[LINK] Aussie Claims Copper Broadband now 200x Faster

[Paul Brooks]

Bernard Robertson-Dunn wrote:
> Aussie Claims Copper Broadband now 200x Faster
> Posted by CmdrTaco on Wednesday October 24, @08:45AM
> from the alarms-going-off-in-brain dept.
> http://slashdot.org/articles/07/10/24/1228200.shtml
>
> 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."
>
Looking through Papandriopoulos's paper, it appears he's developed yet 
another DSM (Dynamic Spectrum Management) method of coordinating 
spectral balancing between adjacent VDSL2 pairs - this is an area of 
very active research within the university and vendor community, and new 
improved algorithms seem to be published every couple of years.

Without taking anything away from the algorithm, the press article has 
got it all wrong. Note that in the paper, the algorithm is looking to 
find optimal ways of balancing transmission power between multiple 
exchange-based services and cabinet-based services - the example being 4 
Mbps VDSL2 services from the exchange, and achieving up to 12 Mbps 
services from the node/cabinet.

Theres no mention of 200 Mbps individual services at all, its all about 
balancing the tradeoffs between multiple services, possibly achieving 
200 Mbps in total amongst all the lines.

In the example simulation in the paper, 8 parallel services (4 lines 
from the exchange and 4 lines from the cabinet) achieves an aggregate 
downstream capacity of around 60 Mbps (average 7.5 Mbps per line) - 
which is better than the current methods that would only achieve about 
42 Mbps in aggregate (average about 5.2 Mbps each), but a long way short 
of the sensational headline.

Paul.