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Demand More From Your Copper
D3 wrote in with a submission about fiber to the home, or the lack of it, and the reasons behind this, and ways to work around the Bells to provide high-speed access despite them. A pretty decent article, which actually goes beyond the Baby Bell PR-speak that deregulation is the solution to everything. Maybe at some point state and Federal regulators will realize that the Bells are the problem, not the solution.
The site's starting to get a bit sluggish - this link will help ease the load.
I can tell you why I would want it. I work for the government as a contractor processing satellite data. The data files are HUGE, routinely over 250 megs a file, with 20+ files a day. A cable modem or dsl line simply doesn't have enough bandwidth for me to work from home effectively. Sure I can SSH into a box at work or whatever, but after all the tcp wrappers, ipchains, dns, etc, there is a noticeable lag when I work with things in X-windows. I don't know what minority of the tech population is also in my shoes, but for us fiber to the home would be great, and something I'd be willing to pay a premium for.
"A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." - Sir Winston Churchill
Also, DSL cannot run over fiber, so the most common low-cost solution is eliminated by fiber to the home.
DSL isn't a layer 2 encoding, its a layer 1 transmission technology. Saying it doesn't work on fiber is like saying I can't use a boat in the desert. It's true, but the boat isn't needed in the desert.
Go to f...ing work. And work from there, The videos I augment and render are huge files and take forever to do from home....duh, that's why I go to work and sit on our 100 megabit network. Which by the way is going to be the fastest you can use right now, I know they sell gigabit cards but how many desktops can write, or read data at a gigabit a second. Optical to the home is dumb, 82% of the internet is still on dial up, why don't we get the cable modem technology to be cheaper first and maybe just get all of our ISPs on Fiber,then they can give us more bandwidth to our cable modems.
Anonymous Cowards - Oh God, How I hate you
Simple. Because right now they aren't allowed to set their own pricing. In the name of competition, the government is forcing the ILECs to lease their lines out below cost. Think about it. If you were a phone company, why would you invest tons of cash to install new lines if you knew you were going to be forced to lease them out to other companies at a loss? If you want the ILECs to spend cash on fiber to the home, you've got to make sure you give them a way to recoup the costs of the investment and turn a profit.
This article brings to light the fact that fiber to the curb just isn't practical now. My wife works for a company that attempted a speculative fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) build for a neighborhood in Colorado, and the project (among other factors) sent her employer into Chapter 11. FTTC is sexy, yes, but it's just not within economic reach yet.
I've said for a couple years now that cable companies truly have the broadband advantage, but they waste their bandwidth to the curb by competing for television subscriptions. The massive installed base of coax has a much greater bandwidth than your POTS copper pair, but rarely is it used to its full potential.
Owners of huge cable plants will eventually let television delivery fall to satellite deliver (high latency, high broadcast bandwidth) while your everyday coax cable will be more used for low-latency, highly interactive bandwidth like voice and data. Satellite for broadcast, cable for interactive voice/video/data services, and let the POTS pairs finish off their remaining useful life.
If more folks would get reasonable about the realistic uses for fiber (long haul, high bandwidth aggregation circuits) by reading salient articles like this one, we'd more quickly be able to enjoy true broadband in many forms of delivery. It's just going to take more people in decision-making positions that realize the appropriate use of the technologies we have at hand.
It's a relatively new technology being deployed by Bellsouth now. Digital Fiber in the Loop (DFITL) makes use of a new card that gets installed into your fiber pedestal (ONU), manufactured by Marconi. It essentially acts as a mini-DSLAM.
Then inside your house, you use a regular ADSL modem on your phone line, and you'll get maximum speed no matter how far you are from the CO.
The problem is that Marconi is the only company that manufacturers cards such as these and they are proprietary from what I understand. However, for those like me that were stranded on dialup for months before this was finally available, it's a wonderful thing to have.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Sure, you can have a CD-quality telephone call, but you need to agree with your called party on the codec. Radio stations and audio production houses have been sending high-quality audio over ISDN for years.
More specifically, I don't expect high-quality calls to become widespread, because there's always a profit-driven compromise between call capacity and quality. The telephone company will never offer higher quality audio on a widespread basis if it cuts their overall capacity and thus, profit.
I just watched fibre being installed at a friend's house last week in the Natomas area of Sacramento. According to the installation tech, the service is available over all of Sacramento; though not in the eastern suburbs yet. The provider is called SureWest. The beauty of the fibre is that the service is only $50, provides 10 MB connection, and you can also get your phone and cable through the same connection. I wanted to move there just to get the connection.
Well, 100megabit works out to 12.5MB/s per second. My hard drive can both read and write considerably faster than that. Gigabit pushes the roof to about 128MB/s. Serial ATA is specced to go to 600MB/s, which is considerably more than 128MB/s. In my company I daily transfer massive collections of CAD drawings back and forth from office to office, and from office to home. When I have a huge project, I put in hours at home as well, and it would be much easier for me if I had that kind of connection speed. And fiber, by the way, is cheaper per megabit BY FAR then copper. The newly ratified 10gigabit standard (which is nowhere near full utilization of fiber, what with frequency multiplexing technology), allows 60gigabit/second to be transfered over 12-strand 50micron multimode cable, which comes in at about $.90/foot. What an end user needs is simply two strands (transmit/recieve pair), which can be scaled up to whatever bandwidth is necessary. It may seem expensive, but fiber has been here a long time, and it's here to stay, so we may as well utilize it rather than saying "100baseTX is good enough for me." Is 640K really enough for you?
Seriously, why would we want fiber in the home? I have a cable modem and I'm perfectly happy with it.
Post a link on slashdot to a web page hosted on your computer and find out.
The issue you're most likely referring to is with newer housing developments where the telco has put in a small fiber-copper mux in the development, and the fiber serves to connect the development to the CO.
In this particular situation, it renders DSL unusable since the mux doesn't handle DSL signaling, only voice signaling, and there is no copper loop to the CO to connect to the DSLAM.
They did this because rapid development meant either building a lot of COs and pulling long copper runs to accomodate the geographic distances was too expensive. This way they could consolidate COs and switching equipment and minimize the number of uplinks to regional COs as well.
Supposedly this fiber/DSL conflict will be getting mitigated in the near future by newer, environmentally hardened DSLAMs that can be slab/pole/vault mounted and integrated into these suburban muxes or placed in areas served by copper but outside DSL's distance limitations.
However, if you have fiber to your house (not just to the big green boxes with bell logos behind the 7-11) it would be highly likely that "can't get DSL" wouldn't be an issue, since fiber to the house would imply digital delivery of services (voice, video), which should mean availability of internet service far better than DSL.
Ever been on a conference call?
IMO the problems with comference calls are most often the speaker phones. Some people will make everyone he calls suffer just to save 20 bucks on a phone.
What in the hell good is it to have fiber running to your door when nobody's doing anything with it!? Here in Boston's North End, we've had to deal with this crap since 1998, when they lavished us with fiber, exhaulting its benefits over traditional copper.
/me takes a pill
Now, 5 years later (5 goddamned years!), with this whole "internet" thing in full swing, and I still can't get high-speed internet access. Sorry, doesn't work without good-ol' fashioned copper cables, even if I am just a few hundred feet from the CO. FUCK.
And naturally, our one-and-only monopoly on cable, AT&T, isn't offering it's much-touted Broadband package, either. If I see one more advertisement for AT&T Broadband I'm gonna throw down, I swear it. How can they advertise a service that's not even available to me? Isn't that false advertising?
Even now, there should be some kind of controls in place to protect against worms and trojans from home users - it's in everyones best interest (ISPs, web hosts, carriers), even if Joe Home user that's infected with the trojan doesn't know or care to know. What's going to happen when DDoS attackers get 5 times as much bandwidth to play with?
Speak before you think