At Computex today, Qualcomm Atheros announced a few new chipsets, and it seems that as a part of their Ikanos acquisition they’ve entered the wireline business in the hopes of solving capacity issues in the last mile. While fiber should be deployed where possible, in many cases it can be expensive and impractical to run fiber optic cable, such as older apartment complexes. As a result, a 10 Gbps connection can turn into a 100 Mbps connection when using POTS lines for the last few hundred meters depending upon channel conditions and run length.
G.fast or GigaDSL attempts to bridge the gap here by using techniques like self far-end crosstalk cancellation and significantly increased transmission bandwidth to significantly improve channel utilization of existing POTS lines, and the QCO5700 and QCM5720 use these technologies to try and improve bandwidth at the last hundred meters.
