ADSL Line Extenders

Tue Apr 28 22:49:56 UTC 2015

On Tue, Apr 28, 2015 at 05:24:39PM -0400, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:
> A search on Google yields many products dating back to the days of
> ADSL-1 advertising 1mbps profiles, but a few seem more recent and
> support ADSL2+ (not sure if any support VDSL2).
> 
> Are these thing out of date and no longer deployed ? Were they ever
> effective, or just vapourware that didn't really improve things ?

Wikipedia[1] suggests they're a real thing, and have real-world uses.  I can
imagine that a big disincentive to installing them would be powering them,
although line power would probably be enough for one or two hops.  Getting
access to the line in the right places to install them might be a challenge,
too (or at least be somewhat expensive).  No doubt telcos also don't want to
install them because they can make a whole lot more money for less effort
by forcing customers onto wireless.

- Matt

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADSL_loop_extender