New Internet speed record blows past Google Fiber


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Bell Labs researchers just broke the broadband Internet speed record.

It is eight times faster than the previous record -- and it was done over copper landlines.

With speeds of 10 gigabits per second, Bell Labs' technology proved to be 1,000 times faster than traditional broadband speeds. It is even 10 times faster than Google (GOOGL, Tech30) Fiber, which offers the fastest broadband available to consumers.

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Bell Labs' parent company, dubbed the new technology "XG-FAST." The company called it a "major breakthrough," giving broadband companies the ability to provide fiber-optic-like speeds over the existing copper landline infrastructure that blankets most of America.

Verizon (VZ, Tech30) FiOS, Google Fiber and others have sought to bring ultra-fast fiber connections directly to people's homes. But the process is extremely expensive, and often involves digging up homeowners' yards. Providing fiber to the majority of American households could cost hundreds of billions -- or even trillions -- of dollars, depending on various estimates.

 XG-FAST could potentially make it unnecessary to bring expensive fiber for ultra-high-speed Internet.

Bell Labs says that XG-FAST can provide up to 10 gigabits per second over a distance of up to 30 meters. So if there is a fiber connection on the street, it would be sufficient to deliver lightning-fast Internet over a home's existing landline wires. For big buildings, fiber could be brought into the basement without needing to route it to individual apartments or offices.

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"which offers the fastest broadband available to consumers."

 

That's the sticking point though. How long till we'll see this new technology filtering through, i'd guess a pretty while.

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"Bell Labs says that XG-FAST can provide up to 10 gigabits per second over a distance of up to 30 meters."

 

Only 30 meters? So much for making use of that "existing copper landline infrastructure that blankets most of America" if it still requires fiber to be any use.

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"Bell Labs says that XG-FAST can provide up to 10 gigabits per second over a distance of up to 30 meters."

 

Only 30 meters? So much for making use of that "existing copper landline infrastructure that blankets most of America" if it still requires fiber to be any use.

Yeah, it's not useful for ISPs. Read somewhere that after 70 meters, the speed decreases to one gigabit. And to achieve the 10 gigabits up to 30 meters, they had to use two lines.

 

Would be only useful for home networking with such speed drops over short distances.

 

edit: Read it over here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/07/bell-labs-pushes-10gbps-over-copper-telephone-lines/

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FYI - For people wondering why this is even making news when there is already 10Gbps CAT6a-7 cables out there.... this is 1Gbps over 1 pair while normal Ethernet is 4 pairs which is what anyone using 1Gbps now uses. Now you can start to add up the possilbiities when all 4 pairs are used in short distances. Most people don't need/use 30meters in a home setting anyways.

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It is eight times faster than the previous record

 

eh? Carriers have been using speeds well above 10gb/s (on fibre) for a long time now, 40gb/s 100gb/s etc.

 

The "real world" difference between 1gb/s (currently used by a number of retail ISPs for consumers) and 10gb/s would be negligable to the average consumer anyway, who isn't going to pay a premium for it.

 

Few content providers are ever going to be able to provide that sort of bandwith to a "consumer", even if they had the equipment to be able to receive it at home.

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What about ping - isn't fiber supposed have lower latency? Throughput is no good by itself.

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The issue is that the copper wires are getting old, and copper is not as abundant as sand/glass used in fiberoptics. The infrastructure is so old it will get more and more costly to maintain, while other countries would be on fiber.

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Have they figured out a way to get more than a 56k connection with dialup yet?

 

The figured that out over the short lived "Shotgun Technology" later morphing into ISDN

oh yeah, and what is the point of that kind of speed when most people are still equipped with either 100mb ethernet weak wifi, let alone how many peoples computers who arent sporting SSDs can actually handle that speed of data transfer??

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The figured that out over the short lived "Shotgun Technology" later morphing into ISDN

oh yeah, and what is the point of that kind of speed when most people are still equipped with either 100mb ethernet weak wifi, let alone how many peoples computers who arent sporting SSDs can actually handle that speed of data transfer??

Shotgunning was  dubbed the poor man's ISDN, ISDN didn't evolve from it.

 

 

ISDN whitepapers date back to 1988, well before shotgunning 56k modems.

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...

XG-FAST could potentially make it unnecessary to bring expensive fiber for ultra-high-speed Internet.

Bell Labs says that XG-FAST can provide up to 10 gigabits per second over a distance of up to 30 meters.

...

I especially like how these two sentences are back to back.

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What about ping - isn't fiber supposed have lower latency? Throughput is no good by itself.

And copper also has big issues with speed degrading over distance.

 

10 gbit speeds over 30 meters is pretty meh... definitely not something that could challenge fiber-to-the-home services like google fiber.

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What about ping - isn't fiber supposed have lower latency? Throughput is no good by itself.

Fibre has lower latency than Copper, but the underlying connection isn't the biggest problem, that's down to routers.

Before I switched to OpenWRT (with codel), the firmware on my router could add something like 1s of latency when congested. And you don't have any control over the routers between you and your destination.

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Fibre has lower latency than Copper, but the underlying connection isn't the biggest problem, that's down to routers.

Before I switched to OpenWRT (with codel), the firmware on my router could add something like 1s of latency when congested. And you don't have any control over the routers between you and your destination.

As a gamer who complains all the time about dirty foreigners running the experience with high latency, I would rather invest in fiber nonetheless.
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Bell Labs researchers just broke the broadband Internet speed record.

It is eight times faster than the previous record -- and it was done over copper landlines.

With speeds of 10 gigabits per second, Bell Labs' technology proved to be 1,000 times faster than traditional broadband speeds. It is even 10 times faster than Google (GOOGL, Tech30) Fiber, which offers the fastest broadband available to consumers.

Alcatel-Lucent (ALU), Bell Labs' parent company, dubbed the new technology "XG-FAST." The company called it a "major breakthrough," giving broadband companies the ability to provide fiber-optic-like speeds over the existing copper landline infrastructure that blankets most of America.

Verizon (VZ, Tech30) FiOS, Google Fiber and others have sought to bring ultra-fast fiber connections directly to people's homes. But the process is extremely expensive, and often involves digging up homeowners' yards. Providing fiber to the majority of American households could cost hundreds of billions -- or even trillions -- of dollars, depending on various estimates.

 XG-FAST could potentially make it unnecessary to bring expensive fiber for ultra-high-speed Internet.

Bell Labs says that XG-FAST can provide up to 10 gigabits per second over a distance of up to 30 meters. So if there is a fiber connection on the street, it would be sufficient to deliver lightning-fast Internet over a home's existing landline wires. For big buildings, fiber could be brought into the basement without needing to route it to individual apartments or offices.

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97.5 Feet is not that long. the lot I live on has 2 houses and the back house is over 100 Feet back. So no 10GB for the back house if they want the service.

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Fibre has lower latency than Copper, but the underlying connection isn't the biggest problem, that's down to routers.

Before I switched to OpenWRT (with codel), the firmware on my router could add something like 1s of latency when congested. And you don't have any control over the routers between you and your destination.

 

Bit of a difference between a SoHo router that's routing in Software on a Generic CPU (That said some of the newer ones do it in hardware) and a Carrier grade router that will be routing using ASICS built speifically to route packets at high speed.

 

That and most carriers would upgrade their equipment /links long before that became a problem, generally it's not good for bussness to let your network become so congested that customers start seeing a massive degridation in latency/performance.

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Yeah, the stuff us end users get is basically bottom of the barrel in quality, but even the high end stuff still imposes a slight amount of latency (Regenerating IPv4 checksums, matching a route, copying from one NIC to another, etc.)

There isn't one single cause of latency (ignoring the physical limits), it's a bunch of small issues that add a slight amount, which adds up.

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And the other news the data cap is 100 GB, at least if this ever get offered in Canada and then just pay $0.50 per MB for over use.

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