The first on is limited by attenuation on the cable. As you increase the frequency, the cable does a less good job of propagating the signal, and your signal level decreases at the other end. This is limited by power and cable quality. The efficiency of the encoding is limited by the sensitivity of the receiver and its internal noise along with external noise. Depending on these parameters, power, bandwidth, and signal to noise, the bandwidth can be arbitrarily high (subject I suppose to quantum effects). See: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theor... This system uses a bandwidth of 500 MHz over two pairs. That gives roughly 10 bits per second per hertz. Both are pretty close to the state of the art over unshielded copper cable. You coaxial cable is usually about 600 MHz. But if you use waveguides and the like, you can get into the GHz range.
madengr 12y ago
Nice technology, but I have had it with telecom company excuses. Electricity has been deployed to most homes in rural areas, as well as copper telephone. It should be no different with fiber. Why could it be done then, but not now?
- schwap 12y ago
  I didn't look up any sources, but if I remember right, the difference was massive government assistance. edit: Yep - rural electrification was pretty much completely government driven[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electricity#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electricity#United_State...
  - madengr 12y ago
    Didn't telecom get billions of tax $ last decade for broadband deployment, with nothing to show for it? Anyway, looks like they were interest free loans vs. outright subsidies. At least something came out of the New Deal, whereas fedgov spending during this recession is pissed away.
    - schwap 12y ago
      Looks like it's been/is being talked about, but no money's gone anywhere yet [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_universal_service#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_universal_service#Uni...
      - nitrogen 12y ago
        There was another program in the 1990s under Clinton that benefited the telcos, but no development happened. I don't remember what it was called.
    - adventured 12y ago
      Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they got tax breaks (tax incentives). The numbers thrown around have tended to be intentionally over-estimated by a huge factor, typically critics will proclaim the telecoms got $200x billion, the real number was closer to the low tens of billions (substantial, but not $200b crazy).
mmaunder 12y ago
The idea here is to provide very high speed from the street (which has fiber) to the home or office using existing copper - the last 30 meters. Laying fiber in the street is far easier than running it through buildings where every building has it's own challenges. Nice intro to the theory around data transmission limits: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115 http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115
- yareally 12y ago
  That's more or less what Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse do, since many connections are still copper at some point on transmission to homes/businesses. There's some latency overhead I noticed in comparison to straight DSL or Cable though.
- philjohn 12y ago
  That's what BT Infinity is in the UK. I currently get 80Mbps down and 19Mbps up - which is perfect for offsite backups of family photos etc. It's also totally unlimited, with no FUP - I've pulled down many hundreds of gigabytes per month (I work with very large data files and often work from home) and not heard so much as a peep from them about it.
  - vertex-four 12y ago
    Also, they dropped the traffic management on the unlimited packages last year, so it doesn't throttle you ever.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - signal11 12y ago
    Specifically, that's BT Infinity 2 -- confusingly, BT use Infinity for their fibre-to-the-home product as well, Infinity 3 offers 200Mbps and Infinity 4 offers 300Mbps. Availability is limited to a handful of exchanges, however http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/faster-internet http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/fas...
pud 12y ago
This'll make some people switch from cable, back to dialup modems (sort of). Which is funny/cool.
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guelo 12y ago
Click-bait headline. Add "30 meters" to the headline and it would drop.
- Gustomaximus 12y ago
  As some others have mentioned, this isn't about getting internet from the exchange to the home/business, just from the street. In this context 30 metres should be ok for the vast majority. From the article > It will enable operators to provide Internet connection speeds that are indistinguishable from fiber-to-the-home services, a major business benefit in locations where it is not physically, economically or aesthetically viable to lay new fiber cables all the way into residences. Instead, fiber can be brought to the curbside, wall or basement of a building and the existing copper network used for the final few meters.
djloche 12y ago
AT&T / Verizon (and the cable companies) will never give up their golden goose unless threatened by competition. They can do FTTC all day long - unless they actually uncap or otherwise significantly change the subscriber bandwidth it means nothing to the end-user.
taylorbuley 12y ago
The embedded short on Claude Shannon is very good and highly reccommended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq1-Iq9Vm28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq1-Iq9Vm28 A good book on the subject is Gleick's The Information http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235 http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...
barbs 12y ago
Anyone know if this would be feasible in Australia? Our National Broadband Network was originally planned to be fiber-to-the-home, but changed to a fiber-to-the-node system with the change of government. Not sure how close the average home is to its nearest node, so I don't know if it'd be less than 30 metres in most cases...
- quink 12y ago
  It would be. This wouldn't however involve the nodes as built at the moment. The problem is one of distance, not of the protocol that you're using. Adopting this instead of VDSL2 and keeping the architecture and topology the same won't make any difference worth speaking of to most premises. Instead the premises will have in the pits (or on one of the electricity poles) just outside them a tiny box - powered from the household itself through the existing copper - that connects to the fibre, which runs past the household. This contrasts with the average distance to the nodes of about three, four hundred metres likely under what the coalition is doing. It gets rid of the most expensive part of a FTTH install, which is the actual connection to the customer. So, yes, it's viable. It's also, however, substantially more like Labor's plan than the coalition's. So even if it were to make a buttload of sense and be insanely more cost effective it still wouldn't be done because Labor is evil. Or something. And Telstra and Murdoch wouldn't approve of something like this.
- monochr 12y ago
  No. This is for fiber to the premise, not fiber to the node. It would have solved some of the problems with the old NBN model, especially in highrise buildings in the city. I'm simply for this by the fact the government has been progressively removing all technical references about the NBN from every government website. During their election they promised a climate controlled box every 500 meters or so. This was ridiculed as completely out of the question due to cost and maintenance and has been quietly dropped since then. So even at the best case scenario the distance will be x20 as long as in these trials. And as the researchers noted: "giving broadband speeds up to 500 Mbps over a distance of 100 meters. In contrast, XG-FAST uses an increased frequency range up to 500 MHz to achieve higher speeds but over shorter distances."
orasis 12y ago
How many of you guys actually hook up any of your equipment to a hard line? I've used nothing but wifi for years. I'd be more interested in ultra-high speed wireless that could stretch to 30m and get me to that fiber node.
- pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
  you do realize that your wifi router hooks into a hard line............. right?
- kijin 12y ago
  It's possible, but then the Wi-Fi router will be outside of your home, probably mounted on the poles, and owned/operated by your ISP. Who will be happy to charge you by the number of devices you can connect. No thanks, I would much rather have direct control over my own home network. (Sure, you could achieve that with a repeater in your home, but then what was the point of moving the Wi-Fi router to the street?) My home PC is hooked up to my router with a CAT6 cable. The router is hooked up to the FTTH modem with another CAT6 cable. So it's hard lines all the way. Both the speed and latency of this setup are much better than anything I ever got with any wireless alternative, especially when I'm trying to talk with other devices on the other side of a wall or two.
  - TheMakeA 12y ago
    Who will be happy to charge you by the number of devices you can connect. ISPs (used to) do that. The solution has always been to use your own router in front of the modem. Sounds like a similar solution would work here.
    - kijin 12y ago
      Quote from GP: > (Sure, you could achieve that with a repeater in your home, but then what was the point of moving the Wi-Fi router to the street?)
      - deleted 12y ago
zw123456 12y ago
This is interesting, but as has been pointed out, the distances are very limited. Just something to think about, 802.11ac comes pretty close to the same speed with no wires at all, so, it kind of makes you think, why even bother with the wires at all.
- jrockway 12y ago
  802.11ac does an order of magnitude less speed than this inside an RF isolation box. Bring it out into the actual world with other people using it, and you aren't getting anything close to a gigabit.
- redwall_hp 12y ago
  Spectrum crunch and interference.
  - quink 12y ago
    Probably more likely to be more fundamental - attenuation, I think. But those two certainly don't help either.
hexleo 12y ago
"speed of 10 Gbps for transmission of data over traditional copper telephone lines" Good news for some places where they still use copper telephone lines connect to the Internet. But in my view, Chinese operators don't like this technology, they more like optical fiber. The first, it's faster than copper telephone and the future copper telephone lines will completely replaced. The second, in countrysides some bad guys steal the copper to sell for money, it's a big problem for operators.
- MAGZine 12y ago
  Take for example remote/rural communities however. It is enormous investment to run fiber out to these communities. Eventually, the copper will need to be upgraded... In the mean time, this is an excellent stopgap measure.
  - hexleo 12y ago
    In some ways, you are right. In China, some facts prove countryside's copper is often stolen.Chinese operators has a same measure, they call it "Fiber In, Copper Out"(translate for English it's so hard for me), first is improve network speed, second is reduce copper costs due to stolen. They prefer build fiber in countryside, rather than upgraded copper.
    - walshemj 12y ago
      I worked for a consulting enginer in the 80's and our telecom guy said the same about African states use microwave for long links as the copper gets nicked.
  - sjtrny 12y ago
    The thing is this doesn't apply to rural communities. It is very distance limited.
  - deleted 12y ago
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CodeWriter23 12y ago
Wonder what the latency is like.
- eloisant 12y ago
  We already have similar latency with FTTH and ADSL, this one being "in-between" I don't see how the latency would be any different.
danbmil99 12y ago
So why am I still stuck with Comcrap? sonic.net is a great co. with excellent service, and they can only get me 1.4 mbit/sec speed using copper.
- quink 12y ago
  If you're on 1.4 Mbps then the odds are very good you're too far from your exchange for this to make even the slightest bit of a difference. Not just by a small factor, but at that speed you're likely to be around two orders of magnitude too far away for this be in any way useful due to the attenuation inherent in your copper line. The only way this latest increment is useful is to bring fibre in your case about 99% of the way to your household. This will bridge the last 1% because it's cheaper than running fibre into your household.
zaroth 12y ago
If Comcast said, "I can get you a 10Gbit connection, it's fiber all the way, but it's going to end as an SFP port at the pole/wiring closet, and you have to take it from there." I would have thought homeowners and businessowners alike would spend the money to upgrade their own "infra" to make that work, rather than something like this. Obviously AL thinks there's a market here, it just seems like such a waste.
- alex4nder 12y ago
  Wiring isn't under control of the home/business owner until it hits their NID, which is already on-prem. Getting the connection to the NID is where the expense is, and it's why AL is putting money into the process. Without this, someone has to spend the thousands of dollars pulling permits/digging trenches to run fiber to your house.
  - zaroth 12y ago
    I guess I don't understand why you need this much tech just to get the fiber off the pole and into my house [1]. The coax drop from Comcast drapes off the pole, hits little more than a barrel connector on the side of the house, and then comes straight in the house and plugs into the modem. Why can't you do the same with fiber? [1] - http://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Outside-Plant/OptiNID-Fiber-Demarcation/OptiNID-ONT-760XL-Optical-Demarcation-Closure.aspx http://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Outside-Plant/OptiNI...
ksec 12y ago
What is much more interesting here is G.Fast, the technology it is based on. G.Fast, is suppose to be a FTTdp, where fibre goes all the way to your building and replacing the central copper wiring box with its DSLAM. In countries where you have many flats within a building, it is likely the copper wiring to home socket are all within 100M range. I am not sure this applies to every scenario in every countries. But the concern of Copper quality is mainly a problem with copper outside of the building. Copper within the building are in much better shape and form. G.Fast also allow operator to config the upload and download speed. Hopefully that means at least 100Mbps of upload speed in the age of cloud computing. I cant wait to see this deploy. No longer would teleco needs permission and planning to work around every home and every building to get high speed internet. Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent are the fore front in G.Fast technology.
hacker234 12y ago
The problem will be getting regulatory approval. A high speed digital signal at VHF is going to radiate like blazes and wipe out FM Broadcast and hundreds of emergency services. This system will face the same problems as BPL, only much, much worse. The truth is that you can't reuse the (all ready full) radio spectrum, especially over copper. The only way you can do it is with well shielded Coaxial Cable (eg Cable TV) or via light (eg Optical Fiber). It's a triumph of Sales people over Engineering. Or to put it another way, the laws of physics will always win.
noso 12y ago
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25840502 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25840502 Alcatel-Lucent and BT said speeds of 1.4 terabits per second were achieved during their joint test - enough to send 44 uncompressed HD films a second. Awesome!
madengr 12y ago
7/10/2114 Alcatel-Lucent-Comcast-Timewarner megacorp sets record of 10 Tbps over 200 year old copper telephone lines. CEO states "We'd really like to bring you broadband but we've been fighting this last mile issue for quit some time. This new breakthrough will finally solve that."
- lupin_sansei 12y ago
  Nitpicking but telephone lines are 1880s and afterwards, and copper doesn't really degrade with age until normal conditions like iron.
  - madengr 12y ago
    It's a joke.
wahsd 12y ago
So what, that changes absolutely nothing about the monopolistic system of our infrastructure. All this will lead to is hidden collusion on the part of the providers just like is done in the mobile phone and data sector. We have a failed government with incompetent and neutered regulators and legislators that are operating in a system that is so deeply corrupt that the best of intentions cannot generate any kind of real momentum. There really needs to be a focus on bifurcating the infrastructure from services. What is wrong with us that we pay taxes to pay for functions of government when all that happens is that those taxes go to subsidizing the privatization of government services and then being overcharged by that very private sector we stood up. Infrastructure is a core function and purpose of government, without it being under socialized responsibility and control there is no purpose for government. Another example that is so blatantly obvious but no one seems to see for all the trees is electronic payment processing; why is there no almost zero cost electronic payment infrastructure that essentially serves the same purpose as paper money. I am not at all for the abolition of paper money, especially in light of the reminder that government is not our friend or anyone's friend but its own, but there should be a government / public infrastructure for payment processing. It's actually rather shocking that there is no such system and it is purely corruption of the worst kind that is preventing it. Ever wonder why it is rather difficult to use a Visa/MC/AE in Germany, it's because the electronic payment / money system is a pseudo public infrastructure and highly regulated. There is no money to be creamed and siphoned off of the economy by the big payment processors. Something the startup community does not take into account is that it is only as successful and has as much wiggle room as the big cartel controlled sectors permit. So you built a service or a product, you're just mucking around while you still have to pay protection money to the mob. Sometimes I wish that efforts like Dwolla would gain a lot more traction. Their payment processing fee is fractions of the extortion of the mob, yet they can't seem to catch on. What is wrong with us, why would we be ok with having your profits siphoned off? Those huge payment processing fees are profits that you pay for not good reason. The same problem affects this technology, there is absolutely no reason for any ISP to implement this technology any time soon. They get away with extortion for shitty services, why would they provide exponentially faster service for anything but a lot more as they seesaw up expectation that "of course, it's faster so I should pay more"
- 12y ago
callesgg 12y ago
"It will enable operators to provide Internet connection speeds that are indistinguishable from fiber-to-the-home services" Doubt it. But it is a nice achievement.

279 points by Deinos 12y ago

"In contrast, XG-FAST uses an increased frequency range up to 500 MHz to achieve higher speeds but over shorter distances. Bell Labs achieved 1 Gbps symmetrical over 70 meters on a single copper pair. 10 Gbps was achieved over a distance of 30 meters by using two pairs of lines (a technique known as “bonding”). Both tests used standard copper cable provided by a European operator." 30 meters with bonded pair for 10 Gbps. While this is pretty cool, due to distance limitation we are not getting telephone line modems that can outstrip fiber optics.

te_platt 12y ago
Not to mention the fact that telephone lines are bandlimited at about 3000 Hz.
- wmf 12y ago
  That only applies to voice calls, not DSL.
  - quink 12y ago
    It does apply if you've got a pair gain system sitting in the middle, but you're essentially right.
  - te_platt 12y ago
    It applies to any call outside of the local loop. From the dsl wikipedia entry: Because DSL operates above the 3.4 kHz voice limit, it cannot pass through a load coil. Load coils are, in essence, filters that block out any non-voice frequency. They are commonly set at regular intervals in lines placed only for POTS service. A DSL signal cannot pass through a properly installed and working load coil, while voice service cannot be maintained past a certain distance without such coils. Therefore, some areas that are within range for DSL service are disqualified from eligibility because of load coil placement. Because of this, phone companies endeavor to remove load coils on copper loops that can operate without them, and by conditioning other lines to avoid them through the use of fiber to the neighborhood or node
nardi 12y ago
> While this is pretty cool, due to distance limitation we are not getting telephone line modems that can outstrip fiber optics. From the article: "XG-FAST can help operators accelerate FTTH deployments, taking fiber very close to customers without the major expense and delays associated with entering every home." So you actually are getting a modem, hooked up to your telephone line, that goes up to 70m over telephone cable to the street, and then fiber the rest of the way. Makes a lot more sense than literally doing fiber to every home.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  Hardly. You are forgetting that most people's copper cabling is degrading quite rapidly or is already of very poor quality. Furthermore the number of nodes required on the street due to the 70m limitation would be a lot higher than with FTTP.
  - XorNot 12y ago
    Exactly - this changes nothing. You'd still be paying workcrews to go street-to-street digging things up and running things through conduit. At the point you're doing that, the marginal cost of getting them there is much higher then the cost of the equipment or cabling they'd be installing.
    - Turing_Machine 12y ago
      Running cable on poles or pulling it through conduit is much, much, much cheaper than fiddling around in someone's attic or crawlspace. The appointment has to be scheduled (i.e., the homeowner has to be there), you have to worry about the three hundred pounds of boxes they've got stored in the way, the crawl space or attic may be brutally hot or cold, have wasps, raw sewage, mud, or any number of other hazards. It's a slow and expensive job.
      - sliverstorm 12y ago
        Not to mention legal hooplah and potential billing. Digging up the streets requires permission from the city, and maybe you send them a bill for some of your services. Digging up people's front lawns requires permission from every homeowner, and if you are offloading cost you have to bill each homeowner...
jpmattia 12y ago
> While this is pretty cool, due to distance limitation we are not getting telephone line modems that can outstrip fiber optics. I doubt anyone is under any illusions that the copper is going to outstrip fiber. However, it is still an important result: There are many places that are stuck with old-fashioned twisted pair and it takes literally an act of gov't to lay down fiber. Rather than leaving that population out in the cold, this result gives hope that they may have cutting edge connectivity. The real issue is commercializability, which has not been Bell's traditional strength.

transfire 12y ago

How in the world can this be cheaper than running the fiber 100 more feet?

tcas 12y ago
Because every household has copper phone cables run to it already. You can run fiber to the trunk and have high speed communication using existing copper lines. > XG-FAST can help operators accelerate FTTH deployments, taking fiber very close to customers without the major expense and delays associated with entering every home
- cdr 12y ago
  How many of those existing copper cables are of high enough quality that they can support anywhere near that speed though? The copper lines in my parents' house are so bad they can't even support a second phone line, much less decent networking speeds.
- mrmondo 12y ago
  The copper running to most homes is up to 100 years old and heavily degraded, most houses can't even get ADSL1 speeds let alone ADSL2 or vDSL
ajb 12y ago
Lawyers fees.
- ajb 12y ago
  Hey, I wasn't joking- well, not that much. You will get more disputes when you deploy across someone else's property, especially if you break or uglify something. That's a serious reason for stopping on public land.
- deleted 12y ago
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nucleardog 12y ago
You can dig up an alley and re-string from poles with little hassle. Digging up everyone's yard, replacing lines that might now be running under garages or driveways, and just generally having to operate in people's yard is a lot more work. Especially multiplied by tens or hundreds of thousands of homes. If you can just trench an alley and run fiber to the nodes then re-use the existing copper for the last 100m that's probably a huge cost savings.

ajb 12y ago

Although this is spun to sound like a breakthough, it's basically a cost reduction measure. G.fast and this new XG.fast are there to avoid the hassle of negotiating with each householder as to how new fibre gets deployed on their property, when it's a lot easier to negotiate with the municipality all in one go.

gardarh 12y ago
Cost reduction being a key factor! The greatest breakthroughs provide something for the masses at a lower cost than previously possible. An important part of engineering is leveraging existing infrastructure to improve service quality. As an example of this it has been technically possible to put fibre into every home for years but apparently not feasible, price-wise. Speed is speed whether it's copper or fibre.

PaulHoule 12y ago

Great, one more excuse why Big Telecom won't give us FTTH in the United States.

gilgoomesh 12y ago
Actually, this invention requires Fibre to the Curb. The only section that would remain copper is the curb to wall-socket link. And in the long term, you'd probably pay to replace this yourself with fibre since (if other high bitrate copper solutions are any indication) fibre would be lower power, lower maintenance and more reliable.
snowwrestler 12y ago
I just want some competition in high speed connectivity. I don't care if it's fiber, copper, wireless, coax, power line, or sewer. If this makes it cheaper for me to get 100 Mbps or higher, sounds good to me.

WatchDog 12y ago

30 meters seems pretty useless, even for a FTTN setup, it would surely be simpler just to run fibre all the way then build nodes every 60 meters or so.

zephjc 12y ago
Like others said in this thread, copper up to 70m to a switch box, then fiber from there on out.

3rd3 12y ago

What is the theoretical limit (for comparison)?

quink 12y ago
Whatever the theoretical limit is, they're pretty much right at it at this point. Similar to how ADSL2+ was near enough at the theoretical limit of what the frequency spectrum it used could do given the attenuation it was asked to do it at. For the same frequency ranges as ADSL2+, VDSL2 delivered pretty much no improvement. What VDSL2 did do is expand the frequency range up to 17 MHz/30 MHz, depending on the profile. So the question you might want to ask is "How high a frequency can we use?" and in that case the real question you're looking for is "How short a piece of copper do you have?". And the answer to that is very quickly becoming "a very short piece of copper indeed". Either that or a lot of copper that's ideally also very thick... which, considering most copper was rolled out with the aim of providing a low attenuation at 3000 Hz over at most a low number of kilometres isn't often the case. tl;dr: How long is a piece of string?
ajb 12y ago
Depends on a number of factors: the major one is the length of the wire, but also what gauge of wire, how well twisted it is (phone wires aren't very twisted due to not expecting to use the high frequencies), the radio environment, local radio interference standards (telephone wires are leaky at these frequencies), how many of your neighbours also have DSL (although this is improving due to crosstalk cancellation mechanisms in the newer standards), how many watts the local operator is prepared to put down the wire...
rayiner 12y ago
The bandwidth of an electrical link is a function of bandwidth (the range of frequencies present on the cable) and the encoding (bits per second per hertz). The first on is limited by attenuation on the cable. As you increase the frequency, the cable does a less good job of propagating the signal, and your signal level decreases at the other end. This is limited by power and cable quality. The efficiency of the encoding is limited by the sensitivity of the receiver and its internal noise along with external noise. Depending on these parameters, power, bandwidth, and signal to noise, the bandwidth can be arbitrarily high (subject I suppose to quantum effects). See: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theor... This system uses a bandwidth of 500 MHz over two pairs. That gives roughly 10 bits per second per hertz. Both are pretty close to the state of the art over unshielded copper cable. You coaxial cable is usually about 600 MHz. But if you use waveguides and the like, you can get into the GHz range.

madengr 12y ago

Nice technology, but I have had it with telecom company excuses. Electricity has been deployed to most homes in rural areas, as well as copper telephone. It should be no different with fiber. Why could it be done then, but not now?

schwap 12y ago
I didn't look up any sources, but if I remember right, the difference was massive government assistance. edit: Yep - rural electrification was pretty much completely government driven[1] [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electricity#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rural_electricity#United_State...
- madengr 12y ago
  Didn't telecom get billions of tax $ last decade for broadband deployment, with nothing to show for it? Anyway, looks like they were interest free loans vs. outright subsidies. At least something came out of the New Deal, whereas fedgov spending during this recession is pissed away.
  - schwap 12y ago
    Looks like it's been/is being talked about, but no money's gone anywhere yet [1] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_universal_service#United_States http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_universal_service#Uni...
    - nitrogen 12y ago
      There was another program in the 1990s under Clinton that benefited the telcos, but no development happened. I don't remember what it was called.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe they got tax breaks (tax incentives). The numbers thrown around have tended to be intentionally over-estimated by a huge factor, typically critics will proclaim the telecoms got $200x billion, the real number was closer to the low tens of billions (substantial, but not $200b crazy).

mmaunder 12y ago

The idea here is to provide very high speed from the street (which has fiber) to the home or office using existing copper - the last 30 meters. Laying fiber in the street is far easier than running it through buildings where every building has it's own challenges. Nice intro to the theory around data transmission limits: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115 http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2010/explained-shannon-0115

yareally 12y ago
That's more or less what Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse do, since many connections are still copper at some point on transmission to homes/businesses. There's some latency overhead I noticed in comparison to straight DSL or Cable though.
philjohn 12y ago
That's what BT Infinity is in the UK. I currently get 80Mbps down and 19Mbps up - which is perfect for offsite backups of family photos etc. It's also totally unlimited, with no FUP - I've pulled down many hundreds of gigabytes per month (I work with very large data files and often work from home) and not heard so much as a peep from them about it.
- vertex-four 12y ago
  Also, they dropped the traffic management on the unlimited packages last year, so it doesn't throttle you ever.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- signal11 12y ago
  Specifically, that's BT Infinity 2 -- confusingly, BT use Infinity for their fibre-to-the-home product as well, Infinity 3 offers 200Mbps and Infinity 4 offers 300Mbps. Availability is limited to a handful of exchanges, however http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/faster-internet http://www.productsandservices.bt.com/products/broadband/fas...

pud 12y ago

This'll make some people switch from cable, back to dialup modems (sort of). Which is funny/cool.

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guelo 12y ago

Click-bait headline. Add "30 meters" to the headline and it would drop.

Gustomaximus 12y ago
As some others have mentioned, this isn't about getting internet from the exchange to the home/business, just from the street. In this context 30 metres should be ok for the vast majority. From the article > It will enable operators to provide Internet connection speeds that are indistinguishable from fiber-to-the-home services, a major business benefit in locations where it is not physically, economically or aesthetically viable to lay new fiber cables all the way into residences. Instead, fiber can be brought to the curbside, wall or basement of a building and the existing copper network used for the final few meters.

djloche 12y ago

AT&T / Verizon (and the cable companies) will never give up their golden goose unless threatened by competition. They can do FTTC all day long - unless they actually uncap or otherwise significantly change the subscriber bandwidth it means nothing to the end-user.

taylorbuley 12y ago

The embedded short on Claude Shannon is very good and highly reccommended https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq1-Iq9Vm28 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wq1-Iq9Vm28 A good book on the subject is Gleick's The Information http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/dp/1400096235 http://www.amazon.com/The-Information-History-Theory-Flood/d...

barbs 12y ago

Anyone know if this would be feasible in Australia? Our National Broadband Network was originally planned to be fiber-to-the-home, but changed to a fiber-to-the-node system with the change of government. Not sure how close the average home is to its nearest node, so I don't know if it'd be less than 30 metres in most cases...

quink 12y ago
It would be. This wouldn't however involve the nodes as built at the moment. The problem is one of distance, not of the protocol that you're using. Adopting this instead of VDSL2 and keeping the architecture and topology the same won't make any difference worth speaking of to most premises. Instead the premises will have in the pits (or on one of the electricity poles) just outside them a tiny box - powered from the household itself through the existing copper - that connects to the fibre, which runs past the household. This contrasts with the average distance to the nodes of about three, four hundred metres likely under what the coalition is doing. It gets rid of the most expensive part of a FTTH install, which is the actual connection to the customer. So, yes, it's viable. It's also, however, substantially more like Labor's plan than the coalition's. So even if it were to make a buttload of sense and be insanely more cost effective it still wouldn't be done because Labor is evil. Or something. And Telstra and Murdoch wouldn't approve of something like this.
monochr 12y ago
No. This is for fiber to the premise, not fiber to the node. It would have solved some of the problems with the old NBN model, especially in highrise buildings in the city. I'm simply for this by the fact the government has been progressively removing all technical references about the NBN from every government website. During their election they promised a climate controlled box every 500 meters or so. This was ridiculed as completely out of the question due to cost and maintenance and has been quietly dropped since then. So even at the best case scenario the distance will be x20 as long as in these trials. And as the researchers noted: "giving broadband speeds up to 500 Mbps over a distance of 100 meters. In contrast, XG-FAST uses an increased frequency range up to 500 MHz to achieve higher speeds but over shorter distances."

orasis 12y ago

How many of you guys actually hook up any of your equipment to a hard line? I've used nothing but wifi for years. I'd be more interested in ultra-high speed wireless that could stretch to 30m and get me to that fiber node.

pg_is_a_butt 12y ago
you do realize that your wifi router hooks into a hard line............. right?
kijin 12y ago
It's possible, but then the Wi-Fi router will be outside of your home, probably mounted on the poles, and owned/operated by your ISP. Who will be happy to charge you by the number of devices you can connect. No thanks, I would much rather have direct control over my own home network. (Sure, you could achieve that with a repeater in your home, but then what was the point of moving the Wi-Fi router to the street?) My home PC is hooked up to my router with a CAT6 cable. The router is hooked up to the FTTH modem with another CAT6 cable. So it's hard lines all the way. Both the speed and latency of this setup are much better than anything I ever got with any wireless alternative, especially when I'm trying to talk with other devices on the other side of a wall or two.
- TheMakeA 12y ago
  Who will be happy to charge you by the number of devices you can connect. ISPs (used to) do that. The solution has always been to use your own router in front of the modem. Sounds like a similar solution would work here.
  - kijin 12y ago
    Quote from GP: > (Sure, you could achieve that with a repeater in your home, but then what was the point of moving the Wi-Fi router to the street?)
    - deleted 12y ago

zw123456 12y ago

This is interesting, but as has been pointed out, the distances are very limited. Just something to think about, 802.11ac comes pretty close to the same speed with no wires at all, so, it kind of makes you think, why even bother with the wires at all.

jrockway 12y ago
802.11ac does an order of magnitude less speed than this inside an RF isolation box. Bring it out into the actual world with other people using it, and you aren't getting anything close to a gigabit.
redwall_hp 12y ago
Spectrum crunch and interference.
- quink 12y ago
  Probably more likely to be more fundamental - attenuation, I think. But those two certainly don't help either.

hexleo 12y ago

"speed of 10 Gbps for transmission of data over traditional copper telephone lines" Good news for some places where they still use copper telephone lines connect to the Internet. But in my view, Chinese operators don't like this technology, they more like optical fiber. The first, it's faster than copper telephone and the future copper telephone lines will completely replaced. The second, in countrysides some bad guys steal the copper to sell for money, it's a big problem for operators.

MAGZine 12y ago
Take for example remote/rural communities however. It is enormous investment to run fiber out to these communities. Eventually, the copper will need to be upgraded... In the mean time, this is an excellent stopgap measure.
- hexleo 12y ago
  In some ways, you are right. In China, some facts prove countryside's copper is often stolen.Chinese operators has a same measure, they call it "Fiber In, Copper Out"(translate for English it's so hard for me), first is improve network speed, second is reduce copper costs due to stolen. They prefer build fiber in countryside, rather than upgraded copper.
  - walshemj 12y ago
    I worked for a consulting enginer in the 80's and our telecom guy said the same about African states use microwave for long links as the copper gets nicked.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  The thing is this doesn't apply to rural communities. It is very distance limited.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]

CodeWriter23 12y ago

Wonder what the latency is like.

eloisant 12y ago
We already have similar latency with FTTH and ADSL, this one being "in-between" I don't see how the latency would be any different.

danbmil99 12y ago

So why am I still stuck with Comcrap? sonic.net is a great co. with excellent service, and they can only get me 1.4 mbit/sec speed using copper.

quink 12y ago
If you're on 1.4 Mbps then the odds are very good you're too far from your exchange for this to make even the slightest bit of a difference. Not just by a small factor, but at that speed you're likely to be around two orders of magnitude too far away for this be in any way useful due to the attenuation inherent in your copper line. The only way this latest increment is useful is to bring fibre in your case about 99% of the way to your household. This will bridge the last 1% because it's cheaper than running fibre into your household.

zaroth 12y ago

If Comcast said, "I can get you a 10Gbit connection, it's fiber all the way, but it's going to end as an SFP port at the pole/wiring closet, and you have to take it from there." I would have thought homeowners and businessowners alike would spend the money to upgrade their own "infra" to make that work, rather than something like this. Obviously AL thinks there's a market here, it just seems like such a waste.

alex4nder 12y ago
Wiring isn't under control of the home/business owner until it hits their NID, which is already on-prem. Getting the connection to the NID is where the expense is, and it's why AL is putting money into the process. Without this, someone has to spend the thousands of dollars pulling permits/digging trenches to run fiber to your house.
- zaroth 12y ago
  I guess I don't understand why you need this much tech just to get the fiber off the pole and into my house [1]. The coax drop from Comcast drapes off the pole, hits little more than a barrel connector on the side of the house, and then comes straight in the house and plugs into the modem. Why can't you do the same with fiber? [1] - http://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Outside-Plant/OptiNID-Fiber-Demarcation/OptiNID-ONT-760XL-Optical-Demarcation-Closure.aspx http://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Outside-Plant/OptiNI...

ksec 12y ago

What is much more interesting here is G.Fast, the technology it is based on. G.Fast, is suppose to be a FTTdp, where fibre goes all the way to your building and replacing the central copper wiring box with its DSLAM. In countries where you have many flats within a building, it is likely the copper wiring to home socket are all within 100M range. I am not sure this applies to every scenario in every countries. But the concern of Copper quality is mainly a problem with copper outside of the building. Copper within the building are in much better shape and form. G.Fast also allow operator to config the upload and download speed. Hopefully that means at least 100Mbps of upload speed in the age of cloud computing. I cant wait to see this deploy. No longer would teleco needs permission and planning to work around every home and every building to get high speed internet. Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent are the fore front in G.Fast technology.

hacker234 12y ago

The problem will be getting regulatory approval. A high speed digital signal at VHF is going to radiate like blazes and wipe out FM Broadcast and hundreds of emergency services. This system will face the same problems as BPL, only much, much worse. The truth is that you can't reuse the (all ready full) radio spectrum, especially over copper. The only way you can do it is with well shielded Coaxial Cable (eg Cable TV) or via light (eg Optical Fiber). It's a triumph of Sales people over Engineering. Or to put it another way, the laws of physics will always win.

noso 12y ago

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25840502 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25840502 Alcatel-Lucent and BT said speeds of 1.4 terabits per second were achieved during their joint test - enough to send 44 uncompressed HD films a second. Awesome!

madengr 12y ago

7/10/2114 Alcatel-Lucent-Comcast-Timewarner megacorp sets record of 10 Tbps over 200 year old copper telephone lines. CEO states "We'd really like to bring you broadband but we've been fighting this last mile issue for quit some time. This new breakthrough will finally solve that."

lupin_sansei 12y ago
Nitpicking but telephone lines are 1880s and afterwards, and copper doesn't really degrade with age until normal conditions like iron.
- madengr 12y ago
  It's a joke.

wahsd 12y ago

So what, that changes absolutely nothing about the monopolistic system of our infrastructure. All this will lead to is hidden collusion on the part of the providers just like is done in the mobile phone and data sector. We have a failed government with incompetent and neutered regulators and legislators that are operating in a system that is so deeply corrupt that the best of intentions cannot generate any kind of real momentum. There really needs to be a focus on bifurcating the infrastructure from services. What is wrong with us that we pay taxes to pay for functions of government when all that happens is that those taxes go to subsidizing the privatization of government services and then being overcharged by that very private sector we stood up. Infrastructure is a core function and purpose of government, without it being under socialized responsibility and control there is no purpose for government. Another example that is so blatantly obvious but no one seems to see for all the trees is electronic payment processing; why is there no almost zero cost electronic payment infrastructure that essentially serves the same purpose as paper money. I am not at all for the abolition of paper money, especially in light of the reminder that government is not our friend or anyone's friend but its own, but there should be a government / public infrastructure for payment processing. It's actually rather shocking that there is no such system and it is purely corruption of the worst kind that is preventing it. Ever wonder why it is rather difficult to use a Visa/MC/AE in Germany, it's because the electronic payment / money system is a pseudo public infrastructure and highly regulated. There is no money to be creamed and siphoned off of the economy by the big payment processors. Something the startup community does not take into account is that it is only as successful and has as much wiggle room as the big cartel controlled sectors permit. So you built a service or a product, you're just mucking around while you still have to pay protection money to the mob. Sometimes I wish that efforts like Dwolla would gain a lot more traction. Their payment processing fee is fractions of the extortion of the mob, yet they can't seem to catch on. What is wrong with us, why would we be ok with having your profits siphoned off? Those huge payment processing fees are profits that you pay for not good reason. The same problem affects this technology, there is absolutely no reason for any ISP to implement this technology any time soon. They get away with extortion for shitty services, why would they provide exponentially faster service for anything but a lot more as they seesaw up expectation that "of course, it's faster so I should pay more"

12y ago

callesgg 12y ago

"It will enable operators to provide Internet connection speeds that are indistinguishable from fiber-to-the-home services" Doubt it. But it is a nice achievement.