While many telcos are investing shedloads of cash into fibre based broadband, Alcatel-Lucent thinks that there is more mileage to be squeezed from existing copper connections.
According to Physorg, the outfit is about to release some new gear which will deliver better broadband speeds with standard VDSL2 (stands for Very-high-speed Digital Subscriber Line 2) plus vectoring. Alcatel-Lucent vectoring boosts speeds significantly and can push .broadband speeds of 100 Mbps and beyond.
An article published in Alcatel-Lucent's TechZine, with the catchy headline "Boosting VDSL2 Bit Rates with Vectoring" by Paul Spruyt and Dr.Stefaan Vanhastel, says a shift to fibre will take years to complete while copper is already in the ground.
Dr Vanhastel said that existing resources can be leveraged to help many countries meet their timelines for universal broadband, and service providers can use the copper infrastructure to deliver higher speeds, in less time, with faster return on investment.
Vectoring is "noise-cancellation technology" and this reduces interference between copper lines. It means that VDSL2 lines can approximate their theoretical maximum speed in real-world conditions by eliminating cross talk.
The technology has been in development since 2001, and Alcatel-Lucent has started testing its vectoring technology with carriers already using VDSL2.
Last year it was tested in field trials with service providers including Belgacom, A1 Telekom Austria, Swisscom, Orange, P&T Luxemburg and Türk Telekom. It managed to improve downstream bit rates by 90 percent to 150 percent.
Bring on the fibre.
Moral and optic.
Get community fibre networks up and running in the rural areas and let them take over the cities and give the greedy telcos a run for their money. A bit of competition is all they need to up their game, not more of the same old copper rubbish.
It's a stopgap measure, that allows an increase in service on existing infrastructure without much cost, the idea is to retain customers. This allows a more leisurely, orderly and probably cost effective method to upgrade to fibre, rather than a mad scramble.