Life left in DSL? Bell Labs gets 300 Mbps out of copper

Looks like there's plenty of life left in copper after all. Alca-Lu's Bell Labs has managed to pop DSL download speeds to 300 Mbps over a short (400 meters) stretch of  wire using a technology called DSL Phantom Mode, and was able to get 100 Mbps speeds over a 1 km line. That bodes well for telcos looking to expand their bandwidth intensive IPTV and Internet  offerings.

Alca-Lu said the technology "involves the creation of a virtual or "phantom" channel that supplements the two physical wires that are the standard configuration for copper transmission lines." It said the huge gains in speed came via the "application of analogue phantom mode technology in combination with industry-standard techniques: vectoring that eliminates interference or "crosstalk" between copper wires, and bonding that makes it possible to take individual lines and aggregate them."

According to GigaOm, a Stamford University researcher is working on developing a gigabit DSL technology.

For more:
- see this GigaOm report

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