Comment by rnhmjoj

Yeah, ADSL being so good at handling a crappy physical medium is both a blessing and a curse. If it weren't for these technologies we would have probably had to replace those rusty copper pairs decades ago for fiber optics. Instead the protocols continued to improve (ADSL2, ADSL2+, VDSL, VDSL2+, vectoring, supervector...) and allowed ISPs to provide usable network speeds without spending a cent on improving the infrastructure.