CNN ran a story about a small town in Georgia experimenting with a cutting edge technology that delivers up to 60 television channels, telephone service and DSL over copper wire phone lines. Revolutionary? Not.
Within a couple hours of posting the story on Slashdot, readers there posted links and information on dozens of places using such technology, many of them having done so for 3 or 4 years (apparently there is a stretch of Canada where this sort of thing has been available for several years).
In addition there is misinformation in the CNN story. While CNN’s David George implies that the technology involves sending out 60 television quality signals simultaneously, in fact this technology involves only a single channel at any given time which is switched at a central router. The main drawback of such a system, of course, is that it doesn’t scale very well — start adding tens of thousands of users and the costs tend to escalate quickly.
The one aspect that is truly amazing is that depending on the technology deployed at the back end, there is still plenty of bandwidth to be squeezed from plain old copper wires. Given the opportunity costs, don’t expect fiber optics to be arriving in your neighborhood anytime soon — odds are that for the forseeable future it will be cheaper to simply take the next upgrade path with copper.
Source:
Small town tests TV, DSL comob via phone lines. David George, CNN, January 22, 2001.