Fast Net News, DSL Prime, DOCSIS Report

Really Real? That's the question I'll be asking the exhibitors at Paris' Broadband World Forum.

Vectoring has the promise of doubling short loop DSL speeds. Take a look at Alcatel, ASSIA, Huawei, Ikanos and a few others to see how close it is to market and what problems to deal with. Keymile has a new vectored line card that's also 50% denser.

Your gateway and home network can't keep up with decent broadband or HD TV if you're like most of us. 3x3 and 4x4 MIMO promise to double 802.11n speeds. Visit Celeno, Lantiq and Quantenna to hear the promises and expect a pleasent surprise when they tell you the price. If it's only a few dollars more for the MIMO, it makes sense to use it almost everywhere. Then ask the carriers testing whether this really is enough for HD around the house. Swisscom says it works.

HD Voice is now standard in Franch and Germany gateways. Why not everywhere? Lantiq will sell a CAT-IQ chip for $2 and that's about all you need.

Infinera's Multi-Terabit Packet- Optical Transport Network Platform (DTN-X) is promising data transfer rates up to 500 Gbps.  Ericsson also has new switches/routers from their old Redback division. Hans Vestberg tells me they are very hot. 

Hughes has new satellites with gigabits of spot beam capacity. Latency won't go away, but speeds of 5 megabits and more to homes are now coming to market.

Adtran and Calix, major US suppliers, hope to break through to European and Asian customers.

From the carriers: Hong Kong Broadband will explain how to make money selling 100 meg for less than $30. Armenia will claim it will be the most fibered country in Europe. Deutsche Telekom will get serious about sharing infrastructure in a series of four sessions.

G.Hn announcements from Lantiq, Sigma, and Marvell. Until the chips they are talking about make it through interoperability testing, it's talk but no action. The talk sounds great. John Egan of Marvell is confident prices will be very competitive, very quickly.