Maintaining bandwidth over copper in changing noise environments requires a multi-faceted approach

Achieving high quality transmission with copper requires responding appropriately to various changes in the noise environment. These changes can be intermediate (caused by impulse noises or temperature), or they can be more permanent in nature (such as changes in noise introduced as other services are added to or removed from the binder).
"Rate adaptive" capability allows modems to adjust their performance to ensure high reliability and service availability by lowering their bandwidth and increasing their SNR. This feature is widely implemented by EFM over Copper vendors. Rate adaptation has its benefits, particularly in addressing longer-term sources of noise (such as a change in the services that exist within a binder). But rate adaptation is not very effective in dealing with intermittent interference, as it allows the bandwidth on the link to drop when intermit interference occurs. More is needed to solve these temporary noise problems.

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The European Union’s revised Digital Agenda for Europe stipulates the following service objectives by the year 2020:

• 30 Mbps to all Europeans
• 100 Mbps to 50% of European households

Can the lofty objective of getting 100 Mbps service to 50% of households really be achieved in the next 6.5 years? This is an eventuality which even the European Commission itself has questioned recently, due to the high cost and logistical “red tape” associated with running fiber.

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Service operators are struggling to find cost effective solutions to enable them to offer faster broadband to their residential and SME customers before losing business to competitors. FTTH/B cannot be justified everywhere. Moreover service providers worldwide indicate that although FTTH is a solution that they will continue to deploy it would not be THE solutions for the large BB deployments in the next years.

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ITU-T Y.1564 is an essential tool used by carriers to increase their differentiation by offering higher service assurance and cost effective
SLA validation. Implementation of Y.1564 within an Ethernet Access Device (EAD) enables generating and analyzing traffic to validate that
internal or customer-facing KPI performance metrics such as throughput, frame loss, latency, and frame delay are continually being met.

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SMEs are constantly looking for ways to draw more customers, increase sales per customer visit, generate growth and expand customer satisfaction. All of these can be succesfuly achieved by offering free WiFi to customers. A recent LightReading article based on a new Comcast
Business survey reaffirms that WiFi is an essential tool for SMEs for keeping their customers happy. It proven to be more effective than free candy, water, community bulletin boards, or magazines as agreed by more than 85% of entrepreneurs and small business IT decision makers that have responded to the Comcast survey.
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Australia is one of those countries where regulators heavily lobbied by the fiber industry initially bought into the myth of the viability of “fiber everywhere,” making fiber the central focus of the country’s initial National Broadband Network (NBN) plans. Being the world’s largest government subsidized broadband project, the NGN is truly a “bellweather” worth watching. They have since learned a very valuable lesson that can be beneficial to operators and governments around the world.

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