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Ethernet Over Assorted Materials
saridder writes: "Cisco has demonstrated their latest last mile technology,
and not only can you now have 10 MB Ethernet over Cat3, Cat2, Cat1, try lamp
power cord, battery jumper terminals, barbed wire, etc. This may have solved the last mile problem, and at 10 MB, it blows DSL out of the water."
Sure, it's faster than DSL, but it's only good to 5000 feet - the last MILE for sure. Great in buildings, dorms, hospitals, etc. For us poor slobs that are 18,000+ feet of copper away from their CO, we're still stuck with lame alternatives. When are we going to see something that solves the DISTANCE problem, not the SPEED one?
"I feel that if a person can't communicate, the very least he can do is to shut up." -- Tom Lehrer
It actually works pretty well. We use it on a large government facility that has some really old wiring in buildings that we don't have fiber runs into.
Has anyone heard the Cisco story about ethernet over barbed wire? Our salesrep tells a story about a facility in Kuwait (I think) that was having a terrible time keeping a link up between two buildings. The locals kept stealing the cable they were using for the valuable copper. They ended up getting ethernet to run over a piece of barbed wire running between the buildings. The error rate was high, and the sustainable throughput was abismal, but with TCP's error correction they were able to get a useful connection through.
I don't know how true that really is, might be a Cisco myth told to impress customers or something.
Casca
That article seemed mostly a puff piece, and fairly short on technical detail (anyone do any digging?). Not that I doubt Cisco's ability to discover methods of doing this, but it also seems a pr piece for investors maybe?
Anyway, it seems like a good idea, however, is there another block here that can be achieved by a company (ie the bells last mile influence on dsl)? Broadband to the masses ideas seem to come and go with the wind lately, and most seem never to pan out.
"Moving through the masses like a fish through water." syrup
If you follow the link to Cisco's site, there is a link on the right for the video presentation.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
They are talking about it more like if you owned a building (say an old one, with crappy wiring) and want to offer a broadband type connection inside it without rewiring then you should use their technology. They really don't say that you will get this at home.
BTW, not everyone deserves a high speed connection to the internet. I think that if you really want to have high speed access then you need to move to an area where other people want the same thing. You can't expect to live in the middle of nowhere and have a high speed connection.
The nice 10 MHz square waves going over an unshielded wire are going to make a whole lot of harmonics (and products) all up and down the radio spectrum. Depending on the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire (and with a transmitting antenna a mile long), I'm pretty sure you'd run afoul of any number of FCC regs. Plus, it would probably just irritate the cows :-).
That is all.
I hate to sound like I'm marketing it, but what about DSDN? It's true that it doesn't run over existing technologies, but for 10 Mbps Internet access it's considerably cheaper than the current alternatives (such as direct fibre-optic lines) and is supposed to cost about as much for the end user as their cable or DSL ISP already does.
It's already in use in Denver as well as a section of Utah, and it's supposed to be very fast in practice - not just theory. The Denver ISP has a site at wideopenwest.com and the company that designed the technology is at switchpoint.com. Switchpoint is the one testing it in Utah as far as I know.
I also know that Slashdot has mentioned this tech before, but it bears repeating this for others; we'll never get past sub-standard cable and phoneline solutions if people don't demand alternatives.
We are using LRE technology to connect approximately 50 buildings via cat 1 and cat 3 underground phone cable. LRE requires only a signle pair, and can share a pair with a voice line, just like DSL.
Out to 3000 feet 15 megabits is normal, between 3000 and 5000 only 5 megabits is typical, but it depends on the quality of the cable.
This technology is based on VDSL and works using the same principals, but runs at a higher data rate, limiting the distance. Also, LRE transports Ethernet frames directly, without any ATM protocol overhead, unlike most of the other DSL solutions. This greatly reduces costs.
The Cisco 575 LRE device is much like the low-end Cisco 600 series DSL routers in appearance, but has no active layer 3 capabilities. Basically, the remote 575 port appears to the 2924LRE as if it were a local port, allowing trunking and vlan assignments as supported by the 2900 series switch.
If you could order a number of "alarm pairs(dry copper)" from your local telco, between a friendly ISP and your houses, and the distance was less than 5000 ft., this would be a pretty economical solution. Otherwise, it's not of much use for the average homeowner.
-Falcor
I had to get a 10mbps coax cable down a brick wall into the room below, but coax cable was too thick and the metal BNC connectors were too bulky. I ended up using audio cable that would normally link a stereo to it's speakers. Ping times were still 10 ms. I guess provided that the transfer medium has similiar properties of resistivity, etc, many metal replacements and objects used in infrastructure can be used to transmit data.