/ˈviː.diː.ɛs.ɛl.tuː/
noun — "squeezing fiber-class speed out of copper."
VDSL2, short for Very-high-bit-rate Digital Subscriber Line 2, is an enhanced broadband access technology that delivers high-speed data over existing copper telephone lines. It improves upon VDSL by supporting higher data rates, wider frequency bands, and better performance over short loop lengths, making it a key technology for last-mile broadband.
Technically, VDSL2 uses DMT modulation across multiple frequency profiles, allowing downstream speeds that can exceed 100 Mbps under ideal conditions. It is typically deployed from a DSLAM or a street-level DPU, where the copper run to the customer is short enough to preserve signal quality. Features such as vectoring further reduce crosstalk between lines, increasing stability and throughput.
Key characteristics of VDSL2 include:
- High data rates: significantly faster than ADSL and early VDSL.
- Short-loop optimization: best performance when fiber is close to the user.
- Advanced modulation: relies on DMT and multiple profiles.
- Vectoring support: minimizes interference between copper pairs.
- Upgrade path: bridges legacy copper and newer technologies like G.fast.
In practical deployments, VDSL2 is commonly used in fiber-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) architectures, where fiber reaches a neighborhood cabinet and copper completes the final connection to homes or offices. This approach delivers high speeds without the cost of full fiber installation.
Conceptually, VDSL2 is like putting a high-performance engine into an old road: the road stays the same, but the ride gets much faster.
Intuition anchor: VDSL2 extracts maximum broadband performance from existing copper lines.