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Friday, April 23, 2010

What if copper could provide the answer? VDSL2

Enough of the European law and its willful misinterpretation in Washington - Beltway tangoing...
Here's an interesting proposition - Alcatel-Lucent is close to standardization of their VDSL2 specification, using vectoring and virtual bonding to squeeze up to 100Mb/s at 1km out of 2 copper pairs in lab conditions.
So maybe we can get up to 50Mb/s realistically from VDSL in semi-urban areas - that is FTTC which is cheapish to develop.
As I have been ploughing through Odlyzko's epic Railway Mania manuscript, which explains how much 1830s and 1840-45 railway development eventually made money for its investors, and that the entire 1825-50 railways boom entirely transformed first England (it was almost entirely concentrated there) and then the world, it has become clear that the 'beautiful illusion' that helped drive that investment by the 1850s into the valleys and mountains of England will not be reproduced by regulated monopolies today. So maybe VDSL2 will at least bridge some of the gap that irrationally exuberant markets are not noticeably keen to jump into!

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