“If you’re still waiting for your ISP to announce when it will bring fibre to your premises and you suspect ‘sometime the otherside of never’ is the answer, take heart,” Jo Best reports for ZDNet. “You may already have the line needed to deliver 1Gbps to your home or office already in place.”
“Copper networks went into the ground in some countries over 100 years ago, and were more recently the first networks used to deliver broadband to customers. However, copper was also viewed as a technology dead end: only capable of offering tens of megabits per second, it was just a staging post until fibre to the premises (FTTP) replacements could be installed, bringing broadband speeds into the hundreds of megabits per second and beyond,” Best reports. “That was, of course, until G.fast came along.”
“G.fast is a new-minted standard being explored by operators in Europe, Australia, Asia, and beyond, as a means of offering fibre-like speeds over those creaking copper wires,” Best reports. “Using the existing copper infrastructure, G.fast can offer a 1Gbps downlink over 20m copper loop, and several hundreds megabits per second over hundreds of metres.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Salvation for millions upon millions of users may be at hand!
Yeah and FiOS cuts and removes the copper when installing their fttp service
Not at my residence. Yes, they disconnected the copper at the customer demarc, but they capped the wires. I could have easily reattached them to the terminals.
“MacDailyNews Take: Salvation for millions upon millions of users may be at hand!”
Well it is almost Easter.
Nice one Higo!
My thought on the MDN take was that salvation was at hand for the Europeans. The US’s messed up conglomeration of cable companies area monopolies and phone companies area monopolies will ensure that it will be a long time of expensive suffering before our deliverance. We don’t want monopolies in the US – then why do we allow situations like mine, where there is only one broadband provider available for my house. Sounds like a monopoly to me.
I have fios and I couldn’t be happier. Gone are the time warner cable does of yore and misery.
20 meters? So that would be good for having the node in the sidewalk and the modem at the kitchen ?
Precisely the problem! 1 Gbps over 20 meters? Several hundred Mbps over “hundreds of meters”? That is fine if your home or business is right next to a substation. But many people in the U.S. are located 1000 to 2000 meters from a substation, or even more distant. Bandwidth will drop quickly with distance and with noise. Are these figures for a laboratory test in a well-shielded environment. I applaud the effort, but I am highly skeptical that this will ever turn into a marketable product.
The old copper infrastructure in the U.S. is crumbling and unreliable. I always had lots of noise on my line in multiple residences over the years, which kills SNR and significantly reduces bandwidth. Fiber is now the go-to technology for all high speed installations, and WiFi is taking ver for everything else. There is no room for a stop-gap data transmission technology over old copper infrastructure.
Wonder if combining this with a mesh system (with wireless nodes) would further extend the system to me here in Hooterville?
Say, have you seen my missing pig? Just ask him where his home is, and he’ll give you the directions. Thanks!
P.S. He answers to the name Arnold.
100s of feet, assuming two pair 24 gauge and a birds nest of wires at the distribution box. It’s interesting.
I am pessimistic, of its true potential, I’m the next 5 years. In the mean time wireless gets better all the time.