MSNBC has an excellent interactive chart that explains what will happen over next the decades to the 210,000,000 U.S. gallons of oil that British Petroleum (BP) spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during 2010.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Thanks to the FCC‘s 100 squared plan for 100 million U.S. homes to have affordable access to download speeds of at least 100 Mbps and real upload speeds of at least 50 Mbps there, seems to be some renewed interest in copper. Both Bell Lab and AT&T have announced experiments to extend the useful life of copper infrastructure.
According to Broadband Reports, Bell Labs, Alcatel-Lucent’s research arm has achieved speeds of 800 Mbps using a pair of traditional DSL lines. Reuters says that AT&T is going to trial 80 Mbps DSL this month. Broadband Reports says that Alcatel-Lucent (ALU) achieved the speeds during lab tests by combining three technologies.
First, AlcaLu uses a phantom circuit–a technique developed in 1886 to create virtual analog phone lines. The firm uses a second, supplementary pair of wires to create a third “phantom” channel to supplement the two physical wires common with DSL.
In “phantom mode,” a digital signal is normally transmitted through two wires twisted together–one positive and the other negative. John J. Carty electrical engineer, telephony pioneer, and future president of ATT realized that it is possible to send a third signal on top of four wires separated into two twisted pairs. The negative half of this “phantom” connection is sent down one twisted pair (which is already carrying a conventional signal), and the positive half down is sent down another twisted pair. At the destination, analog processors are used to extract all three signals–two real and one “phantom”–from the two pairs.
The second component is bonding which treats multiple lines as if they were a single cable to increase the speed of DSL broadband connections by a multiple almost equal to the number of cables involved. Finally vectoring is used on the third channel for error correction to cancel noise or “crosstalk” between adjacent copper wire pairs.
Stefaan Vanhastel, Director Product Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent Wireline Networks told Broadband Reports that “by using vectoring, which is a noise-canceling technology to eliminate noise” they can improve the performance of the copper lines. The lab tests showed that the technology is capable of offering 100 Mbps over 1,000 meters (3,820 feet). Alcatel-Lucent doesn’t believe it will roll out the combination technology until after 2011.
Despite the focus on wireless broadband over at AT&T (T) they are trying to push the boundaries of its existing wireline copper plant to deliver broadband services. According to Reuters, beginning this month, AT&T is going to trial 80 Mbps DSL. This will surpass its top 24 Mbps speed. AT&T’s Seth Bloom told Broadband Reports the trial will look at “pair bonding, vectoring, (and) spectrum management,” which “can be done very inexpensively and on a per-user basis.” AT&T’s experiment will be limited by the quality of existing copper facilities and the distance the end-user is from either the CO or the remote terminal (RT) cabinet The U-verse end-user won’t get all that bandwidth because it also has to carry bandwidth-hungry HDTV signals.
An interesting wrinkle in AT&T’s 80 Mbps test is that Alcatel-Lucent, which is demonstrating 300 Mbps supplies the VDSL2 access gear to AT&T but hasn’t yet shipped access gear that can bond VDSL2 because CPE vendors haven’t done so, an official said. “We will have VDSL2 bonding-ready equipment going into production soon, and we will add the bonding software to the equipment once the CPE for VDSL2 bonding is available.” according to ConnectedPlanet.
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Clearly, the incumbent telcos are feeling the pressure from the cablecos DOCSIS 3.0 rollouts. The Alcatel-Lucent 300 Mbps VDSL2 technology should be scooped up by incumbent telcos who need to squeeze a couple more years out of their thousands of miles of copper wireline last mile and keep a hand in the FCC’s 100 Mbps broadband plan.
In the enterprise space, the improved DSL technology may cut into the optical cable business by reducing the long-term cost-effective argument for private fiber. That is of course if you can get the service. All of the “improved DSL” services need more copper pairs, which may not be available. This of course has to be balanced against increasing your exposure to AT&T.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) has filed suit in the U.S. District Court in Texas again according to an article on :Rethink Wireless. The Aussies have slapped AT&T, (T) T-Mobile, and Verizon (VZ), with patent lawsuits. The Australian science agency, emboldened by its settlements over Wi-Fi patents with Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft is now going after U.S. retailers.
According to the article, patent trolling is a lucrative business, for CSIRO. In 2009 CSIRO brought in about $205m in royalties largely because of a massive out-of-court settlement. CSIRO made a deal with 14 vendors including Microsoft, Intel, Dell, Toshiba, and HP (which I wrote about here). According to CSIRO’s annual report, this settlement helped turn its budgeted deficit of $34.2M into a profit of $122M. The CSIRO now claims 161 active patent licensees. Many licensees are connected to the patent issued in 1996, which CSIRO says includes all 802.11 Wi-Fi products.
In the article, Nigel Poole, executive director in charge of commercialization at CSIRO says this is a deliberate plan. “There’s a legal strategy here that has been thought through very carefully and to a layperson, it looks like a pincer movement. You’ve got court action CSIRO says its proceeds from royalties are invested in new research, and presumably, that could lead to new patents and licensing claims.”
Broadcom and Atheros have counter-sued CSIRO on the behalf of the Wi-Fi industry to have the patent declared invalid.
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Seems the Australians have gotten pretty good at patent trolling. Maybe they can build their entire broadband infrastructure on the backs of U.S. consumers. Too bad the U.S. government didn’t think of this first.
This should be a big test for AT&T. AT&T is testing Wi-Fi data offload for smartphone users by creating a giant pilot Wi-Fi hot zone in New York City’s Times Square. The pilot will offer its mobile broadband customers free access. It is widely believed that after the pilot AT&T may deploy more hot zones in other areas across the country.
Many of AT&T’s smartphones support auto-authentication at AT&T Wi-Fi Hot Spots. The automation makes it seamless for subscribers to connect to its 21,000 hot spots. AT&T’s Ralph de la Vega has indicated in the past that offloading data traffic onto Wi-Fi would play a large role in curbing its overwhelming data growth.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
If it Was My Home make it easy to understand the impact of the disastrous 2010 British Petroleum (BP) oil spill that dumped 210,000,000 U.S. gallons of crude oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Enter your location, and the site will overly the oil spill on top of a Google Map.
Thanks to the folks at Flowing Data for digging this one up.
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Thanks to Professor Steve Hsu at the University of Oregon for finding the ad ….
… and no thanks to British Petroleum for this
Photo: Boston Globe
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
