Ericsson has raised the possibility of radically faster broadband connections by demonstrating that a data rate of 500Mbit/s is possible over copper twisted-pair cable.
The data rate, which is 20 times the speed of the fastest commercial service in the UK, was achieved using crosstalk cancellation techniques for standard DSL, which is known as "vectorised" VDSL2.
This could become a standard by the end of the year.
The importance of this data rate for operators is that it would open up the possibility of broadband services such as IPTV.
It also allows operators to deployment a combination of fibre and copper cables in the access network which will be more cost-effective for very high speed services such as HDTV.
Ericsson also said this high speed capability will also help faster rollout of 4G broadband mobile phone services using HSPA and LTE.
Vodafone has already tested 20Mbit/s downloads over a HSPA mobile network,
“It also proves our abilities to provide future mobile backhauling, which will enable quick and cost-effective introduction of Long Term Evolution (LTE) solutions,” said
Håkan Eriksson, CTO at Ericsson.
Crosstalk cancellation improves VDSL2 performance by reducing noise originating from the other copper pairs in the same cable bundle.
Vectoring technology also decouples the lines in a cable (from an interference point of view), substantially improving power management, which can reduce power consumption.
The demonstration showed aggregated rates of above 500Mbit/s at 500m, bonding six lines.
Standards for VDSL2 and line bonding are available today, while the standardization of Vectoring is ongoing and is expected by the end of 2009.