Dutch ISP Demos Symmetric 100Mbps DOCSIS3 159
Mark.JUK writes "CAI Harderwijk, a DOCSIS 3.0 based Cable Modem operator in the Netherlands, has apparently managed to achieve a world first by demonstrating symmetric broadband internet access speeds of 100Mbps. The tiny Dutch operator is home to just over 16000 customers and was already planning a switch onto Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) technology, although this may now be delayed. The test itself is important because cable operators are still, perhaps unfairly, seen by some as being inferior to fully fibre optic-based broadband services. In reality, cable operators are, for the most part, continuing to keep pace."
Elementary (Score:3, Funny)
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But using the existing copper is cheaper, because it eliminates the need to hire millions of men to dig ditches to lay fiber.
I'm also wondering why they offered 100/100 internet. Since I don't rarely need to upload anything, I'd rather have 190/10 internet so I have a fast enough pipe to grab HD video across 4 or 5 sets.
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there's no point in digging, as that's already been done, and copper been pulled through;
time to remove the old copper, recycle it, and pull fiber in it's stead.
no need to hire millions...
should take about a year for your medium-sized city
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>>>copper been pulled through;
Pulled through what? Almost all of it is just bare cable under the dirt.
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>>>time to remove the old copper, recycle it, and pull fiber in it's stead. no need to hire millions...
Size of United States: 3,537,441 square miles
Number of Homes: 110 million units
Miles of Copper connecting these homes: 2 billion miles (telephone)
So yeah I think you WILL need millions of men to dig the copper out of the ground and then replace it with buried fiber, especially if you
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That's really how it happens at your place? At least in some (that I'm sure of) parts of the EU, I guess also Netherlands, it's basically a pipe through which stuff can be...wait for it...pulled through.
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The main problem is their help desks are generally extremely bad, especially when it comes to network issues they are close to clueless.
The small company in the article must be one of the exceptions to this established rule.
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Probably because it eliminates the biggest downside to cable - that uploading kills the network. All the cable companies hates BitTorrent because uploads kill the network - once the upstream channel is flooded, everyone's service suffers. Netflix, YouTube, and anything downstream-heavy they don't care - there's pi
burst (Score:2)
And yet no provider is going to stand for more than a couple of people actually operating at that speed more than a few hours a month. Lines are congested; transit isn't free. Internet access is being mis-sold just like everything else today: on the basis of a few upfront figures but ignoring the ongoing experience.
(Only yesterday I was confirming once again that there is no point upgrading my 10-year-old printer and CRT, while another dead mid-range LCD gets dismantled for parts after five years of life.)
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Err, not everyone lives in countries with no consumer rights.
I can go at 40-50mbit all day both directions and not a word from my ISP (capped by my inferior linksys router, actual line speed is 60mbit) - what they have realised around here is most people wont be going "balls-out" all day on their connection, there is simply a maximum for how much information any given pira.. err user can crave.
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So are you confirming or disagreeing with what I said? I'm also on one of the few "Unlimited" ISPs in the country which, to everyone's knowledge, has never (for those on its premium brand) kicked someone off for excessive usage, nor does it shape traffic.
This is only possible, as staff have suggested, because pretty much everyone either transfers an insignificant amount of data or practices restraint. If even a sizeable minority were to take unrestrained advantage of the Internet's wealth of multimedia reso
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This is only possible, as staff have suggested, because pretty much everyone either transfers an insignificant amount of data or practices restraint. If even a sizeable minority were to take unrestrained advantage of the Internet's wealth of multimedia resources, as has been increasingly happening with mainstream ISPs, the ISPs end up introducing fair usage policy/caps/throttling/traffic management (sometimes not revealing this last until a few technically minded people demonstrate it).
If the norm for what is "normal" to use on an unlimited line changes, then the company should change their oversubscription, not add more (*) conditions. This whole thing is created by having one product, even though we know the profitability varies greatly and trying to "clamp" it so the unprofitable ones can't actually use it as advertised. If you want a "Value" subscription that isn't like the "Unlimited" subscription, then go for it.
They've tried that here, everyone went for the cap-free subscriptions s
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i once pushed them on the contention ratio being 1:1 and was informed that it was a "virtual 1:1 contention ratio" , peforms well enough as i am close to the exchange(400 meters by wire)
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The problem with 100Mb/s is that it quite often just moves the bottleneck elsewhere. A few years ago, I had a machine on campus connected to a GigE network which linked to a 34Gb/s Internet connection. When connecting to things on ja.net, I could download so fast that the bottleneck was my disk - if you watched memory usage, it would quickly shoot to 100% as the disk cache filled up and then the download speed would start to drop. For pretty much everything else, there was no noticeable difference betwee
Australian NBN (Score:2)
This is the technology the Australian Coalition party is suggesting is equivalent/good enough compared to FTTH. If this is the first live deployment of it, I would want to know distances involved to get these speeds, and how many bonded pairs are required - and if these pairs are installed in Australian DOCSIS setups.
Also, no-one seems to feel that a symmetrical connection is valuable, focus is on download speed and upload speed a footnote. As a business operator with off-site backups, as well as transferri
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IMHO, upload is becoming increasingly important. More and more people are stuffing things onto cloud drives, youtube's, video calls, etc.
As for the distance in Netherlands: where I lived the TV cable divider was rarely more than 500m away. Much better than copper, which I was usually 4-6km away from.
Inferior to fiber (Score:4, Informative)
The test itself is important because cable operators are still, perhaps unfairly, seen by some as being inferior to fully fibre optic-based broadband services
Of course cable *is* (technologically) inferior to fiber. There's no doubt about it. 100Mbps would be trivial on fiber, heck 1Gbps would be trivial on fiber. The only advantage of cable is that it's already there, whereas for FTTH the vast majority of households will have to wait for a long time until they are connected.
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No, there is another one. For time being, POE works way better on copper than on fibre.
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No, there is another one. For time being, POE works way better on copper than on fibre.
How many cable ISPs provide POE? How many DSL ISPs do so for that matter? Right. None. So that point is irrelevant in this discussion.
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unless you have to power a repeater on the long line ... of course "longer line" is different for fiber than cable, but still, it might be necessary.
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Perhaps not as inferior as you think (Score:2)
It is true, that fiber has more theoretical bandwidth. Light operates up in the 100s of THz range. However making use of all that potential bandwidth isn't as easy as one might hope, particularly in a passive network. Remember that FTTH is NOT fiber like you find in a data center. It is not a point-to-point, active network. It is a passive optical network. That is a point-to-multipoint setup where you have multiple people connected using passive optical splitters and you are sharing bandwidth.
Well this impl
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Of course cable *is* (technologically) inferior to fiber. There's no doubt about it. 100Mbps would be trivial on fiber, heck 1Gbps would be trivial on fiber.
Correction: 1Gbps is trivial on fiber.
In France the number one ISP, Orange [generation-nt.com], is deploying fiber using the G-PON [wikipedia.org] technology for residential service. This means 2Gbps downstream and 1Gbps upstream. Of course they don't give you access the the full bandwidth, mostly for commercial reasons. However the point is that the 'optical modem' they send you already communicates at gigabit speeds while being cheap enough to be deployed on a large scale.
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Cable IS Superior (Score:2)
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8 days to download movies (Score:3, Interesting)
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For one movie in reasonable quality, you need 1GB.
I'm not so sure about that, with current state-of-the-art compression we're still looking at 720p movies weighing in at 2 GiB for decent quality. And for a lot of movies it makes a lot more sense to aim for 4 GiB rather than compromising quality just to save a little bandwidth.
If you're going with 1080p you can probably expect an average file size of 5 GiB per movie or so if you want reasonable quality. That's more like 25 TiB with 50 * 100 movies (although I find that number suspiciously high, I'm usually
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Not everyone downloads to keep. Streaming is where things are currently moving, and people are going to want consistent, high performance for that. What if I want to stream and watch a different movie than the kids or the wife? That doubles the bandwidth right there.
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Anything less than 10GB for a movie looks like CRAP.
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What makes you think I only watch single sided DVDs? And what makes you think that I am the least bit impressed by standard definition DVDs?
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If you think an average standard-definition DVD "looks like CRAP", particularly in the context of online streaming,
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With what codec? The inefficient MPEG1? The better, but still not that great MPEG2? Or one of the newer MPEG4 codecs?
MPEG2 generally did 480p (720x480p, stretched to fit) in 3-5Mbps. h.264 can do 720p easily in 3-6Mbps and 1080p would be in the 4-8Mbps range (maybe as high as 10-12Mbps for really busy features).
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Mmmm... 720p clips in h.264 run anywhere between 1.5Mbps (tends to end up rather blocky) and as high as 7.5Mbps for more complicated clips. All depends on scene detail, how clean the source is, whether you have a lot of random elements in the background (blowing trees, ocean/lake water with lots of reflections). The middle of the range tends to be in the 3.0-4.5Mbps range for 720p and about double that for 1080p.
So, for a 2 hour film, 1.5Mbps is about
Fibre good because of less obvious reasons (Score:3, Interesting)
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I'm in the UK. There are stories every other week about theft of metals like railway lines and signalling, telephone cabling, even manhole covers etc. for sale on the black market. It costs the companies involved millions each year and they have special insurance for it. This is part of the reason that BT uses as much fibre as they can now and are pushing FTTH or FTTC.
I was stunned to see copper guttering on the outside of buildings when I visited Europe recently. There is no way that something like tha
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No, but it's the same as me saying that I'm in the US and I visited Northern America recently, or I'm in China and I visited Asia recently. Europe is a continent, the US is not (despite its ambitions).
(
That said, it's obviously implied to mean "elsewhere in Europe", or "Mainland Europe". And surveys shows that most English (UK, but that's another geography lesson) people don't class themselves as European. How would you like it if we referred to the US using the same word as we do for Canada and thus did
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How would you like it if we referred to the US using the same word as we do for Canada and thus didn't distinguish between the two of you?
A bit like using (also by its citizens) one of the most standard descriptions when referring only to the US, "America"/"American"?
And you know, if Iceland is European...
and in America... (Score:2)
What planet are you on? (Score:2)
Keep pace with who? Another monopoly I am unware of? I'm pretty sure my ISP would deny the existence of DOCSIS 3 if I asked them about it, let alone this strange thing you call symmetry.
Fixed IP addresses? (Score:5, Informative)
Otherwise, CAI Harderwijk now have a thoroughly modern infrastructure. For instance, they can remotely control the availability of their services to individual clients. This is as opposed to UPC (the only available cable ISP in and around Amsterdam), who still have to arrange their client connections locally and manually. The latter method has the added disadvantage that a small percentage of cable customers will always enjoy services for which they do not pay -- something that is impossible to avoid due to the scale and the administration involved. CAI Harderwijk does not have this problem; an advantage that they can now pass on to their ISP customers.
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Most ISPs around the world are starting to keep fixed IP addresses as an "added extra". It's nothing to do with cable/DSL/fiber.
There's two good reasons: people will pay more for fixed IP addresses and IPv4 addresses are starting to get expensive because they're running out (dynamic IP addresses can let you cram 10%--50% more users into the same address space).
Get a dynamic name instead -- you don't want to enter a number anyway.
Re:So some Dutch people now have 100Mbps connectio (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Distance? (Score:5, Informative)
It's not DSL, it's cable, so using coax cables instead of telephone lines. I don't know what that means for speed vs. distance though. For your information: "CAI" is Dutch for "central antenna installation". Those cables have been laid to deliver TV signals.
Secondly "laying FTTH" of course is nice, but it's also mighty expensive and disruptive to break open all the streets and dig trenches to everyone's home. These CAI cables are there already, so why not continue to use them? Just like what DSL is basically doing with telephone lines.
When building new homes of course nowadays they should put an optical fibre in the trenches that they dig already for telephone, cable TV, water pipes, power lines, etc. Then it's a relative cheap upgrade. But for existing homes this is definitely the cheaper option.
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The main difference between DSL and DOCSIS cable is that DSL is your personal connection. No one is sharing it. DOCSIS cable line is shared between those on the same line, so if you have active warez people in your neighbourhood or someone hosting an active server of some kind, expect much lower speeds and higher latency then advertised.
Second difference, which has been largely negated lately is latency. DSL offers slightly lower latency by advantage of design.
Tradeoff is that DSL only uses one really shitt
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Latency yes... that was (is?) an issue... I recall from 10, 15 years ago when ADSL was no more than about 1 Mbit, cable would blast it away at about 5 Mbit. Down that is; up has always been a fraction of that only.
Me downloading stuff was happy about the speed compared to ADSL lines.
Gamers however complained cable is too slow - they care more about latency than raw throughput.
And indeed cable is a shared medium but I never really had a problem with that. May be luck.
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>>>I recall from 10, 15 years ago when ADSL was no more than about 1 Mbit,
Yeah well ADSL is now 100 Mbit/s with a just-released 200 Mbit/s standard being rolled out. Unfortunately you have to live in Korea or Japan to get it. :-| Still the technology exists to enable DSL to match Cable speeds, and it's a dedicated phone line not a shared neighborhood coax cable, so the user gets what is advertised.
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Not all cable is a shared medium. Depends on the network. Some, like the old StjärnTV/Chello installations in Sweden, use a star topology rather than ring/loop.
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Cable users are, in practice, experiencing higher bandwidth than DSL users. The assumption from the DSL camp is that sharing closer to home is a downside for the end user, but the evidence seems to suggest otherwise..
Could it be that Cable networks are forced to structure themselves better due to their nature? That th
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The thing is with cable with 10 people on it, if 9 of them are downloading, fat chance of you checking your email.
With ADSL, the backhaul is more than likely far faster than the individual connections added together, so no speed degration for anyone.
Its all about where the bottleneck is, and 99% of cases its the bit closest to the users.
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Why ? Can you not design a concentrator that shapes traffic intelligently, based on MAC addresses ? TCP will bring itself down usually.
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You seem to be assuming that there's no congestion control on the cable. In practice, if 9 people are downloading and you try to get your email then they will all be throttled back a tiny bit, won't notice, and you'll think your connection is fine. Most cable ISPs (outside the USA) resegment if a part of their network is being congested.
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The thing is with cable with 10 people on it, if 9 of them are downloading, fat chance of you checking your email.
Got any citations for this?
You seem to think that if the provider offers 10Mbit, that thats all the cable line will carry, that 2 people downloading only get 5Mbit each..
Wrong.
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This is why its hard to believe the grandparents claim that 9 users downloading at the same time can prevent you from getting your email.
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Wrong, because even DOCSIS 2.0 supports 38 megabits/second. However, users are NEVER sold this full amount. They're sold a much lower cap.
For example, my Time Warner service is capped at 5 megabits/second. (The modem itself enforces this cap, probably modern headends double-check to make sure the modem has not been tampered with.) So it takes nearly 8 simultaneous full-downstream users before anyone sees evidence that their line is shared. For upstream, I have a cap of 512 kbps if I recall correctly. T
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DOCSIS 2.0 supports 30Mb/s upstream PER CHANNEL, and either 42 or 55Mb/s downstream PER CHANNEL. The channels aren't shared between users that I know of.
For example, my Comcast is capped at 16Mb/s (my choice, they also offer 25, 30 and 50Mb service), and my upstream will peak at 30Mb/s in short bursts (First 10MB or so) then settle back to 10Mb/s. A year ago I had completely uncapped service and was able to download at the full 42Mb/s rate (although I could swear it was 52-55Mb/s), and I saturated the lin
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Channels are shared between users - 1.0/1.1 used TDMA, 2.0/3.0 use either TDMA or S-CDMA.
However, as I mentioned in my post, as user count goes up, providers can throw more channels at the problem.
e.g. if you wanted to give 5 Mbps without any potential for slowdown within the cable network (not counting overselling of your backhaul), you could assign 7 users per channel. 8 users per channel would have a slight bit of sharing, but negligible.
DOCSIS 3.0 supports bonding of multiple channels.
My guess is that
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I see. We are probably just very lucky out here then that Comcast isn't overselling their local capacity by enough to affect us.
BTW, I do believe that I swapped out my modem for a DOCSIS 3.0 one not too long ago as I think they said that was required for a 50Mb/s connect. I just didn't have to swap it back to the older modem when I downgraded back to 16Mb/s.
Currently where I am, they consider 16Mb/s down, 5Mb/s up as the entry level. Noone has lower than that. All older connections got bumped up to that
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The thing is with cable with 10 people on it, if 9 of them are downloading, fat chance of you checking your email. With ADSL, the backhaul is more than likely far faster than the individual connections added together, so no speed degration for anyone.
DOCSIS 3.0 is very different from ethernet - most importantly it's strictly time multiplexed. And slice allocation is such that you will be able to read your email just fine while your neighbors download and/or upload. There is no collision domain. So while it's "shared" it's not a free-for-all where the one with the most TCP connections wins. Fire up more connections and they just compete for your existing allocation. You're the only one who won't be able to check your email.
The same basic metric appl
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>>>DSL proponents like to point out the shared nature of cable, but forget that all internet connections get shared at some point
If the DSLAM is being fed with a 10 Gbit/s fiber line, then no, there won't be any slowdown even if all your DSL neighbors decide to bittorrent at the same time. A coaxial cable can carry about 5 Gbit/s... minus about 2400 Mbit/s for television and on-demand channels... leaving just ~2.5 Gbit/s for your neighborhood. i.e. Less bandwidth.
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If the DSLAM is being fed with a 10 Gbit/s fiber line, then no, there won't be any slowdown even if all your DSL neighbors decide to bittorrent at the same time.
You begin with an If.... and then limit the equation to only your neighbors.... and only want to follow the link back to the DSLAM, ignoring the BRAS that many DSLAMS converge on.
To put this as succinctly as possible. The BRAS needs to be able to handle every user of every DSLAM it connects to. We are talking about massive areas of coverage all going to a single point.
Evidence of the problem is that DSL users complain about prime time bandwidth just as much as Cable users. It doesnt mean anything that
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Interesting.
(1) I've never experienced any kind of slowdown on my DSL line, whereas I have seen it on my neighbors' cable lines. My DSL runs at peak speed all the time.
(2) "bras" is a most excellent name. ;-)
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The main difference between DSL and DOCSIS cable is that DSL is your personal connection. No one is sharing it. DOCSIS cable line is shared between those on the same line, so if you have active warez people in your neighbourhood or someone hosting an active server of some kind, expect much lower speeds and higher latency then advertised.
Second difference, which has been largely negated lately is latency. DSL offers slightly lower latency by advantage of design.
Tradeoff is that DSL only uses one really shitty quality copper pair, that limits distance and maximum speed far more severely then cable's coaxial. This is exacerbated by the fact that many phone lines are from times before CAT3 home cabling, which is a realistic requirement to reach even ADSL2 level of speeds, causing end user speeds to be below 10mbps even over 24mbps ADSL2+ connection.
This is VERY wrong.
#1. DSL is shared just like cable, just at a slightly different point. Several DSL customers connect to the same node and from there, they are given times slices. example. My brother has aDSL, he has ~20 people on his local node and he had an 80ms ping to his first hop. Yes, his ISP that is just down the road is an 80ms jump. If he had this dedicated connection you talked about, it would be impossible to have anything much more than 1ms to his ISP.
#2. even FTTH has local choke points. You
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Wanted to add a few more things.
Obviously FTTH and FTTC is better than cable, but it's mostly better on the reduced noise on the line. DOCSIS tech is really good, but if there is something wrong with your coax, it can sometimes be hard to diagnose the issue. With fiber, there is much reduced chance of having intermittent issues and it's more likely to just not work. I would rather my connection completely fail so my ISP can fix it, than have a problem go away when my ISP shows up to fix the unknown problem.
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This is VERY wrong.
#1. DSL is shared just like cable, just at a slightly different point. Several DSL customers connect to the same node and from there, they are given times slices.
It's unclear what you call a 'node'. If you mean a local exchange then yes obviously a lot of people are going to connect to it. However each ISP usually has their own DSLAMs there and the customer's line plugs directly into the ISPs DSLAM. Then upstream of the DSLAM of course every thing travels on a single 'cable'. However that is normally a fiber optic line with far more bandwidth than the DSL lines that connect to it so it's no issue. There are still cases where the DSL plugs into a competitor's DSLAM a
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Let me just chip in. I'm a Freenaute too, but i moved from Poland having a UPC (docsis 2, then docsis3) connection. The difference is astounding. Using ADSL2+, the top i can get is 28MB/s, but realistically nobody gets more than 12MB/s (on average) because of the distance to the DSLAM, which tends to be 1km-2kms. I get 10. Is there a way to fix that? No, because Cat3 can't carry frequencies above 2Mhz at that distance.
For comparison, i get 50MB/s back in PL without the line ever breaking a sweat, and if i w
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DSL is a bit different because of the dslam, but Fiber and Cable is nearly the same.
Fiber lines have a dedicated line to the local node, the local node is shared by others and connects to the ISP via fiber. Cable has as shared connection to the node, but the node is connected to the ISP via a fiber link also.
Case in point: Some posters in other forums for my cable ISP claim that they get their 60mbps during peak hours and their power boost even hits ~120mbps.
The issue isn't too many customers on the same CO
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That's absurd. The entire distinction between DOCSIS and FTTH is in the last mile, because they're last mile technologies. You can't just pass the last mile distinctions off as being trivial, when they're the only distinctions to be made. 56k modems on DS0s have dedicated lines to the CO, and that CO likely does optical transport deeper into the network. Does that make them "nearly the same" as DOCSIS and FTTH as well?
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The issue isn't too many customers on the same COAX, but too many customers on the same node. If a Node has a 1gb fiber link and you have 100 customers, each with a 60mb connection, you're node is going to be overwhelmed. If you think changing the connection between the user and the node is going to make the connection from the node to ISP faster, I'd like to take what you're taking.
That really reminds me of all the discussions saying DSL was useless because already with 0.056Mbps modems the bottleneck was the connection between the local exchange and the ISP. Yet here I am maxing out my 12Mbps (>200x faster) ADSL connection anytime I want. I guess they must have upgraded the connection between the local exchange and the rest of the network. Why you think they will never do that again is beyond me.
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No, I mentioned 5-6 MB/s out of a 50Mb/s theoretical max.... B=Byte, b=bit....
Geez, and this is a geek site...
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I shouldn't have started my rebuttal with "This is VERY wrong".
I'm sorry.. :*(
I should've stated something more like "DSL being "dedicated" is a common misconception" or something.
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It's fairly obvious that ANY internet connection is shared at some point. Hell, one of the main attractive points of using IP was how well it performed on shared connections.
Point was that, the point where you share your connection with other people on DSL is on DSLAM, which can both QoS people who such too much, as well as being connected with far more bandwith then last mile, typically making it impossible to congest by a single, or even several users. Essentially your copper pair going from DSLAM to your
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Fiber can be slow if they overload a node to. The issue isn't the connection from the customer to the node, but from the node to the ISP.
Since the difference between fiber and cable is customer to the node and that isn't the issue, then there is no major difference with current sub 1gb speeds.
Put 100 customers with 60mbit on a node with a 1gbit connection and ANY tech is going to have bandwidth issues.
I would still rather have fiber just because there are fewer "random" issues and issues are easier to fix,
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Good job exploding the DSL vs cable myth. The tired old mantra is just repeated mindlessly as if the repeater understood a single thing about the issues involved. Everything depends on the particulars of each case.
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That is not entirely true, you have a personal cable, but the DSLAM unit in the telephone operators building is shared mostly with 100/50/20/10 other subscribers, only the most expensive business DSL subscriptions come with a 1:1 congestion.
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"today you have your own dedicated frequencies until the central hub in your area (AKA your personal connection). just like with ADSL."
That is entirely false. Layer 2 in a DOCSIS plant is shared fully amongst every cable modem locked on a given channel. Downstream access is scheduled by the CMTS entirely, while upstream access is requested by cable modems, and scheduled by the CMTS.
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Additionally, the idea that shielded conductors somehow make distance trivial is absurd. DOCSIS cable plants are HFC, with fiber pushed as far out as possible. So far out, in fact, that many DOCSIS operators see PON as a natural evolution in their last mile. This isn't done just because fiber is super cool, or because yellow looks better than black. It's done because as soon as you transition to copper, the signal quality goes to absolute crap. In the main neighborhood copper loop after the last fiber node
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I don't know about Harderwijk, but in the places where I've lived in NL there would be a tube from the house to the street, limiting the trenches to the actual street. There would be no trenches on your property.
Regardless, you're right. FTTH is (at this moment) unjustifiably expensive and disruptive when an alternative like this is available.
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I remember when cable TV came to my parents' home (roughly 25 years ago). Fantastic for me and my sister, more TV channels to watch! Anyway part of the installation was digging a trench to the house. I don't think they would ever use the existing pipes such as the sewage pipe.
It could be that this cable is in a tube by itself with room to get another cable through, I really wouldn't know.
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"laying FTTH" of course is nice, but it's also mighty expensive and disruptive to break open all the streets and dig trenches to everyone's home.
Most recent developments already have underground conduits. It shouldn't require more than targeted digging where each individual feed branches from the main. Not cheap, but I would think it's better than tearing up a whole street.
Most older developments have phone poles. They're not ideal, but it's doable to run fiber along them, and less expensive than digging
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Most older developments have phone poles. They're not ideal, but it's doable to run fiber along them, and less expensive than digging to boot.
Many places outside of the USA (like The Netherlands what this story is about) keep all their cables underground, except high voltage power lines. Actually all of Europe does this, except in the mountains where the ground is too rocky to dig. It costs more to set up, but much more reliable and no ugly poles all over the place.
Re:Cable = 1GHz of bandwidth (Score:4, Informative)
Where I live, we have cable in a star topology, rather than ring/loop, and just in these 4 houses, there are 220 apartments. Yet I can still hit 5-6 MB/s during peak hours, on a 50Mb/s down connection, from a decent FTP like say Sunet.
That's how it is everywhere (Score:5, Informative)
Cable is basically always star with regards to multiple houses. Reason is that cable companies need to be able to charge per house, connect and disconnect services per house. If it was looped through all places, well then they'd lose any ability to do that.
What you also discover is that for a lot of reasons, cable Internet being one of them, they've built out the fiber part of their network quite far. The cable network isn't all coax and hasn't been forever. It is called a HFC, Hybrid Fiber Coax, network because that is what it is. So you find that because of that, they can and do segment it down pretty far. Yes you'll share with other places, but probably somewhere in the 32-128 realm, which is the same you get with a FTTH PON connection.
Also with DOCSIS 3 they can separate users out even more. DOCSIS 3 allows for multiple channels to be used for data (that is how it gets its speed). Well they can have even more channels than a single person gets. So each user gets, say, 4 channels (152mbits) on their modem. However they have a total of 16 channels for a segment. They then stagger what channels users are on so there's less sharing going on.
Don't get me wrong, FTTH has the capacity to be faster in the long run, fiber optics just has more theoretical bandwidth because of that whole Shannon's Law thing. However cable can work very well, and does when providers want it to.
Re: (Score:2)
We have star all the way out to individual apartments. Channels and such can be switched on and off per endpoint if our current cable operator would use that(They bought up the last one, which used to do that. No need for decoder boxes and cards, you just called, ordered a channel subscription, 5 minutes later at most you'd have it available).
So, in our stairwell, there's a pretty beefy tube running that holds the individual cables for each apartment, going down to the central switch cabinet in the house. E
Re: (Score:2)
Whoops, slight mistake there.
It should say "With 50Mb/s down 10Mb/s up available right now, 100Mb/s down will become available"
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We're running star topology, with each apartment being a separate endpoint. And the topology has been in place since the late 80's. It was a special niche for the company that ran the cable network back then. Among other things, they could administer what channels you had available centrally, and just toggle what endpoints could see it, based on subscriptions etc.
As for gigabit ethernet? No, last time we checked, it would cost us about the same to have it installed, and all apartments prepared for it, as th
Re: (Score:2)
What is this 'need' you are speaking of?
Strictly speaking, we need food, water, shelter and human companionship. Some of us would beg to differ on the latter.
Everything else is a luxury. We defined that certain luxuries should now be considered essential. That's okay. But the reason for this reassignment can have its root in pure wishing, liking and wanting.
I'm not gonna die if I can't download whatever off the internet in the blink of an eye. But I'm gonna like being able to do it a hell of a lot.
I don't N
Core needs (Score:2)
Er, we also need medical services. It is arguable that society should provide food, water, shelter, and medical services at some level to everyone at no direct cost[*]. If it doesn't do that, it is questionable what the value of society is in moral terms. I don't think there has ever been a governmental jurisdiction in the world which has done this, however. I guess the best is yet to come :)
[*] Yes, tiresome libertarian extremists, I am aware that nothing is without cost. I am talking about point of p
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some people have this thing callled a Family...
5 people in our house, 2 playing Wow, 2 watching iPlayer and someone else torrenting from eztv - that sweet 50Mbps Virginmedia cable connection we have starts getting stressed. (yes, that does happen a lot!)
We're moving more towards online entertainment all the time (netflix etc) so it's not unreasonable that 100mbps will become the expected connection speed before too much longer.
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Drop the torrenting for some better P2P solution, and your connection will be sufficient. Back when I shared an apartment with several other people, as soon as we blocked torrents, 5 people could split a (back then blazing fast) 24Mb/s down connection.
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A station wagon to carry reel-to-reel tape and a large social network.
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For TV I prefer my satellite dish and we are waiting for legislation to force the cable owners to allow other ISP's access.
The cable ISP's are notorious for their lack of service and totally clueless help desks, until they match good ol' xs4all.nl I'm not tempted and stay on VDSL with 40/3Mbits/sec and especially shell access.