back to article Ericsson quickens up cable broadband

Ericsson has taken the 100Mbit/s VDSL2 telephone cable broadband standard and made it go five times faster. VDSL is very high bit rate Digital Subscriber Line technology, and is a follow-on technology to ADSL (Asymmetric DSL) which first established a data transmission channel parallel to the voice transmission channel on the …

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  1. MacRat

    Expensive Copper

    Copper is expensive these days.

    Telcos should be doing more to replace it as much as they can with fiber.

  2. Kevin Pollock
    Unhappy

    ...and what about the backhaul?

    It's great to hear about local loop technologies that could deliver "up to" 83Mbit/s over telephone cable. But the adoption of these technologies will just widen the "digital divide" in this country.

    In my case line checks indicate that I could enjoy up to 18Mbit/s if my exchange was equipped with good old ADSL2+. But I'm on a "Market 1" exchange so that's not scheduled to happen until 2011. I mean - who the heck needs VDSL when I could get 18Mbit/s from ADSL2+?

    But in the meantime my router runs the line at 8Mbit/s - and the fastest I can get on a speed test is 2Mbit/s. That's because the backhaul from my exchange runs over a piece of wet string.

    I don't live on some remote Scottish island, this is a location that's only 1 mile from my exchange, which is itself only 2 miles outside Nottingham.

  3. Edward Miles

    O RLY?

    "VDSL2, if adopted, should boost the paltry ADSL speeds we have today, unless BT and other telcos contend the lines to hell"

    s/unless/until/

  4. Anonymous Coward
    Alert

    unless BT and other telcos contend the lines to hell

    its a business..

    says it all..

  5. Mark Daniels

    @ Kevin Pollock...

    Kevin, I don't mean to be rude, but I have feeling I am going to be.

    Only 2m/bit ? Only ? I am going to make the assumption that you do realise just how fast 2meg actually is ?

    I have the good fortune to travel for a living. Not to the boring glamour capitals of euroland, but to the exciting world there is in Sub Saharan Africa. I am just back from six months in Swaziland, for example. Swaziland has one 4meg link for the entire country, back to Johannesburg, which it uses as it's hub to the rest of the world.

    There are some reasons for this, not least of course the mountains that string north to south on the western border of Swaziland. Getting some sort of connection during the day can be neigh on impossible.

    I am not suggesting we bin all our investment until some backwater corner of anywhere has what we have, but I am suggesting a swig of reality juice with a largish slice of perspective.

    So please, don't complain because you only get a 2 meg link, and not 18.

    Two meg's, wow. Be thankful you are not on 33k copper wire still…..

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Paris Hilton

    I don't get it

    If you can get 100Mb down a single line on VDSL2, why is is so suprising that you get 5 times that speed by using six bonded lines?

    Paris, because she doesn't get it either.

  7. Simon Painter
    Heart

    backhaul

    It doesn't matter what speed the last mile is until the rest of the network is souped up. I have an excellent ISP who has invested in their network and so I can watch TV online (tvcatchup.com) and watch (legally) downloaded HD content (xbox live - takes about two minutes to buffer enough of a movie to start watching it in 1080 juicyness).

    The freetards who use the other ISPs (think of the debt ridden Tiscali, ForceWhine, Virgin NTL Telewest Media and Sky 'Broad'band) may get similar last mile speed to me but if the rest of the network is made of thin strands of sh!t or the traffic is more rigorously shaped than Tony Hart's Morph then they will be stuck to web surfing and email.

  8. Kevin Pollock
    Unhappy

    @Mark Daniels

    Hi Mark,

    Your point is well taken. But that actually confirms my point about the Digital Divide. And by the way, I'm not sure we should be comparing ourselves to sub-Saharan Africa :-) How about comparison with France, or Germany?

    My line *could* run at 18Mbit/s if BT invested in ADSL2+ at the exchange. My line *could* run at 8Mbit/s if BT invested in a decent backhaul connection from that exchange. Myline *could* run at 2Mbit/s if it weren't for all the other folks in the village who insist on using their broadband at the same time as me in the evening (gosh the nerve :-) ).

    But in reality my line runs at 2Mbit/s during the day, and drops close to zero at times in the evening.

    How fast is "fast enough"? I am certainly thankful that I get an always-on (or mostly on) connection that runs fast enough to get email all the time, and can usually get the low-res BBC iPlayer with only one or two stutters. so please don't think I'm ungrateful.

    But surely the government should be focusing on making sure that everyone in the UK can access a decent speed of broadband. Spending money to upgrade the local loop is pointless if you don't invest in lowering the contention rates.

    This is the same point that Simon Painter made.

    And by the way - the current, misleading "all you can eat" business model does not help. The ISPs have painted themselves into a corner with the low cost broadband model. I pay £21 a month for my PlusNet service - so why can't I expect three times better speed than the entry level services?

    The economic model is broken.

  9. Steve
    Thumb Down

    Telcos

    "VDSL2, if adopted, should boost the paltry ADSL speeds we have today, unless BT and other telcos contend the lines to hell, and should also extend the reach of near-broadband speeds out into the places that ADSL can't get to now."

    And the chances of this happening are near zero.

    As an example the area I live in (in Gtr Manchester, suburban, not at all rural) is serviced by a BT exchange 2 miles away (as the crow drives, according to Google Maps... :), but once BT's crazy tortuous wiring is factored in it's nearly four miles. That means that the best speed BT will promise is still 512Kbps.

  10. Alan W. Rateliff, II
    Paris Hilton

    Not so bad in the US

    I use a local ISP reseller over Embarq's last mile. I have a 5Mb (actually provisioned at 5888kbps to account for overhead) and I get my full 5Mb. Some speed tests put me close to 5.6Mbps, so I am certainly not complaining. My DSLAM is only ADSL not ADSL2, but supposedly I should qualify for the ADSL2 stuff when it comes available as I am only 1/2 mile from the DSLAM and have lines clean as a whistle.

    Embarq does a good job of managing their DSL network. Now if only they could keep their backbone operational and not fall victim to a four year-old Cisco ISO bug.

    Paris, she got bugs, too.

  11. Neoc
    Thumb Down

    No good in Oz, then

    Not with Telstra having been handed the copper lines on a silver plate, and screaming blue murder any time someone mentions actually maintaining (let alone upgrading) the lines.

    Telstra - because we now own your previously public-owned infrastructure.

  12. Kevin Pollock

    @Steve in Manchester

    Hi Steve,

    Actually I think VDSL would be ideal for folks like you who currently have a long copper loop out to the exchange. As I understand it (disclaimer alert), if BT deploy VDSL at your exchange they would run a fibre cable to within a short distance of your home. Exactly how close they would come is dependent on several logistical, technical and local planning factors. But the idea is they'd cut out a lot of that 4 mile copper local loop, and only use the last 100m or so of existing copper cable into your home.

    So despite the fact that you're so far from the exchange, you'd still get these high speeds of VDSL connection. You'd then find that the bottleneck becomes the backhaul from your exchange, as I described above.

  13. xjy
    Paris Hilton

    Ericsson's roots

    Ericsson hails from Sweden and probably assumes Swedish copper line ubiquity and cleanness. Maybe subconsciously (I mean, China is one of their biggest markets...). The battle for carrying broadband is pretty hot between traditional cable (TV) operators, fibre operators, and telecoms. This development gives the telecoms (Ericsson's major milch cow) a real boost. The good news is that this will stiffen competition so we might eventually get good connections at good speeds at less than gouging prices, regardless of the type of signal carrier.

    (Paris, cos bonding and roots might be just up her channel...)

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