Broadband access is the commercial and technical future of telecommunications. Higher data rates on access links enable any or all of video, data, and voice/audio signals. It is widely recognized that the ability to deploy ubiquitous, robust, broadband access services to the majority of U.S. households is vital to economic prosperity, a vibrant civil society, and homeland security. The goal of this 'FAST Copper' project is to help build an engineering foundation to bring broadband information services to everyone with a phone line, including people who live in rural and less-privileged areas. This can be achieved by substantially enhancing the rate and reliability of the existing copper plant access network. Equity of broadband information access in the U.S. will be enhanced as a result. There are two threads of research activities towards this goal: (a) dynamic and joint optimization of resources in Frequency, Amplitude, Space, and Time (FAST) to overcome the attenuation and crosstalk bottlenecks, and (b) integration of communication, networking, computation, modeling, and distributed information management in the multi-user environment of twisted pair networks. Innovations in both physical layer algorithms and network architectures and protocols are pursued. In particular, Dynamic Spectrum Management, a science of multi-user methods for adaptively tuning an access network to specific situations dynamically, is investigated for rate improvements and implementation viability. This proposal has major activities integrating research with education. It also facilitates close collaboration with industry in analyzing highly valuable empirical data and validating research results through extensive lab tests.
