Imagine that you're the guy who has to deliver the bad news. You straighten your tie, clear your throat, and jangle your keys as you step into your boss's office. She does not look like an executive who has gone to the sorts of conferences where managers are reminded not to shoot the messenger. It is, in fact, quite possible to imagine her stashing a Glock just out of sight in a desk drawer. Come to think of it, it's been months since you've seen Jenkins, the last guy to deliver bad news. "Boss," you begin, "about that $18 billion we just spent? Well, turns out it wasn't strictly necessary..."

It's a conversation that could be playing out at telcos like Verizon in the next few years if a new consortium of hardware vendors and phone companies has its way. The group is led by ECI Telecom and includes members like Spanish telephone giant Telefonica, but it's based in Israel and funded in part with a grant from the Israeli government.

The group's goal is audacious: achieve fiber optic speeds over copper wire. If they succeed, Verizon's $18 billion decision to run fiber all the way into consumers' homes might be a costly one for them and other companies around the world that have jumped on the fiber optic bandwagon.

The group hopes that the answer will be found in the use of Dynamic Spectrum Management (DSM) to boost DSL speeds. "The main obstacle for the advancement of DSL technology is the interference ("crosstalk") generated from different DSL lines that share the same telephone cable binder," said Professor John Cioffi, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, a pioneer of DSM research. "DSM is a promising technology for the future evolution of broadband access networks using existing copper infrastructure."

To avoid interference, current DSL implementations use static spectrum management that is built for a "worst-case" scenario. Most actual phone lines would allow for far better performance, and DSM technology will allow each DSL connection to be regulated in real time by the hardware based on measured crosstalk and on current data needs of each customer. The end result could be DSL connections that top out at 100Mbps or more.

More bandwidth than fiber?

One of Dr. Cioffi's presentations of DSM contains a slide that argues that copper actually has more available bandwidth than fiber; it just needs to be better used. He points out that a bundle of 50 Cat 3 twisted-pair wires (the kind that might be used in the last segment of the phone network) has 10Gbps of available bandwidth to distribute to the fifty homes at the end of those wires. By contrast, fiber to the home has only 2.5Gbps to distribute to its homes.

"DSM is the next step in the evolution of telco's access infrastructure. It will allow telcos to provide high-bandwidth services cost-effectively by leveraging FTTC (fiber-to-the-curb) topologies rather than replacing all copper wires with fiber-optics until the subscriber premises (fiber-to-the-home)," said Zvika Weinshtock, VP of Marketing for ECI?s Broadband Access Division.

It's not hard to see why this technology would interest telcos. Many have moved slowly on FTTH deployments over cost concerns. Others, like Qwest, have decided to remain on the sidelines. DSM, should it provide good real-world results, could keep the existing copper infrastructure competitive for many more years, and could give DSL users massive speed boosts, something welcome to power users who might cast a lustful eye on faster FiOS or cable modem connections.

While Verizon has made a big bet on FTTH, don't call the money wasted just yet. The commercialization of DSM is just beginning, and real-world results may never jibe with laboratory experiments. For the forseeable future, FTTH still offers the fastest available speeds.