The FAST Copper Project

'FAST Copper' is a research project jointly pursued by Mung Chiang (Princeton University), Alexander Fraser (Fraser Research Institute), and John Cioffi (Stanford University), funded by U.S. National Science Foundation's Information Technology Research program 2004-2008 with NSF Grant 0427677.

Access networks are often the rate-reach-reliability-quality bottleneck of end-to-end connections in wide area networks. Realizing the vision of truly broadband and ubiquitous access to almost everyone in the U.S. is a formidable task, with many significant technical and socio-economic challenges. Although the fiber-to-the-home solutions promise to provide broadband delivery, the labor costs associated with fiber installation need to be divided over the number of customers served by the fiber. Such cost becomes increasingly expensive as the number of customers served decreases, which happens when fiber gets closer and closer to the customer, especially in suburban areas. That last segment labor cost of deployment is the dominant economic limitation in broadband access, especially given the population density in established suburban neighborhoods in U.S.

This goal will be achieved through two threads of research: dynamic and joint optimization of resources in Frequency, Amplitude, Space, and Time (thus the name ‘FAST’) to overcome the attenuation and crosstalk bottlenecks, and the integration of communication, networking, computation, modeling, and distributed information management for architectural design of broadband access networks.