Cheaper equipment to give fast copper broadband a boost | PCWorld

Cheaper equipment to give fast copper broadband a boost | PCWorld: G.fast promises up to 1G bps over existing copper telephone wires, but only over distances up to about 100 meters. The technology is now being designed to work at distances up to 250 meters, and it looks like ITU will have a full set of standards by early next year, according to Johnson.

Here we go again with the nutty idea that copper isn't obsolete for IP-based telecommunications. No matter how much throughput one can achieve with this decades-old POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) infrastructure, as this story shows it will always be limited by distance.  The faster the speed, the shorter the distance -- not a good trend as customers expect faster connections.  With such short distances of 1 gigabit connections over copper, it has to be fed by fiber connections so close to customer premises that it makes more sense simply to run fiber all the way to the premise.