During the dot-com boom, fiber was being laid as fast as they could dig the trenches. Last I read a while ago, there is still a huge amount of unused "dark fiber" out there.

Actually, even closer to home, you may be surprised. When I bought my first house last year, I thought I'd finally order Verizon's fiber optic Fios broadband. Unfortunately, Verizon doesn't serve my area. Bummer. So I just ordered AT&T DSL and mentioned the Fios thing to the technician that came to my house. To my suprise, he said that AT&T has fiber optic right up to the junction box two blocks away. Unfortunately, it's that "last mile" that is--and probably will remain for a long time--the bottleneck between my house and that fiber optic line.

That's the big headache about replacing the telco/cable circuits. The are all too happy to drop the mains in and set up 1,000 channel duplexors at the corner pedestal on every other block, but then getting them to run a drop to your house you're looking at 5 figures, assuming you don't have to cross the road. With the advent of bandspace opening up due to the conversion of tv from analog to digital, as well as a number of other little coincidental opportunities coming soon, I think the next big push is going to have to be wireless. CDMA and such on the cellphone side is going to have to expand it's functionality, and when it does, I see a real meld with wi-fi, with wi-max portals working like microwave relays to provide a big bandwidth improvement, but resulting in a much noisier spectrum. We deployed a gigabit circuit over much of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, but still it was the local 100 Mb/sec lans and the 54 Mb/sec wireless feeds that governed most of the systems speeds. A few circuits that were able to make use of the backbone directly really beneftitted a lot, but all those office buildings never saw any improvement over the old telco backbones (a kluge of microwave, T1 wire circuits, and a hodge podge of dedicated wire and telemetry junk from the 50s, 60s and 70s when every dept was doing their own thing).

Interesting post. My background is I've been in the IT field over 10 years.. but I've been supporting ADSL in the states for 2 different internet providers (my current position is with a ILEC and I've been withworking for them for 4+ years).

I can tell you that all the grid sounds like to me is nothing more than a big fiber backbone. Which many companies already employ using SONet for countrywide transmission. The devil is in the details though and in order for that transmission medium to reach your house it would 'have to use existing high speed lines'. So in the end, it's still bottlenecked on the front end.

In short, I fail to see how structurally they are achieving anything which is not already being done.

Regarding ADSL in the UK only acheiving 6mbps; the standard of g.dmt/G.lite is only written for 8mbps. Realistically even with a sub 4000 foot loop, you're looking at BEST around 6-7mbps. Frankly, if they're advertising 10mbps on standard ADSL, they are lying to you. Frankly, the standard and technology in no way can support it. I know as part of our infrastructure upgrade we had to upgrade our systems to ADSL2+ to offer a true '10mbps' service here.

Now if they are using 10mbps, they would need a rack of ADSL2+ cards on the DSLAM (yay technical terms) which could support it, along with appropriate bandwidth on the back end to handle the transmission of that data to their regional aggregator.

It's possible they are running ADSL 2+ equipment with insufficient bandwidth. Which means upping their speeds will have no impact until they upgrade their pipes. In fact, it should actually make things worse due to more packet collisions and poorer resource management.

Anyways...

The next big thing for traditional copper is pair bonding. This will increase the speed a bit more (roughly 45+mbps) after this evolution of adsl 2+. There's also the "RIM" chip which I read about somewhere which is supposedly in development to offer 200+mbps over a standard POTS network.

/end geek rant.

Again, it the last leg of the circuit that is the weak link in the chain.

I can only imagine how much noise this has got to be putting on the line. These are not exactly clean signal devices to begin with. Overdriving them and ganging them around can only make ambient that much worse inside the building.

I've seen LANs shut down completely due to spurious noise from digital PBX circuits, intercomms, 2.4 and 5.6 Ghz cordless phones, etc etc etc. The spectrum is just getting trashed out IMHO.