Broadband Bytes for 2014-12-05

4 Responses to Broadband Bytes for 2014-12-05

1. charlesH says:

   December 6, 2014 at 8:57 pm

   “Gigabit DSL (with a fiber boost) to hit market next year”

   “The new standard is “designed to deliver access speeds of up to 1Gbps over existing telephone wires,” the ITU said. “Within 400 meters of a distribution point, G.fast provides fiber-like speeds matched with the customer self-installation of DSL, resulting in cost-savings for service providers and improved customer experience.”

   “G.fast operates on higher frequencies than today’s DSL, requiring shorter transmission distances, so the gigabit speeds won’t be available at the outer range of that 400 meters. Within 250 meters, G.fast speeds top out at 150Mbps, according to the ITU. In the US, successful G.fast deployments would probably require a fiber expansion, though without the expensive step of bringing fiber into each home. AT&T’s current fiber-to-the-node deployments place fiber about 600 to 900 meters from homes.”

   “But early demonstrations suggest that G.fast has great promise. Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs developed its own extension of G.fast called XG.FAST and said it could hit 10Gbps over 30 meters of copper and 1Gbps over 70 meters of copper. BT is testing service that hits nearly 800Mbps, and Broadcom in October previewed chips for back-end systems and consumer gateways that can push up to a gigabit per second.”

   I sure would like to see Centurylink deploy this and get back in the game as a competitor to Comcast.

   Reply
   • Jesse says:

     December 8, 2014 at 8:41 am

     There’s a few problems with that, though.

     The big one is that CenturyLink doesn’t have a lot of money. That’s why despite their press releases about fiber to the home, they only really search a few thousand households. What money they do have is going into business fiber, hosting services, and stuff like that, services with nice, big margins.

     The other problem is the VERY limited range of G.fast. 70m means a node can hit, what, maybe a dozen homes? That’s an awful lot of fiber. By that point, you might as well build it to the house.

     Honestly, I don’t think CenturyLink wants to be in the residential service market anymore. It’s a low-margin environment that they’re all to happy to abandon to cable companies. (See: http://www.freeutopia.org/2014/02/26/not-just-copper-is-centurylink-slowly-withdrawing-from-the-residential-wireline-market-entirely/). I wouldn’t count on them to ramp up except in areas where there’s a lot of money at stake.

     Reply
     • Greg says:

       December 9, 2014 at 12:39 am

       I agree. Century Link keeps sending me advertisements to my home, about their blazing fast speeds, but I still can’t get anything more than 7Mbit. They also want the same $65/mo for the service, but they are throwing in a phone line for that price…As a side note, Comcast must be fearing this Macquarie deal, as they just increased my bandwidth again (to 60 Mbit). Sadly, my upload is still 8 Mbit during peak hours, and 10 on off-peak hours.

       Reply
       • Mike says:

         December 9, 2014 at 2:54 am

         It would be nice if CenturyLink would stop spending so much on advertising. then they might have more money to spend on actually expanding their network! )I know, different budget categories and stuff..

         Reply