to show off my new found geek hood, i watched the bbc's click online show.
what most they said was out of date (xp sp2...etc)
but they commented on adsl 2 which i founf intresting as im on adsl at the moment
watch it here :
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quote:
Originally posted by BBC's Click Online
There can be little doubt that without broadband the internet would be a very slow place indeed. With broadband we get our web pages faster, we watch films and download software upgrades, indeed the software itself.
But delivering broadband raises many issues for the service providers. To get high-speed connections to urban areas means using the cities' own phone infrastructure, an infrastructure that can be 100 years old.
Some of the copper expected to deliver high speed data to our computers may have been around since Victorian times, and all of it is based on a technology dreamed up at the turn of the previous century.
Chris de Courcy-Bower Chris de Courcy-Bower, Lucent: "Nowadays we are trying to squeeze 25 megabits per second down a cable that was only designed to carry three kilohertz of traffic."
To prove the industry has a sense of humour it has employed irony in naming its cabling - it is called POTS, or Plain Old Telephone System.
ADSL is the term a lot of us who use broadband will know. DSL is Digital Subscriber Line, and that refers to the connection between you and the exchange, and the A stands for Asymmetric, which means the you can download data faster than you can upload it.
Dylan Armbrust Dylan Armbrust, Computer Active: "ADSL essentially solves the problem of infrastructure that exists throughout the world today. You have old copper lines beneath the streets of hundreds of cities and they've managed to squeeze every little bit of capability out of that copper technology. So it's really about making use of old technology to bring in the new technology."
In the next couple of months we will be seeing the next generation of ADSL: ADSL2+, which is faster. It has been ratified by the men in suits and the manufacturers are gearing up.
Sarah Kemp, Nokia: "ADSL2+ will give you a much greater bandwidth to the home. So for instance if you live within two kilometres of a central exchange you can have up to 24 megabits to your home. Alternatively, you can run ADSL in 'Reach Extended' mode and have up to 200 kilobits up to seven kilometres from the local exchange. So you have it both ways - either lots of capacity close to, or less but further out, compared to ADSL."
Nontheless, as you may have gathered, ADSL over ageing copper isn't necessarily the infrastructure you'd want to start with.
Dylan Armbrust: "If they can possibly avoid it the companies don't really want to spend money on upgrading their infrastructure because something like fibre optic costs an awful lot of money to put down. You've got to wire every street, every county, every nation if you decide to go that route. And it's a long term commitment as well. So there are great financial resource issues involved, there are great infrastructure resource issues involved, so the longer they can delay that the better off they are and the better off their bottom line is, in the short term."
Sarah Kemp Sarah Kemp: "In Europe you still have large urban areas where you have people concentrated within about four or five kilometres of a local exchange, so an operator can tackle a lot of people with one central point. They can then put a remote DSLAM out in an area or village with, say, several thousand people, put electronics closer to them and then offer DSL that way. And a lot of those countryfied areas have high users of technology and telecoms in them so it makes a good business case. So people who want to work from home can do so.
This doesn't work quite the same in places like Africa, where the services that are needed may be different, and also the population is so much more spread out."
So there is good news and bad news. The good news is that some of us are getting faster broadband, and the bad news is that this doesn't effect the people who need it most - the ones that live outside cities.
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