What if a new type of modulation meant that we could have gigabit wireless in a couple years,
You mean if we can suspend the laws of physics?
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It's not like building extra lanes on the harbour bridge - where as the cost of materials rise, the cost of bandwidth falls over time.
It is with wireless. Low frequencies need less power to transmit the same distance as high frequencies, but you need high frequencies to transfer data faster. Of course, you could build a fibre backbone, and have hundreds of cheap wireless transmitters/receivers attached to it, but it would be a bit like living in a microwave oven. At least it would solve the world's population problem.
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My first 1gbps network card cost $780. You can pick em up for under $15 now...
Right, but the ethernet cable didn't change, it still has a maximum transmission distance of about 100 meters before signal degradation due to power losses.
The most promising increase to bandwidth is frequency multiplexing in optic fibres. We still don't know how much faster we can transmit data on the same cable. With shielded copper twisted pair, we pretty much know the transmission limits for a given thickness of cable and voltage, but with optical we are only at the beginning of what is possible.
It is with wireless. Low frequencies need less power to transmit the same distance as high frequencies, but you need high frequencies to transfer data faster. Of course, you could build a fibre backbone, and have hundreds of cheap wireless transmitters/receivers attached to it, but it would be a bit like living in a microwave oven. At least it would solve the world's population problem.
Right, but the ethernet cable didn't change, it still has a maximum transmission distance of about 100 meters before signal degradation due to power losses.
The most promising increase to bandwidth is frequency multiplexing in optic fibres. We still don't know how much faster we can transmit data on the same cable. With shielded copper twisted pair, we pretty much know the transmission limits for a given thickness of cable and voltage, but with optical we are only at the beginning of what is possible.
1. Why would you need to suspend the laws of physics? You can already buy retail gear that transmits up to 900mbps. Sure, it's currently at very high frequencies, hence low range, no penetration, but that's not a limitation of physics - merely a current limit of our capabilities.
2. Great. So why pay $4Bn now, when we could spend a few hundred million now, and a few hundred million in 10 years, and get the same network? As I pointed out, the price of the gear is falling dramatically. a 1Gbps fibre receiver is currently around $700, who's to say that in 10 years, you couldn't buy the same fibre receiver for $15?
3. Cat 5's theoretical limit was 100Mbps. We were supposed to go Cat 6 after that. Instead, we found most of Cat 5 was good to 10Gbps for short distances, and guaranteed for Cat 5e. We even have 40 and 70gbps over copper, again, only over short distances for now, but who knows what else will come?
Property speculation is a type of gambling... But everyone knows that in gambling, the house always wins in the end.
1. Why would you need to suspend the laws of physics? You can already buy retail gear that transmits up to 900mbps. Sure, it's currently at very high frequencies, hence low range, no penetration, but that's not a limitation of physics - merely a current limit of our capabilities.
Er, no, it is a limitation of physics. We live in a fluid called 'air', and that limits the range of high frequency signals, unless you boost the power, and again,if you did that it would be like living inside a microwave oven. But if we ever live in LEO, the problem is solved.
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2. Great. So why pay $4Bn now, when we could spend a few hundred million now, and a few hundred million in 10 years, and get the same network? As I pointed out, the price of the gear is falling dramatically. a 1Gbps fibre receiver is currently around $700, who's to say that in 10 years, you couldn't buy the same fibre receiver for $15?
You still need to lay the fibre backbone to connect the cat5/6 or wireless transmitter/receivers. If it means getting a network faster, I'm all for it, but there are other costs associated with mixed transmission media. You need an analog to optical switch for each node, and because of the range limit of twisted pair, you need a lot more nodes/switches, so it may not be cheaper. As for wireless connected to the fibre backbone, aren't they rolling that out already?
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3. Cat 5's theoretical limit was 100Mbps. We were supposed to go Cat 6 after that. Instead, we found most of Cat 5 was good to 10Gbps for short distances, and guaranteed for Cat 5e. We even have 40 and 70gbps over copper, again, only over short distances for now, but who knows what else will come?
All of those limitations are physical limitations, of the shielding between wires, the thickness of the wires, the conductivity of copper, the voltage used. Sure, we could improve the shielding, make the wires thicker, use more power, but why bother? Copper is a high demand commodity and hence expensive, thicker shielding is more expensive to produce, higher voltages mean higher running and maintenance costs. Silicon, on the other hand, is so abundant that almost every country in the world has access to it, and currently the only limit to how fast we can transmit data over glass fibre is the granularity of light wavelengths we can send and receive on.
Er, no, it is a limitation of physics. We live in a fluid called 'air', and that limits the range of high frequency signals, unless you boost the power, and again,if you did that it would be like living inside a microwave oven. But if we ever live in LEO, the problem is solved.
You still need to lay the fibre backbone to connect the cat5/6 or wireless transmitter/receivers. If it means getting a network faster, I'm all for it, but there are other costs associated with mixed transmission media. You need an analog to optical switch for each node, and because of the range limit of twisted pair, you need a lot more nodes/switches, so it may not be cheaper. As for wireless connected to the fibre backbone, aren't they rolling that out already?
All of those limitations are physical limitations, of the shielding between wires, the thickness of the wires, the conductivity of copper, the voltage used. Sure, we could improve the shielding, make the wires thicker, use more power, but why bother? Copper is a high demand commodity and hence expensive, thicker shielding is more expensive to produce, higher voltages mean higher running and maintenance costs. Silicon, on the other hand, is so abundant that almost every country in the world has access to it, and currently the only limit to how fast we can transmit data over glass fibre is the granularity of light wavelengths we can send and receive on.
You have a very, very, limited ability to look beyond what you currently have, don't you?
How much bandwidth did the first 900Mhz phone have? How much does LTE over 900Mhz have now? Have we broken any laws of physics to make that change? Have we replaced the air since then?
And with the cable issue. Argh! Argh! Are you daft!?!?! I'm saying what we see as a limitation now, does not become a limitation in the future!!!!!!!! Twisted Pair copper carried a maximum of 8.0Mbit/s in ADSL version 1. At the time it was seen as a limitation. Now, we can transfer up to 24Mbit/s over it, and at longer ranges as well. Have the laws of physics changed? Have we laid new and different copper? NO! Technology improved and broke what were previously technological limitations, not physical limitations!
We don't need to be spending $4bn (As if it's going to stay within budget anyway) for a 100Mbps to the premises network. We could just spend far less upgrading the backhaul now, and a more later when we actually need the bandwidth - who knows, in a few years, twisted pair copper may be carrying 100Mbps.
Look, I'm guessing you don't have vision. You're one of those people who would have probably said the car would never replace the horse and cart, and it was a limitation of physics that we could never break the sound barrier. Good on you. Just don't let your ignorance cost the taxpayer billions we don't need to spend.
Property speculation is a type of gambling... But everyone knows that in gambling, the house always wins in the end.
You have a very, very, limited ability to look beyond what you currently have, don't you?
How much bandwidth did the first 900Mhz phone have? How much does LTE over 900Mhz have now? Have we broken any laws of physics to make that change? Have we replaced the air since then?
And with the cable issue. Argh! Argh! Are you daft!?!?! I'm saying what we see as a limitation now, does not become a limitation in the future!!!!!!!! Twisted Pair copper carried a maximum of 8.0Mbit/s in ADSL version 1. At the time it was seen as a limitation. Now, we can transfer up to 24Mbit/s over it, and at longer ranges as well. Have the laws of physics changed? Have we laid new and different copper? NO! Technology improved and broke what were previously technological limitations, not physical limitations!
We don't need to be spending $4bn (As if it's going to stay within budget anyway) for a 100Mbps to the premises network. We could just spend far less upgrading the backhaul now, and a more later when we actually need the bandwidth - who knows, in a few years, twisted pair copper may be carrying 100Mbps.
Look, I'm guessing you don't have vision. You're one of those people who would have probably said the car would never replace the horse and cart, and it was a limitation of physics that we could never break the sound barrier. Good on you. Just don't let your ignorance cost the taxpayer billions we don't need to spend.
Further to this, as mentioned above, I have Internet through Telstra cable (the Foxtel cable). When I first looked into this it was 10mbps, then 15 and for quite a while it was 30mbps. I now have signed up for 100mbps and actually get 115. Rey are using Euro Docsys 3.0 now so it's actually provisioned for max of 350mbps but throttle it to 115 - which means that die to the headroom, everyone (who has infrastructure in their home) gets 100-115.
No laws of physics have been broken with the increases. At all times these speeds were the theoretical maximums. And yes they will find a way to make it faster in the future.
“You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means” - Inigo Montoya
You have a very, very, limited ability to look beyond what you currently have, don't you?
Not that I know of. On the other hand you seem to believe in magic, whereas I tend to stick to science.
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And with the cable issue. Argh! Argh! Are you daft!?!?! I'm saying what we see as a limitation now, does not become a limitation in the future!!!!!!!! Twisted Pair copper carried a maximum of 8.0Mbit/s in ADSL version 1. At the time it was seen as a limitation. Now, we can transfer up to 24Mbit/s over it, and at longer ranges as well. Have the laws of physics changed? Have we laid new and different copper? NO! Technology improved and broke what were previously technological limitations, not physical limitations!
Mmmmm magic .... tasty magic. Do you know why IC channels stopped at 32nm? Every reduction up to 32nm was overcoming a technological limitation, but at 32nm we reached a physical limitation (except for very pure silicon, but that will only take us a little further). And sure, the IC world has moved on to multicore parallel computing for this very reason, but that is a much bigger infrastructure change than just making the die smaller, and we are still struggling to make that transition.
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We don't need to be spending $4bn (As if it's going to stay within budget anyway) for a 100Mbps to the premises network. We could just spend far less upgrading the backhaul now, and a more later when we actually need the bandwidth - who knows, in a few years, twisted pair copper may be carrying 100Mbps.
I've got some bad news for you, it is $40bn, not $4bn. We could spend far less, and we certainly have done so in the past with Telecom and Telstra putting down cheap cabling, cheap waterproofing, etc and that is why Australian Internet is the third-world pile-of-fukkin-shit it is today. In fact, I won't be posting here for up to 4 weeks because that is how long this third-world backwater takes to connect Internet. At least it is better than Botswana and North Korea though. So instead of paying $40bn now, you are suggesting we pay $10bn now and $50bn in 5 years time?
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Look, I'm guessing you don't have vision. You're one of those people who would have probably said the car would never replace the horse and cart, and it was a limitation of physics that we could never break the sound barrier. Good on you.
You want to put a third-world network in that will cost as much to replace in the future as it would to put in a decent network now, and I'M the one with no vision???!!!!!
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Just don't let your ignorance cost the taxpayer billions we don't need to spend.
So you would rather the taxpayer spend billions building infrastructure for kleptocrat c^nts in Mosman?
I'm curious what all these people feel they need greater than 25Mbps for. You can watch standard definition video at 2Mbps. Not sure what 1080p is under any kind of reasonable compression, but does anyone (legally) offer full streaming movies/TV in 1080p anyway? Video conferencing, remote working can all be done on far less than 25Mbps...
Sure, a very small number of people will need more than ADSL2+/4G can deliver, but for a very small number of people, they can get private fibre, or do link aggregation. Exactly why do most people need that fast an internet connection?
Actually, a 25 Mbps symmetric service would meet most requirements in the medium term. But copper technologies will never deliver anything like 25 Mbps upstream. The NBN fibre service has also been neutered somewhat in terms of upstream speed, but at least the terminations could be upgraded over time. A pair of fibres can deliver terabits per second with the right terminating equipment. Of course that would be fabulously expensive today.
Another thing of course, is that you cannot assume a single client per household. You need to assume multiple streams. Most houses have more than one TV set, for example.
Telepresence is a technology that could rapidly go mainstream if everybody had (or could get) about 20Mbps upstream connections. Yes, you can compress one-way video into less than that, but at the cost of very significant delay. Not a problem if information is only going in one direction, but a killer for 2-way conversations.
And of course FTTN just will not work out cheaper than FTTH in the medium term. To get decent speeds you need to build so many more nodes.
genX
6 Apr 2013, 09:04 PM
Mmmmm magic .... tasty magic. Do you know why IC channels stopped at 32nm? Every reduction up to 32nm was overcoming a technological limitation, but at 32nm we reached a physical limitation (except for very pure silicon, but that will only take us a little further). And sure, the IC world has moved on to multicore parallel computing for this very reason, but that is a much bigger infrastructure change than just making the die smaller, and we are still struggling to make that transition.
New Fabs are going onto 22nm technology, which is 3 generations beyond 32nm. (32nm, 28 nm, 24nm, 22nm) The physical boundaries keep getting pushed out by lowering the voltage, by using ever-shorter wavelengths of light to etch the substrate and by choosing materials with different physical properties.
Your general point is correct. At some point twisted pair craps out. And it craps out unevenly. Where one person might have access to a good pair where they can get 30MB down and 2MB up, many people's connections will only be able to get 10/1 using the same termination technology.
You run up against Nyquist's and Shannon's laws. The amount of information you can carry is limited by the bandwidth of the channel and the Signal/noise ratio, and both of these are physical properties of the cable. To get more info through the cable you have to increase the bandwidth (mainly by using shorter cables and by changing the cable sheath) or improve the SNR (mainly by having tighter twists, but also by being very clever and adaptive about how you manage the launch power to reduce near-end crosstalk and getting more and more anal about the quality of termination.) i.e. you need to use a better cable or better connectors. I am using bandwidth in the engineering sense here and not in the IT sense which is strictly not a correct use of the term. It relates to the range of frequencies of signal the cable will carry without attenuating the signal too much.
A lot of the improvements in cable TV internet speed come simply from allocating more of the bandwidth in the cable away from TV channels and to data. Coax cable beats the hell out of the sub-Cat 1 cable that is laid along streets. You could probably get Gbps if you weren't carrying all those TV channels.
Sunder
5 Apr 2013, 08:37 PM
What if a new type of modulation meant that we could have gigabit wireless in a couple years, towers only need to be every 10km or so? It's not like building extra lanes on the harbour bridge - where as the cost of materials rise, the cost of bandwidth falls over time.
Certainly the reduction in the cost of processing power has allowed new modulation schemes to get much more data through wireless (and also through twisted pair.) But we are asymptotically approaching physical limits that have not changed since the 1920s and 30s when people started studying information theory seriously.
Not that I know of. On the other hand you seem to believe in magic, whereas I tend to stick to science.
Mmmmm magic .... tasty magic. Do you know why IC channels stopped at 32nm? Every reduction up to 32nm was overcoming a technological limitation, but at 32nm we reached a physical limitation (except for very pure silicon, but that will only take us a little further). And sure, the IC world has moved on to multicore parallel computing for this very reason, but that is a much bigger infrastructure change than just making the die smaller, and we are still struggling to make that transition.
To that, I can only quote Arthur C. Clarke's three laws:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Yes, I believe in magic. I believe in sufficiently advanced technology.
By the way, you do know that Ivy Bridge CPUs, millions of which have been produced, are based on a 22nm die? So much for your physical limitation... Must be magic.
stinkbug omosessuale Frank Castle is a liar and a criminal. He will often deliberately take people out of context and use straw man arguments. Frank finally and unintentionally gives it up and admits he got where he is, primarily via dumb luck! See here Property will be 50-70% off by 2016.
In the end, this is not about the merits or technical limits of one technology vs another.
It's about economics and politics, and in particular the economics and politics of "the last mile" of telecommunications connectivity to "the Australian bush" (a very hazily defined concept).
Roughly 80% of the Australian population lives in areas which are, for private-sector telecommunications operator purposes, densely populated enough to justify world-class service provision, both wireless and wireline. Another 15% live in areas which are marginal propositions, breakeven at best. (The exact composition of that 15% varies somewhat between wireless and wireline provision, but not enough to be politically important.) The final 5% is uneconomic to service: telecoms to the bush only happens as a result of "universal service obligations" (and mining projects--mines get great wireless telecoms service, at least from Telstra).
In the absence of government carrot (e.g. $11B to Telstra), FTTH or even FTTN deployments would have proceed slowly and selectively, and exclusively within the 80% zone. The $36B NBN project is supposed to take FTTH-equivalent coverage to the high 90s (I defy you to find a firm promised coverage standard, however...).
It won't.
Even if that accomplishment might ever have been possible under the initial plan, internal performance in NBN-world has been dramatically short of it. Even if Labor wins the next election, there is going to be a dramatic curtailment of NBN ambitions, or a dramatic NBN budget blowout, or both.
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