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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."
I think it is just short of a mile, thus the technology is nothing more than hype. It is the last 20 miles that need to be addressed not the last 5000 ft.
Got Code?
Is it just me, or did anyone else think "huge bare ass" when they saw "Hugh Barrass" in this article?
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
The problem is money. Nobody wants to spend the dollars necessary to hook us all up with data cable. That's why all the hullabalo about cable ISPs and DSL--they both utilize an existing physical connection.
In other words, the answer will not come from Cisco, it will come from somebody with deep pockets. And the only pockets deep enough in this case belong to the federal government.
324006
Hey, I just went out and bought a spool of barbed wire, only to discover that Cisco hasn't yet developed Ethernet-over-barbed-wire technology.
I guess I'll just have to reattach the alligator clips for my Ethernet-over-city-sewer connection.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
"By offering Ethernet-like speeds over regular phone wire, at reaches up to 5,000 feet, and co-existing with phone traffic, LRE brings rich, advanced services such as next generation video-on-demand to places it has not gone before."
So, once again, 90% of the population is too far from the CO for this to bring broadband into the home.
The problem isn't the last mile, contrary to the buzzwords... the problem is getting the pipe to run many, many miles to actual end users' homes.
Cisco spokesperson "Hugh Barrass"? Yeah, wait for the Ethernet-over-Jell-O(tm) Puddin' Pops protocol called "IP Freely"...
Carousel is a lie!
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
A simple google search would prove that assumption wrong.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
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.
...or BWoE. I suspect there would be a number of spikes in the connection.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
Okay. So, yeah, we might finally have a reasonable technology to solve the "last mile" problem.
:)
But where the *hell* is all this bandwidth going to come from? I mean, server bandwidth is expensive. I know a few people who donate Debian mirrors, and it costs them a pretty penny, that's for sure.
I mean, I'd still want to have this; if for nothing more than great community networks. (Community as in physical locality)
But this won't solve all our problems, it will probably bring us new ones.
Not that we still shouldn't do it
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
I do not believe Cisco does, or ever has, positioned LRE as a "last-mile" technology. LRE is more about leveraging existing cabling infrastucture in a multi-unit facilities such as hotels and hospitals.
Cisco's LRE product offering requires two pieces:
1. An LRE-capable switch at the head-end (such as a 2900XL LRE), which terminates the LRE and has a standard Ethernet handoff to your normal data equipment. In an intergrated voice/data setup (where you're reusing existing voice cabling to carry voice AND data) you would then use their LRE 48 POTS Splitter at the head-end and hand off to the PBX before bringing everything in to the 2900XL LRE.
2. Cisco 575 CPE, which uplinks to the head-end and splits off the voice and the data. Very similar to Cisco's 600 series.
Sound like DSL? It essentially is, just on a smaller scale (3500XL/2900XL LRE costs a whole hell of a lot less then a carrier-class DSLAM). In fact, scanning over the Cisco 575 CPE Overview, Cisco declares the technology to be "based on VDSL".
Draw your own conclusions, but I have never heard this positioned as a last-mile replacement. The article never seems to hint at it either, but simply reiterate their marketing the product line for multi-tenant facilities.
Obviously you don't own a back hoe, or you'd know how hard those bastards are to keep track of. Just the other day, when I needed my back hoe to cut some buried fiber optic cable as a final solution to my spam problem, it took me hours to find it. I checked between the couch cushions, where I drop it a lot. Eventually I found it under an empty pizza box; no idea how it got there. I swear it has a mind of its own and crawled there! So give your local telco a break -- I'm sure their building is a lot bigger than my apartment, so they have a lot more space to lose their back hoe in.
The enemies of Democracy are
Hats off to Cisco's engineers for putting this into hardware - with the emerging IEEE standard, hopefully there will be others.
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.
Yeah, and his daughter Emma doesn't like to be seen in public with him because of his funny name. q:]
(ok, think about it a bit before you mod me down)
MadCow.
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
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
It was only 1Mb/s, but it could communicate over ANYTHING. Would not take too much to bump the speed up with todays technology.
This isn't new or suprising. This technology has been around for years. God, I remember using ARCNET to communicate thru barbed wire back in 1995 (as a test to prove it could).
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
Someone needs to convert pound-test to bandwidth, and there you go.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
Does anyone know which company they bought to obtain this technology?
Where will the bandwidth come from?
Me.
If I had a 10MB connection to my house, I'd mirror shit just to mirror it. I'd download kernels and patches, and tell the maintainers to put me on the list of mirrors. And I wouldn't be alone.
That's one of the reasons that P2P networks work so well. There are so many nodes to get the information from.
Server bandwidth is expensive because it is a scarce commodity. How much do you pay per month for the 100MB connection between your workstation and your server? If you (conveniently) don't count the cost of the infrastructure, the price is zero. Factor in the cost of the infrastructure, and amortize it over the life of the equipment and that number is still ridiculously low. ($70 for two NICs, $80 for a half-decent switch (optional), say it's only good for a year. That's $12.50 a month!)
Server bandwidth is expensive because servers are concentrated into little high traffic nodes. Spread the traffic out (ala freenet, gnutella, morpheus, etc.) and costs drop dramatically. Make bandwidth a commodity, and you will start paying commodity prices.
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.
Actually..
Where _does_ bandwidth come from ?
I get bandwidth from my isp, they get it from 2 or three places... and it goes "up the line" until you get networks that are simply moving traffic that doesn't belong to them..
Does UUNet create bandwidth ? Does sprint ? Why dont they create a bunch more ?
Where is the top of the food chain of bandwidth ?
Obviously, its in their interest to keep charging ridiculous fees.
Why doesn't someone else "make more bandwidth" ?
I pay $65/mo for 128/768 DSL with static ip. I think thats because tahts what I'm willing to pay, not because theres any cost structure supporting that price.
There is no peice of technology that I can think of that doesn't become trivial amortized over even a year. Yet T1 and DS3 line charges are still astronomical. Why ?
ISP's overselling bandwidth implies that they cant afford more upstream, implying that upstream bandwidth is expensive, which I've seen plenty of evidence of. Why is this upstream b/w so damn much money ?
Sorry for the incoherency. I just don't understand the cost structure for broadband.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
"Hey, I just got a cable modem; it's so much faster than anything else I've ever used!"
"Oh yeah?! I've got a barbed wire Ethernet line!"
"A what?!"
"A barbed-wire Ethernet line. Haven't you heard of that?"
"Umm... No, I can't say I have."
"Oh... ACME Networks installed it for me last month. It cost a fortune, because there are no barbed wire fences around where I live, so they had to upgrade their entire barbed wire infrastructure; they billed me for like 20 miles of barbed wire fencing."
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I saw the demo for this last year, its pretty lame. If you can, grab the demo kit from the marketing slime and try it with regular 10bT ethernet and it still works.
They have built a big wooden frame, about 1.2 metres on a side. Across the front of it they have a number of strips of cloth, held in place with velcro. The spiel starts about putting a signal down cat5 cable, and how expensive that can be. The rep pulls off the top strip of cloth, revealing some cat5 running between two RJ45 plugs, at the top is a connection to a LRE switch, and coming out of the bottom still hidden by 4 or 5 more strips of cloth is another RJ45 going to another LRE switch with a signal light. The rep makes a point to plug and unplug the cat5 to show the signal lights going on and off.
Then the pitch starts talking about cheaper cable, and then he pulls off the next strip, showing cat3 phone cable. The jumper from the cat5 RJ45 goes into the RJ45 for the cat3, and the jumper on the other side goes down to the next level which is still hidden.
Soon the pitch talks about pushing signal over anything, and the sales rep pulls off the next cloth, revealing two strips of lamp cord. And finally the bottom strip reveals four strands of barbed wire between 4 insulator posts, with RJ45 connectors at either end. BFD.
The final result is that the LRE signal is running over a bunch of impedence mismatched wires for a total distance of about 5 metres. If the rep is doing this canned demo in a conference room and there is 10bT available, try running a regular 10bT signal through this frame, it will probably still work.
They may also have a 200-250 metre spool of twisted pair phone wire with RJ45s at either end. That is impressive, since 10bT will have lots of error at such a distance, but LongReachEthernet will back down to about 2 Mbps and still function.
And this isn't a direct plug replacement for ethernet, LRE requires both dedicated blades in their switches for distribution, and very expensive receiving units for the far end. They are targetting places with old wiring going to a wiring closet, they can't actually compete with DSL at this time. But there is always a question about using these switches for neighborhood distibution when a telco has a small remote switch serving customers at the end of a fibre loop. The rep will not make any committment to that.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
I do this for a living, so I know. At the top of the food chain is the SONET/SDH telecommunications network. That works at between OC12 (660 Mbit/s) and OC768 (40+Gb/s) rates, and go typical distances of a hundred kilometers (upto a thousand). And these rates can be done many times on difference frequencies of light (DWDM) on a single fibers; and you can have multiple fibers between offices as well.
At present, 6.4 Terabits can be shifted on a single fiber, although I don't think that has been deployed in any serious way, ~100Gb/s or so are much more common. If you need more bandwidth, add another wavelength (cost: a millionish); or if the fiber is full (rare right now, but will happen more and more often in a few years or a decade), then you need to lay new fibers- that costs 100s of millions; but we are talking significant bandwidth from that- you don't lay 1 fiber you lay 50 or so and keep most of them for expansion or sell them to other telecoms companies to pay for your layout.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)
This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:
- Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.
You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)