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Alcatel-Lucent Promises 100 Mbps over Existing Copper Wires

Lest we forget in the excitement of OTT and smart TVs and Facebook offering TV shows and movies, someone has to deliver all those bytes to the home...

The cable TV companies have been taking broadband market share away from the telcos with their faster DOCSIS broadband technology, especially their DOCSIS 3.0 that uses a combination of optical and coax. Most telcos, with the exception of Verizon and few others, are still trying squeeze as much out of the millions of miles of ancient copper wire they installed decades ago. Most, like AT&T, have run fiber into the neighborhood but connect that to the existing copper wire that runs to the home.

Alcatel-Lucent has been aiding them in that squeeze effort. This week it said it now has VDSL2 Vectoring technology commercially available. The new technology, which we reported on several years ago when it was being tested in its labs, will help some telcos hit speeds up to 100 Mbps over copper wiring. The cablecos are already achieving 100 Mbps and more with DOCSIS 3.0, which did not require them to run new cables.

Alcatel said its vectoring technology uses sound cancellation to limit interference and crosstalk. It increases DSL speed and the distance over which the higher speeds can be attained.

“Our objective is to help operators and nations ‘get to fast, faster,’” said Alcatel-Lucent’s president of its wireline division Dave Geary. He said they would need less time to recoup their investments, and make it easier for to meet various national broadband goals.

Rob Gallagher, principal analyst and head of broadband and TV research at Informa, said Alcatel-Lucent’s launch of the VDSL2 vectoring is timely because service providers and governments worldwide intend to boost broadband speeds but the costs and complexities associated with fiber-to-the-home deployments have been a major obstacle. He said VDSL2 Vectoring can make superfast broadband speeds available to many more people, much faster than many in the industry had thought possible.

It will also make the telcos competitive with the cablecos, whose global footprint is much smaller than the telcos, unfortunately for consumers that don’t have another company competing for their broadband account.

It said VDSL2 Vectoring has been tested extensively in the labs and in the field with Belgacom, Telekom Austria and Turk Telekom.