Bell Labs Achieve 10Gbps Record Over Traditional Copper Telephone Lines

Just how fast can your copper telephone line carry data to your computer? I clearly remember those good old days of 14.4k baud modems with the terrible screeching that they made while dialing in, and loading a nice JPEG of Cindy Crawford took forever. However, the wizards at Bell Labs have managed to push the envelope the farthest possible to date with the humble copper telephone line, having achieved a record of 10Gbps along the way.

Just what kind of tools did Bell Labs have at their disposal? Well, they made use of a couple of pair of standard phone cables that measured 30 meters in length in order to hit this mind blowing speed – definitely not something that I would have envisioned, even today. It is said that this technology, when refined, might eventually be adapted in order to deliver a whopping 1Gbps to customers in real-world usage situations, and could help lower the amount of expensive fiber optic cable required when it comes to giving Internet speeds in congested cities much needed boost.

An analyst claims that this technology falls short of solving the seemingly perennial issue of slow net speeds for majority of the users, so it might not be all that it is drummed up to be.

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: internet