Old, slow telephone lines may soon be a lot faster
For ultra-fast Internet, you need fiber, right? Wrong, say promoters of a technology called G.Fast, which is creating quite a bit of buzz at the Consumer Electronics Show this year. G.Fast produces Google Fiber-like speeds over plain old copper telephone lines. Think of it as DSL on steroids. It's actually been around awhile but has not been widely deployed, a situation that appears to be about to change. Among those displaying G.Fast applications at the CES is Israeli chipmaker Sckipio, which staged a demonstration showing download speeds of nearly 750 megabits per second on a standard phone line using one of its modems. Chances are that's about 50 times faster than the broadband you have coming into your home via fiber or coax.
