In a keynote address delivered earlier this week at the G.fast Summit in Paris, Dr. John Cioffi, chairman and CEO of DSL management optimization software supplier Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment, Inc. (ASSIA) and Emeritus Professor at Stanford, asserted that his company has figured out a way to support terabit speeds over 100 m of existing twisted-pair copper lines. The techniques also can enable 100-Gbps transmission at more than 300 m and 10 Gbps over 500 m, according to the company.
The secret to such high speeds is the use of significantly higher frequencies than currently employed – 300 GHz or higher, potentially. "Fiber-like speeds of 10 – 1000s of gigabits/second are possible by using the previously unexploited waveguide modes of current copper infrastructure," stated Dr. Cioffi via a press announcement. "Waveguide-mode use is similar to use of millimeter-wave transmissions in advanced wireless and 5G. Waveguides can enable use of frequencies above 100 GHz for extraordinary speeds."
While Dr. Cioffi doesn't believe anyone will need a terabit connection anytime soon, 10 or 100 Gbps over existing copper plant could prove useful for emerging applications such as 5G small cell interconnect. Dr. Cioffi asserts that early designs using the proposed approach have shown that link latencies of 50 to 100 microseconds are readily achievable.
"There are a few years of work ahead in the industry to refine the system," allows Dr. Cioffi. "LTE and now 5G wireless have proven major advances can evolve from concept to deployment in five to seven years. Data centers at Google and Facebook can leverage such new technologies in only a few years."
ASSIA offers a wide variety of software platforms for DSL network management and performance enhancement, headlined by its DSL Expresse platform (see, for example, "ASSIA strengthens VDSL vectoring play with DSL Expresse 3.3"). While the company has developed a version of Expresse for PON systems ("ASSIA offers Optical Network Expresse for PON infrastructure"), Dr. Cioffi for a number of years has carried the flag for DSL as a less expensive approach to broadband and other service delivery versus fiber.
The company also successfully took BT to court over allegations that the service provider had infringed on its DSL management patents (see "ASSIA wins another round in DSL patent fight with BT").
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