| Not really. There are thousands upon thousands of 256k and 1.5mbps users who can't get better DSL speeds because they are running off of a copper-fed remote terminal. No fiber anywhere to be seen.
If those Remote Terminals were fiber-fed, 7mbps and higher speeds would be possible. The copper is the bottleneck. |
| If you take a simplistic approach, the backbone is any part of the network that carries more than 1 user's traffic. In a DSL network, that delineation occurs at the DSLAM. The link from the RT to my house is just my own traffic, hardly considered a backbone. However, the link from the RT to the CO carries hundreds of user's traffic back to the CO. That is a backbone link.
If you want to play the game of semantics, we could use proper terms such as backbone, core, distribution, aggregation, edge, etc, but for the purposes of this conversation the copper "backbone" that feeds the remote terminals is a bottleneck that needs to go away. |
