Aussie Claims Copper Broadband now 200x Faster 208
SkiifGeek writes "Winner of Melbourne University's Chancellor's Prize for Excellence, Dr John Papandriopoulos could soon find himself the focus of a number of networking companies and government agencies interested in wringing more performance from existing network infrastructure. Dr John developed a set of algorithms (US and Aussie patents pending) that reduce the impact of cross talk on data streams sharing the same physical copper line, taking less than a year to achieve the breakthrough. It is claimed that the algorithms can produce up to 200x improvement over existing copper broadband performance (quoted as being between one and 25 mbit/sec), with up to 200 mbit/sec apparently being deliverable. If the mathematical theories are within even an order of magnitude of the actual gains achieved, Dr John's work is likely to have widespread implications for future bandwidth availability across the globe."
200x??? Hardly... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:2, Informative)
John's actually a pretty cool dude (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Metaphor please (Score:2, Informative)
I can bet that it is a reuse of the 3G MAC ideas. 3G uses multipath to improve the signal to noise ratio by filtering the signal versus delayed samples.
Similar thing is possible with crosstalk as long as you handle all wires from the same duct in the same ASIC this usually is not the case. It will simply not work in countries where access to the copper is unbundled. In other places it will require major rewiring in the exchange.
I would hate to extinguish the hopes of all hopefuls which think that the holy grail has arrived. This type of algorithms provide O(LOG N) improvement and there is major improvement only for the first couple of filter buckets. Once you are past that each bucket adds less and less.
Re:Famous scam? (Score:5, Informative)
Details? Here are some links. (Score:5, Informative)
The slashdot summary and linked articles are rather short on details. A little googling located some details:
NOTE: I did a quick skim of it and had not seen any empirical evidence of the advance; seems to be entirely theoretical. I don't mean to lessen his accomplishments, but my experience is that reality usually has unforeseen factors. I certainly hope he IS on to something here!!
(*) I didn't know anyone used the <blink> tag any more. :/
Re:Metaphor please (Score:5, Informative)
I think the premise that this tech is based on 3G multicast is wrong too.
Dr Papandriopoulos paper [ulos.org] suggests the algorithm works by iteratively lowering power, and therefore reducing crosstalk. The reduced crosstalk allows faster protocols like VDSL to be used on the copper that was previously only capable of ADSL2.
Re:Sounds good, but... (Score:5, Informative)
If this means they'll be able to go to ADSL3 at 200Mb/s then I'm all for it.
Re:200x??? Hardly... (Score:1, Informative)
I pay almost the same thing here for FastWeb that I paid for RoadRunner in the US. I used to get 800 kilobytes/sec down and 150 kilobytes/sec up.
Now, I'm stuck behind a giant firewalled NAT without an IP address of my own (although I can rent one for $2/hour!), and get 300 kilobytes/sec down at the best.
Re:Never happen... (Score:3, Informative)
ADSL, though, uses the spectrum above, and needs extra ports on the last phone exchange to your house, since - contrary to standard modem - these signals don't pass through the plain old telephone system. They are kind of injected at the very end.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Famous scam? (Score:2, Informative)
Also Australian. Who would have guessed it's an island full of criminals?
Re:Metaphor please (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Metaphor please (Score:3, Informative)
all discontinuities cause some degree of reflection and it can be a big issue as frequencies get higher. Telco wiring is likely to be full of discontinuities (cross connect panels, different cable types etc).
destroying everything in it's path.
Luckilly it doesn't destroy everything in it's path. It destroys some frequencies attenuates others and boosts others. Oh and it causes some nasty phase effects too. It is a very similar effect to that of multipath distortion in radio systems. The fact that primitive systems like thinnet couldn't cope with this doesn't mean it is impossible to do so.
What has really changed (and continues to change) is the systems we can put on the end of a line. DSP chips get ever more powerfull and with them ever more complex encoding schemes become availible. Systems can split the availible bandwidth into narrow bands an then tailor the encoding perameters to match what is going on in each band.