Copper wire internet making a comeback?
DSL is a good way to get a fast internet speed as long as you’re living relatively close enough to the host company. The farther you move from ‘home base’ the more single degradation occurs and the slower your speed gets. Think of the older ADSL standards to where the subscriber got a blistering 8Mbs over a mile or so over unshielded copper wire. Providers then introduced ADSL loop extenders which then increased these distances but we still had the problem of signal noise or ‘crosstalk’ that limits full use of the bandwidth. Soon enough we were then introduced to fiber optics, which gave us more speed, but had to be dug into the ground and left the service providers with remnants of copper wire unutilized. However you look at it the bottom line is that companies are losing money by not using the existing twisted copper wire. I know it’s sad but there is a solution. Ikanos, creators of broadband chips, has announced a new technology to help make use of ‘the copper wire problem’ called NodeScale Vectoring.
What NodeScale does is analyze the ‘crosstalk’ or signal noise interference in real time and compensates with a unique set of signals to eliminate both. Doing this Ikanos was able to effectively gain up to 100Mbps over existing copper lines without any cross contamination of signals and over the entire spectrum of the service provider. Not to mention its more cost effective to use the copper wire already in place which will be a new competitor over fiber optics.
The entire system uses NodeScale Vectoring compatible line cards, Vector Computation Engines and G.vector-ready customer premises equipment, and since the same Ikanos chipset supports vectored and non-vectored deployments, upgrades can occur on a line-by-line basis for a pay-as-you-go vectored network deployment. “Ikanos’ NodeScale Vectoring technology will deliver the performance of fiber at one-tenth the cost of fiber-to-the-home.
With NodeScale Vectoring, we believe that service providers will save billions of dollars on broadband deployments by delivering high-speed, highly reliable Internet access and premium services over their existing copper infrastructure.”, said John Quigley, CEO of Ikanos. I’m not sure if this implementation of NodeScale vectoring is really ‘that’ effective in the long run. Fiber optic speeds out-paced the speeds obtained by the fastest ADSL line from the start, and are only going to get faster. Not to mention copper disintegrates over time and will eventually have to be replaced, to where fiber lines won’t. Is NSV the better solution or is it new technology to get a bigger monetary surplus before the copper corrodes?
Eavesdropper
