ASSIA envisions Terabit DSL

Dr. John Cioffi, Chairman and CEO of ASSIA and Professor Emeritus at Stanford, will present a vision for delivering terabit-class connectivity over twisted pair copper lines in the home.

This fiber-like speed could be enabled by leveraging previously-unexploited waveguide modes of current copper infrastructure coupled with ASSIA's vectored transmission capability.

In a presentation at this week's TNO Ultra-fast Broadband Seminar in The Netherlands, Dr. Cioffi will explore how vectored waveguide-mode use of copper phone lines is similar to 5G wireless's Massive MIMO use of millimeter-wave transmission.  He will also discuss how waveguide modes use frequencies above 100 GHz to enable extraordinary speeds.

When deployed, these extremely high-frequency millimeter and sub-millimeter waves hold the possibility of increasing single-line data rates to terabits/second at 100-meter lengths on ordinary twisted pair phone wire.  Speeds of 100 Gbps could be achieved at distances over 300 meters, and speeds of 10 Gbps could be achieved at distances over 500 meters.

During this presentation, Dr. Cioffi will explain how 5G wireless often runs at 28 GHz and 39 GHz, while commercial microwave gear can run at 70 GHz and 90 GHz.  Wireless transmission above 300 GHz (sub-millimeter wave) is being actively researched.  Cioffi explains, "Early designs suggest link latency of 50-100 microsec is readily achievable, which would easily allow even the most stringent 5G latency specifications of 1ms or less to be achieved with Terabit DSLs."

Today's fastest DSL (G.fast) uses only 200 MHz of bandwidth, while wireless uses 25 times as much spectrum. Dr. Cioffi notes, "by working with my ASSIA colleagues Dr. Chan Soo Hwang, Dr. Ken Kerpez, and Dr. Ioannis Kanellakopoulos, we found a solution that uses higher frequencies over wires."

https://www.assia-inc.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/TDSL-presentation.pdf