DSL to be stretched by DSM - noise reduction on lines

Years ago, I attended the superb Marconi Awards, as guest of Prof. Eli Noam - whose 25th anniversary party for his CITI centre at Columbia was last weekend - lets have 25 more!!!

The discussion was a little too technical for this lawyer, but the Lifetime Award went to Gordon Moore - Moore's Law predictor and all-round "mensch".

The annual award went to the French mathematician inventors of Turbo Codes - which enable 3G data over wireless. There was much discussion of Shanon's Law too.

Shannon's Law lurked in the back of my brain for 3 years - and now back in the front as a Stanford prof has shown how to DOUBLE DSL throughput per line on a shared exchange. He has 14million lines installed, with Sky in the UK going public about it (thanks to Dave Burstein for this).

So rejoice in the midst of recession - we can squeeze a hell of a lot more out of DSL before we have to invest in fibre in, oh, about 2025...and BT says peered backhaul is cheap as chips so we can watch iPlayer to our hearts' content.

Yes we can...