Re: Now flood the comms pits with water…
Well, some places there are comms pits with conduits running between, in other places, the phone line is buried bare, no conduit.
My point being that, while it's great they've been able to squeeze high speeds out of copper pairs over 100m, possibly in controlled conditions, we don't know how well it will work in the real world.
What happens when you run two of them in parallel, with the electrostatic and electromagnetic coupling that comes with such arrangements?
Fibre isn't a guarantee either. If you've got reactive soil, then fibre is going to be a pain. Telstra tried putting a fibre across the Nullarbor plain years ago. They had to abandon it because soil movement kept breaking it.
We seem to have less of a problem with this though, and there isn't the cross-talk issues that plague copper. It also doesn't have the line-of-sight or capacity issues of wireless, and for the most part, upgrading speed requires replacements of equipment at each end of the cable, not the cable in between.
It's useful to have an extra tool in our arsenal, but I think it premature to declare one technology not-required so soon.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
