VDSL

Will the UK ever see VDSL or is it likely to get ADSL2+ at best ?

Found this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL

The 52MBit/s down sounds great.

Its possible fairly shortly but only in limited deployment in a couple of areas before the LLU / BT boys get hold of it in due couse. We have a couple of areas we are looking into SLU but no concrete plans as yet.

and by SLU I think Pete means Sub Local Loop unbundling.

which is either a dslam in a cabinet at the end of your road, or i think there was even talk of a device down in a cable duct!!

VDSL is out of date - VDSL2 is vastly superior. In tests it's about the same speed as adsl2+ past 1.5km, and something like 100mbit total up/down at 0.5km (ie 70mbit down, 30mbit up). At very short line lengths (200m) it can do up to 200mbit, but that's only really any use for basements of apartment blocks in really high population density areas, in which case you might as well use gigabit ethernet for the final connection.

In the European and British case, there isn't the population density for this. Street cabinets are almost all within 1km, so put a cabinet dslam there and you've got 30-100mbit for everyone downstream. This is what the Germans have done, and the French are doing.

Edited by arfster (Thu 05-Oct-06 19:48:43)

In reply to:

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This is what the Germans have done, and the French are doing.

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This is what you can do if you are a monopoly. Spend vast amounts of money installing the best and most expensive equipment and charge the punter extortionate sums of money for an incredibly fast internet connection they almost certainly don't need or want.

Even better, if you are a French state owned monopoly put in the equipment using vast amounts of taxpayers money and charge the punter almost nothing.

Alternatively if you are a British state owned monopoly (BT prior to privatisation) spend absolutely nothing at all on modernising the network and employ huge numbers of engineers to fix the clockwork exchanges and charge the punter extortionate sums of money as well as using vast amounts of taxpayers money!

Actually, if you look at BT pre-privatisation the chancellor did very well out of BT and is one of the reasons that BT didn't genreally spend vast amounts of money on infrastructure upgrades and it also didn't have large handouts from the state.

They aren't monopolies anymore :-) France has enormous competition, with far more LLU lines than us. It's the model for successful competition throughout Europe, with countrywide adsl2+, the incumbent pushed to vdsl2, widespread VOD, etc etc.

Even better, one of the LLU companies has decided to rollout a fibre network to the home in response to France Telecom's VDSL2. Of course, said company (Free) are already a major video/ip providers over adsl2+ already, so there's plenty of potential growth in it for them. For raw internet access, it's hard to see there being sufficient profit motive for anyone to deploy vdsl2/full fibre - the equivalent in this country would likely be Sky/Easynet.

Edited by arfster (Sat 07-Oct-06 02:07:08)