The benefits of using VDSL2

If you are simply interested in getting the best deal on broadband for your home or business, the current lexicon of acronyms related to the service can be confusing at best, or even frustrating. In a nutshell, the differences are down to what you can get, how fast, and how reliably. Broadband was a huge leap forward in speed from the older dial – up technology, but the plethora of options, including video and online ‘telephone’ services, has made even further additions necessary. VDSL2 simply provides you with more options, but not always greater speed or reliability.

What is VDSL2?

VDSL2 stands for Very High Speed Digital Subscriber Line 2. But what does this mean?

• This technology uses the existing infrastructure of your good old copper phone wires to provide broadband. If you have copper cables, you can get VDSL2
• The difference between the various DSL services (DSL, ADSL, ADSL2, ADSL2plus, VDSL and VDSL2) is bandwidth. Each of these five services is able to work at higher frequency levels, with VDSL2 being the highest. It operates at up to 30MHz, and provides the fastest service
• The ‘noise’, or electrical interference, on VDSL lines can be a problem, and increases with the length of the cable down which it travels. VDSL2, being higher frequency and providing the greatest speed, is the most susceptible to ‘noise’ interference
• VDSL is provided to customers who are further than about 5 or 6 km by using street cabinets, or nodes. These receive the original signal from a specially designed fibre cable, then feed it to customers through their copper telephone cable (know, somewhat amusingly, by the acronym POTS, or ‘Plain Old Telephone Service’!), thus getting around the distance problem

VDSL2 is the fastest of the DSL provisions of broadband, and uses a combination of nodes and existing copper telephone cables to provide the highest available frequency of DSL.

VDSL2: Benefits and availability

The most obvious benefit of VDSL2 is the speed – hence its name – in comparison to the other DSL broadband services.

The other major advantage offered by VDSL2 is its ability to provide all the available services (known as ‘triple play’) – video, data and voice services because of its high band width. Simply, the higher the band width, the more information can be packed into it. VDSL2 offers the best combination of speed and range of services.

In Australia, several broadband providers have begun to introduce VDSL2. EFTel and iinet began rolling out the service in mid 2009. If you wish to use VDSL2, contact your service provider to find out whether it is available in your area.

The provision of internet services has only become complicated because newer technologies keep superseding older, more limited ones so quickly. VDSL2 is simply the fastest way of getting the broadest bandwidth possible right now. It has limitations, but at this point provides the highest speed and best service broadband on offer.