Don't get excited. The new standard will not impact you because you won't get higher rates to your home and you won't suddenly get service where there was none before. At least no time soon.
ADSL2 is what happens when you take a bunch of high-brows and send them off to places like Melbourne, Geneva, Nuremberg, Belgium, and Fiji. This was all during the high-tech boom and now everyone is post-boom and going "what were we thinking?".
The only real strength to the new standard is in the area of line diagnostics and the ability to provide more feedback at the CO into why errors happen.
Backwards compatible? Not! *Some* modems and switches can be software upgraded to support the new standard, but let me tell you, its one hell of a re-write. The compatibility talked about in the article is simply referring to the fact that we don't have to rip up all our phone lines to make this work. Jeez, really?
Higher rates? (ADSL+) Sure, but guess what? That feature has nothing to do with ADSL2 and could have been provided under the umbrella of the existing standards (by extending them). And -- there's no way hardware in existing modems and dslams will support the higher rates. You'll have to wait for new and more expensive hardware for that.
And higher rates for who exactly?
Most of you people who are stuck with 1M DSL don't realize that the current standard supports over 10Mbps downstream and over 1M upstream. Most of the modems and dslams out there today will support up to 8Mbps down but the phone companies usually don't provision it. ADSL2 and ADSL+ will not change this.
The phone companies *will* pick up this solution to get that extra 600ft to increase their user base. This means users getting 1M service, by the way.
Majik
