Faster Speeds over Copper

For households that don't have a fibre-optic connection, copper networks can be used as a viable option for the fast movement of data.

Global telecommunications corporation, Alcatel-Lucent, has recently announced it has found a way to move data at 300M bps (bits per second) over two copper lines. Researchers are currently working to convert their findings to real products and services to be released in the marketplace next year.

The company's Bell Labs recently held a successful test of the 300M bps technology over a distance of 400 meters using VDSL2 (Very high bitrate Digital Subscriber Line), also demonstrating that it can do 100M bps over a distance of 1,000 meters.

On its own VDSL2 manages no more than 100M bps over a distance of 400 meters, so to get to three times that capacity Alcatel-Lucent combines a number of different technologies. The first of these is to use two copper pairs at the same time, a technology called bonding. Next Alcatel-Lucent uses a feature it has developed called Phantom Mode to create a third virtual copper pair that sends data over a combination of the two physical ones.

The problem is that when you use bonding and Phantom Mode you also get a lot of crosstalk, a form of noise that degrades the signal quality and decreases the bandwidth. So instead of 300M bps you only get about 200M bps. To solve this Alcatel-Lucent uses vectoring, a technology that works like noise-cancelling headphones. It continuously analyses the noise conditions on the copper cables, and then creates a new signal to cancel it out.

Even higher speeds than 300M bps can be achieved by using more copper pairs. However, Alcatel-Lucent settled on two copper pairs because it is a more realistic scenario for when the technology is rolled out to residential users in the future.

Currently, copper is the most common broadband medium. About 65 percent of subscribers have a broadband connection that's based on DSL (Digital Subscriber Line), compared to 20 percent for cable and 12 percent for fiber, according to market research company Point Topic. Today, the average advertised DSL speeds for residential users vary between 9.2 M bps in Western Europe and Asia Pacific and 1.9M bps in South and East Asia.

It seems there is a very real market for maximising speed from our existing copper network.