LIGHTING UP COPPER

This invited History of Communications paper provides a perspective on the many contributions and achievements to the science of high-speed transmission on telephone-line copper twisted-pair. This perspective relies largely on the author's 30-year academic and industrial DSL working experience, but nevertheless attempts to include key events and mention key individuals in the steady march from the kilobits/second of voiceband modems to the Gigabits/second of today's copper connections over those three-plus decades. Digital Subscriber Lines (DSL) and its ancestors are emphasized, while some Ethernet contributions to DSL are also cited.