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Comment by ndespres | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize DSL speeds were even possible above 7.1 Mbps, have things changed? ADSL is (or was) very much dependent on total wire distance and overall copper line quality from the nearest telco switching station. Top speeds were simply not possible above the 2-mile mark and that was pushing it. Rural areas, forget about it.

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In my experience modern DSL (like AT&T Uverse) is fiber-to-the-curb and DSL from there. Meaning the amount of DSL line you have is incredibly short and then it hits a fiber line.

That's an interesting approach, and really seems like it would cut down on the amount of work required in the home to provide such a significant speed upgrade over traditional ADSL. Thanks for enlightening me!

Verizon rips out the copper network interface from your home and replaces it with Fios gear all the way through, which always felt like overkill though I know they do it partly to suck you in to their TV offerings too. I wonder how much the extra expense of this last 100 feet of the deployment (from telephone pole to house) holds back more broadband penetration.

That’d be ADSL1. ADSL2+ showed up here (in Ireland) in 2006 or so, and it wasn’t new then. It went up to 24Mbit/sec. Same range as ADSL1, more or less. VDSL showed up here in 2010 or so (again, not sure when it was actually introduced), and does up to 100Mbit/sec. It’s much lower range, and is usually used from roadside cabinets. G.fast is extremely low range but can go up to 1Gbit or so. In some markets it’s used for multi-hundred-Mbit links for premises within 500m or so of a cabinet.

None of these are especially useful for rural areas.

vDSL is what changed to make the speeds higher, but although it got a little better, it seems like the distances are still pretty limited. I suspect that the DSLAMs have become smaller and cheaper, so that you can push those out of the central office and into smaller cabinets inside neighborhoods, which had the effect of making the distance problem appear to go away.

That still seems to leave truly rural areas out of luck, though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VDSL

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