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by AviationAtom
2338 days ago
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DSL is dedicated all the way back to the central office, so it doesn't have the same problem as cable has. That said, what others posted is correct, home users download far more than they upload, so it makes sense from a marketing perspective to give far more downstream bandwidth than upstream. Home users tend to appreciate having a high download speed much more than having equal, but much lower upload and download speeds. Other interesting info: ADSL is dreadfully slow by today's standards, but VDSL can actually hit some decent speeds. The big problem with both is attenuation of copper wire is fairly significant over the distance the lines generally travel, much more so with VDSL, due to it's higher frequency range. That's why companies like AT&T, with their U-Verse brand, bring fiber to the neighborhood, to lop of a significant distance of copper. They can increase the distance they service by making use of two lines paired together. AT&T takes a portion of legacy ADSL service now and puts VoIP over it, with the VDSL service having more than half it's capacity generally devoted to IPTV bandwidth. One single good condition line could generally carry 118 Mbps, but they would split that up for TV, leaving only 45 Mbps. Now they are mostly pushing FTTH/FTTP though, leaving no option for POTS/copper. That is all good though, because most the copper run is such garbage that it absolutely sucks being a technician. You would be gigged for the line runs getting water in them and making service drop out, even if everything tested great when you installed, or even if you turned a ticket in the line techs might kick it back and say everything is fine. |
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Our national telecom operator, Telekom Srbija, had a monopoly on internet access in most areas due to the fact they own all the phone lines. In cooperation with Huawei and the Chinese and Serbian governments, they made a plan to kill POTS service per line and use ALL of the bandwidth for VDSL, as well as building DSLAMs on street level, to provide very high speeds (100/10 Mbps was the max they achieved before stopping) with short copper lengths. Phones would work over VoIP, so all new modems were VDSL compliant with IAD (integrated access device) "certification" (a SIP client and 2 POTS ports).
In the end the Chinese lost interest and it was all forgotten and covered with ash. The new idea, which is why I say it failed in a good way, is to skip the street DSLAM buildout and just do FTTH. And they did, though not with symmetric gigabit speeds, because reasons (bla bla customer demand, costs, etc..) The highest speed is 1000/400 Mbps for $120/mo. (which is super expensive compared to what was promised by the Chinese and also compared to general purchasing power in the country).