The rollout of FTTC across the country is clearly good news. The optical fibre itself will bring huge advantages: increased speeds, very little crosstalk, immunity from electrical noise, etc. But given that some copper is still used between the subscriber's house and the exchange, a thought occurred to me the other day - Could this ultimately result in a crisis of crosstalk on the copper?
Think about it. The "final 100m" in copper is, in practise, going to be more like 500m - 800m. Maybe more, in some cases. So, what with FTTC download speeds being at least five times what they are under ADSL Max, surely crosstalk is going to markedly increase on that 500m stretch of copper? And the more people who switch to FTTC, the greater this problem will become. Okay, crosstalk is a function of length but even taking into account the much shortened copper lengths with FTTC, surely the crosstalk figures are still going to worsen?
Am I raising a non-problem here? Maybe the researchers at BT have done the studies and found this to be a non-issue. But I wonder. 40M bps signals zooming along (typically) 500m stretches of bundled wire-pairs aren't going to be without their problems, are they?