Date/Time 01 Jul 2015 4:00:35am

That is certainly true, but we need to keep in mind that we're very fast approaching the hard limits of what copper cabling can provide, regardless of the cable's quality and that such speeds are only viable to those lucky enough to have a very short connection to the telephone exchange (i.e. live very close to it). The Laws of Physics are unkind to copper, unfortunately.

At one stage, it was only possible to get 56 kilobits per second through a copper phone line. With new technologies, like we saw with ADSL1, ADSL2, ADSL2+, (the very expensive) VDSL and so on, it is possible to expand on these existing technologies.

Remember that you're only likely to get around 24 megabits per second if your connection to the exchange is very, very short. Due to attenuation (electrical resistance) and electromagnetic interference on copper cabling, the throughput of ADSL nose-dives as the cable gets physically longer. In short, after three kilometres or so, the copper cable is too 'noisy' to be able to get any decent throughput over it.

Fibre optic cable is almost entirely immune to both of these and as stated in the article, technologies that are being pioneered on Fibre (like ADSL over Copper) have seen the throughput of Fibre to be thousands of times better: 100 Megabits per second as standard, 2,800 megabits per second theoretical maximum.

'Speed' (technically a misnomer, the speed of light or electrical signals doesn't change; the amount of data you can shove down a cable or over the airwaves does, thus 'throughput') and other arguments aside, replacing the copper network with Fibre now ensures that our telecommunications system as a whole is future proof for the next 50 or 100 years until the next best thing comes along, getting it built now means we don't need to worry about it in future when all of a sudden, we panic because we're being overtaken technologically by other countries.
