Developers continue to make progress on boosting the bandwidth that can be supported by traditional copper telephone wiring, as a pair of recent component maker announcements illustrate.
Lantiq announced it had begun volume shipments of a system level vectoring solution. And Ikanos demonstrated 300 Mbps throughput at 200 meters on a single-pair copper line.
Vectoring, as readers may know, is a means of boosting DSL bandwidth by virtually eliminating crosstalk on copper connections. According to Lantiq, there are 1.5 million vectoring ready lines already deployed in cabinets and central offices. The company expects to see the first large-scale vectoring services in the second half of 2013.
The high-bandwidth short-distance application that Ikanos demonstrated targets a “notable percentage of certain carriers’ fiber deployments” – those where the carrier can’t reach all the way inside a subscriber’s residence, Ikanos said in its announcement. The company said this typically occurs because the home or building owner does not allow the construction required to lay the additional fiber.
“While the G.Fast promise of gigabit performance is still on the horizon, our ability to demonstrate hundreds of megabits for lower-port-count short-loop configurations using our currently shipping CPE and CO silicon establishes Ikanos as the leader in the ‘pre-G.Fast’ era, as we enable telcos to remain competitive against mounting pressure from MSOs and continue to enhance the consumer DSL broadband experience,” said Kourosh Amiri, vice president of marketing at Ikanos, in the announcement.
