Telkom 8mbps ADSL?
Rumor has it that Telkom will be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial anytime soon. According to several users from the MyBroadband forum, Telkom techies told them that Telkom will soon be launching a 8mbps ADSL trial.
This comes to no surprise as cellphone companies MTN and Vodacom has launched their 7.2mbps HSDPA services as a trial a month or 2 back.
According to the techies the 8mbps will be first run as a trial to current 4mbps users. My question is just with all this speed when will we have uncapped accounts or high cap account to accommodate all that speed for a fraction of the cost it currently goes for.
So lets just have a look at what the requirements are to have a 8mbps line running at its full speeds. Currently there are various 4mbps users that can’t even achieve their full line speeds, this is cause of the fact that they live far from a exchange. ADSL works at a maximum distance of about 5km from the exchange for normal low end speed. According to the graph below to achieve a speed of 8mbps you’ll need to live about maximum 1.8km from the exchange and that is the worst case to sync at 8mbps. Just take in consideration that there are other factors that can also influence sync rates to the exchanges such as.
- the length of copper wire from your premises to the exchange - this is always higher than the distance ‘as the crow flies’.
- the number and type of other digital services being used by other customers over copper pairs within the same cable sheath.
- the configuration and line quality of the copper wire pair between the exchange and your premises.
- electrical interference from outside sources (such as electric motors).
- the configuration of the copper wiring within your premises (ie use a central splitter for optimal performance).
- the software configuration and application on your computer (in particular how it uses the uplink back to the exchange).
- your ADSL hardware.
- the capacity of, load on, and access data rate of the destination host computer which you are accessing.
All and all I wont say no to a 8mbps line, and sure the majority of users out there won’t either. Maybe this is just what is needed to bring down the cost of faster ADSL speeds and maybe introduce cheap uncapped or high cap accounts. You can follow the MyBroadband thread here.