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Tuesday, 26 October 2010 18:43 |
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 Real products will double speeds for some homes served by new gear. Some of the promotion has gone too far and confused people. Your DSL line at home will not run at 400, 700, 825, or 900 megabits. Only the fraction of people within a few hundred meters will get the 50 and 100 megabits. Speeds will drop off very rapidly with distance and the improvement for most people will be far less.
That said, millions of homes in Germany, Britain, Switzerland and possibly the U.S. that will be served by newly installed terminals in 2012-3 will be able to run much faster.
What's Real:
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30-100% increase is speed, primarily at shorter distances. Many homes will be able to get 50 and 100 meg downstream.
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Carriers are testing boards in their labs and tell me the results are good.
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Ikanos is vectoring entire DSLAMs of 192 and more lines, while others are only vectoring a linecard. That's attractive where more than 48 lines attach. Until this gets to the field, it's not clear how much of an improvement will be realized.
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Bonding works, so it's straightforward to quadruple speeds by using four lines. Four lines, phantom mode and other tricks are used to get the 700-900 megabit speeds. Over short distances (hundreds of meters) real speeds should approach these claims but probably only will be available at far above a consumer price.
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British Telecom, Deutsche Telekom, and Swisscom are actively deploying new field terminals and this would be natural to include.
But:
- Vectoring will require new line cards or DSLAMs. No carrier has committed to upgrading existing DSLAMs so it's unlikely more than a handful of the current 300M DSL subscribers will see any benefit. (Other noise reduction techniques are improving rate/reach, but more like 10-30%.)
- Almost no consumers will be offered more than 50-100 megs even if they are in new service areas.
- While carriers tell me they like the results of the boards in their labs, none have indicated they will offer vectored service before 2012-2013. However, it might be smart to make sure that new equipment in 2011 is able to support vectoring without an expensive upgrade.
- Vectoring is not a magic bullet that eliminates the need for other improvements. In particular, retransmission on PHY is now an ITU standard which Lantiq has added. ASSIA's DSM is proving so effective large telcos are installing it and even investing.
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 02 November 2010 15:22 |
