Aussie Claims Copper Broadband now 200x Faster

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."

200 mbit/sec

[FatAlb3rt]

m != M ...or is it just me? MB and Mb...let's use them correctly. [/rant]

Across the globe == developed nations

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The growing availability of wireless technology makes the wired world an interesting evolutionary dead end. The speeds that are described are impressive (if you consider only 4x the speed of 802.11g impressive), but the future is not in copper wires. The only technology that has any future these days is wireless.

So thanks, Mr. Aussie guy. You've breathed some life into the geriatric hobbling of copper. I hope you get a big payout, because you've basically done the equivalent of developing the world's fastest webserver running on Windows 95.

In other news...

[EveryNickIsTaken]

PhD student advertises thesis on slashdot! News at 11.

Realism...

[Danathar]

"Dr John's work is likely to have widespread implications for future bandwidth availability across the globe."

Given what I've seen in the past and knowing how greedy telecommunications companies are, I doubt the above statement.

Re:Sounds good, but...

[CastrTroy]

It could on cost. Using fiber in many areas requires that you lay new lines. Even if it's not quite as fast as copper, or has a little more latency (light is faster than electrical signals), you could probably make quite a bit of money since there's a much smaller investment.

Re:Obligatory ...

[smilindog2000]

Not true... information theory shows that a fractional bit is a probability of transmitting the desired bit correctly. A true source of random noise generates no bits, but a highly noisy channel transmits fractional bits per noisy bit sent. Fractional bits are well-founded mathematically.

Re:The limit has been exceeded....

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only true if the bandwidth is limited to 3 kHz, as it is in voice circuits.

Plug a 3 kHz bandwidth and about 35 dB signal-to-noise ratio into the formula for channel capacity and you get about 35,000 bits per second. This is consistent with the last generation of analog modems (33.6 kb/s).

Now if the bandwidth is not artificially limited (remove transformers, filters, bridged taps, etc.) the theoretical capacity will increase by a large amount.

Re:Metaphor please

[Anonymous Coward]

At first I thought he was pulling everyone's leg, but then I realized what he was getting at. Basically, he believes that this new invention uses signal noise as error correction. i.e. If one wire is wirelessly pushing its signal on to another wire (a phenomenon known as crosstalk [wikipedia.org]), a microprocessor could use the noise from the crosstalk to do error correction on original signal. In that way you end up with a matrix of signals that are interrelated across a bundle of wires as opposed to each wire carrying a distinct signal. This allows faster communications since you can accept a higher error rate due to the ability of the microprocessor to infer the correct value of the transmitted bit.

The only catch is that crosstalk is considered bad. Wires are often isolated in attempts to reduce or eliminate the problem. Furthermore, the signals are rarely processed by the same microprocessor, but are instead handled in parallel. Which means that we need a new infrastructure in order to support this new idea. (Assuming, of course, that the original poster is correct in his "guess" as to how this works. TFA is pretty light on details.)

That's the way I understood him, anyway.

(Awesome captcha: Speakers!)

Re:Metaphor please

[Anonymous Coward]

Psst! Hey, bud! That's not the article you're quoting. That's an AC who was trying to put your explanation into layman's terms. In effect, you're setting up a strawman and knocking it down.

Re:Metaphor please

[wsanders]

Summary: You have to do a bunch of math, like, real fast, and it might not even work if all the signals don't go through the same thingy.

Re:Metaphor please

[unitron]

Summary: You have to do a bunch of math, like, real fast, and it might not even work if all the signals don't go through the same thingy.

If I hadn't already posted to this story I'd be trying right now to figure out how to use my two remaining mod points to mod you both funny and insightful.