New type of broadband

[BarkingGhostar]

Will need to see it in practice, especially with multiple users in the same neighborhood at the same time, but looks promising.

Exactly. Running anything 'fast' over unshielded twisted pair on dated wiring is asking for dreams to come true.

 

[Zstream]

From a 50mb Fios user with two people in the house. I honestly can't notice a difference between 25 & 50 service.

Steam games still cap out around 8-12mb regardless of my speed.

Difference between Mb and Mbps 🙂

 

[PliotronX]

 

[mnewsham]

Difference between Mb and Mbps

yup 8MB/s is over 60mb/s

 

[mnewsham]

Exactly. Running anything 'fast' over unshielded twisted pair on dated wiring is asking for dreams to come true.

yeah I have some major concerns, but only deployment of the tech will tell the whole picture.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Difference between Mb and Mbps 🙂

I see and I guess I'm wrong

 

[Charmonium]

Exactly. Running anything 'fast' over unshielded twisted pair on dated wiring is asking for dreams to come true.

Telco isn't like cable, right? With POTS, you have a direct line to the central office. Sure, you have switches in between but once you're connected, it's a straight shot back to the CO on your own personal pipe.

The only issue I can see is signal degradation. But it sounds like they have some sort of box on the receiving end at the neighborhood level.

 

[BarkingGhostar]

Telco isn't like cable, right? With POTS, you have a direct line to the central office. Sure, you have switches in between but once you're connected, it's a straight shot back to the CO on your own personal pipe.

The only issue I can see is signal degradation. But it sounds like they have some sort of box on the receiving end at the neighborhood level.

This isn't always the case. Ever hear of the SLC96?

 

[Charmonium]

This isn't always the case. Ever hear of the SLC96?

I hadn't heard of it but I figured something like that would be used in some cases.

An SLC remote terminal is typically located in an area with a high density of telephone subscribers, such as a residential neighborhood, that is remote from the telephone company's central office.

Just like you have fiber connecting various hubs or microwave towers.

But for people that aren't "distant" from the central office, I think they still use POTS or IOW, standard wiring. I could be wrong about that but I still see those green boxes everywhere.

 

[zCypher]

With DSL you do have a "dedicated line" via copper loop between your modem's DSL port and the port jumpered at the DSLAM. But that is more or less completely irrelevant. A commonly used DSLAM is the ALU 7330, which is typically comprised of 4 cards with 48 ports each. That's 192 potential customers that may subscribe up to 50mbps on a single loop, or 100mbps on a bonded connection (2 lines). For the sake of simplicity let's just say we have 192 customers at 50mbps. That would be 9,600mbps of bandwidth required if the DSLAM is full and everyone is maxing out their connections. But in practice these boxes typically have uplinks of just a 1gbps to 3gbps (1, 2 or 3 gigabit uplinks) towards the RE.

In other words, oversubscribing is standard practice. Any DSLAM that has more customers provisioned than total uplink capacity could experience congestion, making it completely irrelevant if you have a dedicated link of 50mbps, you won't see those speeds if that node is congested. They are getting better at this, congestion issues are thankfully becoming less common than on legacy networks - but the whole "woohoo, DSL so dedicated pipe" argument pretty much completely falls apart. In reality, the service delivered is just as "shared" as anything else. It's all about how you've provisioned your customers vs the available capacity. Cable is a "shared" line, if you want to think of it that way, and yet I have never ever experienced any congestion issues with my cable connection here. Simply put, this isn't a congested area. A given area could be oversubscribed/congested regardless of last mile tech used. 🙂

I will say that it's definitely true "higher" speeds can be problematic with poor inside wiring, but that doesn't mean you can't have a good stable 50 or 100mbps line. If your inside wiring sucks, then fix it. If you can't.. well then yeah, you're screwed. But IMO, the tech is pretty cool. think about it... not so long ago, it was impossible to have anything faster than 56kbps on that same copper wire. 😉 they keep pushing the envelope as to what is possible over that very same copper wire, which i think is awesome. at some point physics will limit how far that can go , but just being able to provide 100mbps+ over that same wire is already pretty amazing, and we still have quite a long way to go before the average user will ever make use of such capacity.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Yep I've actually seen AFCs deployed in more rural areas, with like 2 T1s going to them! "Your speed looks fine from this end, it shows you're getting 8mbps!" Yeah, to the AFC. 😛

I never actually noticed what kind of uplinks our DSLAMs have, they are stingers (also by ALU) and think there are two fibres that plug in to them, but not sure what speed. I think they are OC3s but I'm just guessing.

Inside wiring can definitely be an issue too. When I used to work help desk it was a fairly common issue. I'd run a continuous line test and have them go around and unplug stuff to see if it's better. It was all fun and games till they unplug the phone they're calling from. 😛

 

[Red Squirrel]

Telco isn't like cable, right? With POTS, you have a direct line to the central office. Sure, you have switches in between but once you're connected, it's a straight shot back to the CO on your own personal pipe.

The only issue I can see is signal degradation. But it sounds like they have some sort of box on the receiving end at the neighborhood level.

Typically. The cables coming out of the CO can have like 900 pairs in them, they split off throughout the city. Though there will sometimes be smaller COs throughout that are fed by fibre, then those COs will have RLCMs (basically an extension of phone switch with line cards, one card per phone line) and their own DSLAMs.

In the CO the cables go to "outside loop" blocks at a frame, and on the other side there are blocks going to the telephone switch and DSLAM.

Looks like this:
(best pic I could find showing the actual wires)

When you call the phone company to get hooked up, they literally run a wire from your house's cable out pair to the proper terminal block. I sometimes do it when the guy who does it is off.

 

[Rakehellion]

regular phone lines

Those still exist?

 

[BarkingGhostar]

With DSL you do have a "dedicated line" via copper loop between your modem's DSL port and the port jumpered at the DSLAM. But that is more or less completely irrelevant. A commonly used DSLAM is the ALU 7330, which is typically comprised of 4 cards with 48 ports each. That's 192 potential customers that may subscribe up to 50mbps on a single loop, or 100mbps on a bonded connection (2 lines). For the sake of simplicity let's just say we have 192 customers at 50mbps. That would be 9,600mbps of bandwidth required if the DSLAM is full and everyone is maxing out their connections. But in practice these boxes typically have uplinks of just a 1gbps to 3gbps (1, 2 or 3 gigabit uplinks) towards the RE.

In other words, oversubscribing is standard practice. Any DSLAM that has more customers provisioned than total uplink capacity could experience congestion, making it completely irrelevant if you have a dedicated link of 50mbps, you won't see those speeds if that node is congested. They are getting better at this, congestion issues are thankfully becoming less common than on legacy networks - but the whole "woohoo, DSL so dedicated pipe" argument pretty much completely falls apart. In reality, the service delivered is just as "shared" as anything else. It's all about how you've provisioned your customers vs the available capacity. Cable is a "shared" line, if you want to think of it that way, and yet I have never ever experienced any congestion issues with my cable connection here. Simply put, this isn't a congested area. A given area could be oversubscribed/congested regardless of last mile tech used. 🙂

I will say that it's definitely true "higher" speeds can be problematic with poor inside wiring, but that doesn't mean you can't have a good stable 50 or 100mbps line. If your inside wiring sucks, then fix it. If you can't.. well then yeah, you're screwed. But IMO, the tech is pretty cool. think about it... not so long ago, it was impossible to have anything faster than 56kbps on that same copper wire. 😉 they keep pushing the envelope as to what is possible over that very same copper wire, which i think is awesome. at some point physics will limit how far that can go , but just being able to provide 100mbps+ over that same wire is already pretty amazing, and we still have quite a long way to go before the average user will ever make use of such capacity.

This isn't always the case. Point in fact, BellSouth had to deploy more remote DSL terminals well outside the nearest Central Office because of the number of SLC96's in the field. The remote DSLAM, sitting beside the SLC96, would co-terminate the copper, but the network-sode of the remote DSLAM was fed by something else (DS3/OC3 or a combination therein {DS3OC3}).

But it should be kept known that BellSouth went beyond SBC in terms of wired-distances in qualifying customers. SBC had a hard sto at 15K feet and BellSouth had a hard at 21K, and soft at 18K. Of course now that SBC bought BellSouth (and changed their name to AT&T) there is no telling what the practice is as I've been told by my wireline peers that no new infrastructure is going on old POTS.

 

[Leyawiin]

I'll never have anything but copper wire in my 70s subdivision in a smaller town. Hope this happens one day.