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Verizon To Use New Tech With Old Cables
Ant wrote to mention a ZDNet article about a new initive to get modern high-speed net access into homes utilizing old coaxial cable lines. Right now Verizon digs up streets and lays out expensive fiber to get homes online, but new tech may let them accomplish that task for much less hassle and expense. From the article: "Later this year, it plans to use new technology from the Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) , an industry group that promotes using coaxial cable installed for cable TV to transmit broadband around the home. The organization says that its technology supports speeds up to 270 megabits per second. Because most homes already have coaxial cable installed in several rooms, Verizon can significantly reduce its Fios installation costs by using existing cabling to connect home computers to its broadband service."
I'll start holding my breath now.
The summary says Right now Verizon digs up streets and lays out expensive fiber to get homes online, but new tech may let them accomplish that task for much less hassle and expense, but the article is talking about using pre-installed coax to connect computers within the home to broadband, it has nothing about getting the broadband to the home.
Oh no... it's the future.
Verizon came and fixed my voice line last week - we had a lot of noise and other people's phone calls on our line. Unfortunately this also 'fixed' my DSL connection, which hasn't worked since then. Perhaps by using a separate set of wires for voice and data this kind of problem will go away. Of course once everyone starts using VoIP for thier phone calls....
..several Telecom firms are planning to introduce amazing new technology that allows the Internet to go through telephone lines. Also, in the distant horizon, talks are beginning to emerge about telephony itself going over telephone lines, and even an exciting new breakthrough called the telegraph has been mentioned.
Will code a sig generator for food
I'll do the rest.
And men do not put new bits in old wires, else the wires rot and the bits leak out; but they put new bits in new wires so that reliability is preserved.
I used to run my school computer lab on co-ax. What a pain. The connectors were always breaking. They didn't have to completely break either, they just had to go slightly bad and they'd take down the whole network. Anyway I suppose they will come up with a solution that has 'more conventional' connectors because most NICs don't have co-ax connectors.
I think its a great idea to use "existing" infrastructure to reduce costs and speed up implementation. IMHO a "new" technology using copper is suitable as long as it meets certain criteria (which I'm sure it does). My only beef with the article is in the title -- existing copper cables are not "OLD" technology -- copper has many advantages over fiber in terms of practicality, cost, etc. I'm going to consider that they were referring to "copper" as old... but I don't foresee and sudden disappearance of wires in the near future.
Matt Wong
http://www.themindofmatthew.com
What are the chances they will actually pass the savings on to the consumer? Exactly nill. Anyway, since everything and the kitchen sink will soon be relient on an IP address and broadband connection, is this really a good idea? Just lay the fiber and get it over with.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I thought they learned the last time not to band-aid these issues. We have fiber that would be upgradeable to ??????? speeds, or we can bottleneck ourselves yet again at 270mbit (and that's probably theoretical only) so in reality maybe 200mbit? So that in another 5-10 years they'll have to do the fiber thing anyways. Why not just do it right the first time so there's a nice long-term upgrade path?
I had Cat6 run from the Fiber terminal up to the computer room when I got FiOS installed. The Fiber will still go to the home but the connection will not be Cat6 according to this article. All it states is that instead of running Ethernet they will use the pre-existing Coax lines to make the connection. I plan on getting the Verizon Television (FiOS TV) and have already read that they will use my pre-existing Coax for that connection.
So this article summary is misleading. The fiber is *still* going to the home, it's just that they will not run Ethernet into the home if they don't need to. Instead using the pre-existing Coaxial runs which are already in place.
Eventually we're going to bump into limits yet again with the coax cabling, so why not still go forth with the fiberoptic plans? -- Jim http://www.runfatboy.net/
However, in cities like Montreal where houses are very old and almost impossible to run any new cabling, this has been an alternative for years. Without this technology, there would have been almost no broadband outside of cable modem in Montreal, much less the majority of the rest of Canada's old cities. However, as its said in the article, this is not primarily for an internet based usage. This is more related to the features of the new IP-based television services. Even in new houses today to find networking cable near a TV is a shot in the dark, and this technology, even though by no means new, will allow Verizon (and the other Telcos that are providing the same service) to install the services without having to ask the customer to change their entire room configurations around. Since the tech provides enough throughput to stream video, its a perfect solution for something that would otherwise cost a lot of money. The post is misleading though as this really has nothing to do with the wiring outside of the home. MoCA is not made for outside use, its an internal usage, with a host adapter acting as the router for the coaxial lines. Coaxial to ethernet bridge, thats all they are.
Um no? Coax in my house is my coax, the cable co doesn't own it. They may own it up to my house, but once it enters the house, it's all mine.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
It's just another ISP corporate "make money without spending it" hoax. You see these once every few years. A major telco/cable conglomerate/backbone operator/ect talks about using some old'n'busted tech to deliver a faster than pie in the sky internet connection. Almost all the initial information is from the marketting dept of the company that is selling the idea (not from engineers or anyone who could really explain how these fabulous data speeds will be accomplished).
Stock Market laps it up like candy. Thinks Company X is going to become the new King of Content Delivery (because, you KNOW all the company's competitors and going to sit on their hands and have their kiesters handed to them by Company X).
Then there will be delays of getting the project actually going. Maybe even some slight downplaying of actual speeds of conetnt delivery.
At some point someone with a PhD in physics or a heavy EE background gets ahold of the actual method of content delivery and point out it simply isn't possible in the real world because of interfereance, older lines than they used in the lab, ect.
Marketting dept for technology company downplays statement made by PhD/EE. Slashdot crowd made up of people who know WAY too much about the national power grid and enough about radio spectrum to work at the FCC pop up to defend the scientist's statements.
More backpedaling of speeds for new service. Marketting direction of new tech starts to veer slightly into the "will allow service in areas not currently reachable by standard broadband providers" direction.
Companies who have not yet publically committed to using tech start to back out. In the others unfortunately, corporate inertia takes over. Whoever greenlighted the project doesn't want to try and back out and look stupid for having wasted plenty of company money at this point.
New tech has limited rollout, shows to be the flop we knew it was the whole time. You never hear about the new tech in the media again and it becomes one of those fringe technologes only seen in rural regions. Perhaps eventually phased out as traditional broadband service (Cable/DSL) are pushed into the region.
A few years pass and major Telcos/Cablecos grouse about the cost of last mile hookups and getting ot that last few % of homes in the middle of nowhere. Stock is tanking on high network infastructure costs gobbling revenue.
But then a company no one's ever heard of pops up with the idea of...
This was actually decided by a court case years ago, you own the cables in your house (Hence, Verizon now charges you when there are problem in your home). One question I would have is whether the cable TV and FIOS and live on the same cable, or if this is a way to force adoption of FIOS TV
Verizon has been surprisingly willing to cable up homes accepting FIOS for almost no money, I've been wondering how long that can go on. Then again, they take a durprisingly long view of this stuff.
Man I want FIOS :(
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
I always thought the cable company owned those lines, and also one of the many reasons why one location is usually never serviced by 2 cable companies.
The cable company owns the cable 1 foot away from the house entrance point. After that, it belongs to the homeowner/landlord. This was decided when the DBS guys started business and some cable companies wanted to block them from using the inside wiring.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
Phone companies managed to get usable broadband over ancient phone lines, and all I have to do is plug in a little adapter to my telephone. This is a good re-use of existing infrastructure, and stock holders should look favorably on this. Of course, a smart company would take some of the resulting savings and keep a fund ready for eventual replacement of their lines.
TFA cites those costs for 2005 as $1,200 and $1,400 respectively.
How exactly is this a profitable business venture when their optimisitc goal is to spend over $1,600 per household for installation of a service that they sell for $40/month, with relatively little commitment to stay with the service?
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
"1394 Trade Association and Pulse~LINK To Demonstrate Bi-Directional HDTV Streaming of IEEE 1394 S400 over Coax at the 2006 International CES, Jan. 5-8"
"The HANA exhibit will showcase how Pulse~LINK's CWave -On-Coax and the 1394TA's S400 interface provide a powerful, whole-home distribution capability that can run over pre-existing in-home coax cable AND co-exist with legacy cable and satellite programming. The demonstration will consist of two 1394-enabled CWave(TM) UWB transceivers, one in the Trade Association's booth and another in the Pulse~LINK booth, with splitters and several hundred feet of coax cable between them. 1394 HDTV audio and video will be streamed bi-directionally between the two booths in the HANA suite, showing how coax cable in the home works as a broadband backbone with 400Mbps application layer throughput for seamlessly transporting multiple simultaneous streams of digital content to 1394-equipped devices throughout the home."
http://www.pulselink.net/pr-jan02-2006.html
Bingo.
... while at the same time, cutting the cable company totally out of the picture.
I think this is the real headline here -- basically what Verizon wants to do is run fiber to your house, to the outside service entrance or basement or whatever, and then unplug the Cable Company's wires from where they attach to the wires inside your house, and plug themselves in there. Then their signal -- instead of the Cable Co.'s -- goes to everyplace you have a cable jack. Which is quite a few places, in many modern homes.
For you, the customer, they can say "hey, you don't need to run Cat 5 all over your house this way"
I think it's their way of responding to the Cable Companies who are bundling TV+Highspeed Internet+VOIP packages, where they install a VOIP box and plug your analog phone into it, effectively cutting out the phone company.
Frankly I think it would be better if both companies agreed on a common wiring standard (hey, how about Cat 6 UTP?) and then plugged THAT into whatever network line the customer wanted to use -- whether it was the Cable Co.'s or the Telco's.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
270 Mbps on coax - the OP was correct, Whoopty-frickin-doo!
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Smooth. Getting the damn fiber in the ground once and for all sounded like too good of a plan did it? Verizon needed a way to move back in time instead of forward? I wonder how many more years carriers will spend trying to squeeze whatever they can out of old, decaying infrastructure. We all know how great cable modems and DSL work compared to 'true' digital circuits (T1, Frame, etc) and fiber-based infrastructure. There are so many fundamental flaws with reusing old wiring for new services that I don't even know where to begin (Cable Modems = shared medium & collision city, DSL = distance limitations and interference, etc.). Because most homes already have coaxial cable installed in several rooms... GIVE ME A BREAK! I'm sure that was a real deal-breaker.
A friend in Ottawa told me how his Bell phone service went out one day and they didn't send someone for at least two days to fix it. He finally went out to the demarc to take a look, and a service guy from Rogers new phone service had CUT HIS PHONE LINE. How's that for a little unwarranted competition between the cable and phone providers?
Oh You POS
No their lines end at the demarc, which is outside the home. All the coax inside the home is the property of the homeowners.
Libertarian: label used by embarrassed Republicans, longing to be open about their greed, drug use and porn collections.
I have FiOS service currently -- phone, internet, and TV -- and they are already putting IP over coax. They use it for the video on demand. They have a simple ethernet to coax bridge (made by Motorola) and the cable box then is able to get it's guide data and VOD streams over the internet connection. What I haven't been able to figure out is if the bandwidth used for VOD is taken out of my 15mbit internet bandwidth allocation or if they have some traffic shaping going on for the VOD separately.
I'm not really sure how it's going to be cheaper -- coax isn't that expensive, and they were more than happy to replace the sub-par cabling that MediaOne/AT&T/Comcast had left behind. They even ran more wire inside the house to accommodate the way I wanted to setup things.
dennis
I have idea for Verizon. Why don't they use some new tech, old tech, or any goddam tech, to stop the overwhelming array of spam originating from zombie PCs in their netblocks? How much shit do we have to put up with before Verizon gets off their lazy asses and stops polluting the net!
AOL and other ISPs have taken aggressive and extremely effective approaches by filtering port 25 traffic on their networks. As a result, the spam and zombie activity from their customers has dropped off dramatically. ISPs like Comcast and Verizon still have yet to do this and they're a major source of internet pollution.
Until Verizon controls the illegal activity of their users, I urge all system administrators to block all port 25 traffic from Verizon IP blocks such as:
68.160.* * - 68.170+
70.16.*.* - 70.23.*.*
70.104.*.* - 70.124.*.*
71.100.*.* - 71.251.*.*
141.150.*.* - 141.158.*.*
151.199.*.* - 151.200.*.*
etc.
Screw you Verizon. Control your idiot users!
Verizon serves a lot of metropolitan areas and rerunning cable (speaking from someone who works in real estate with multiple tenant properties) can be prohibitively expensive for each order. It has to be done all at once--usually at the apartment building owner's expense. Maybe the telecom company will pay to do that--but what company is willing to do that now if their competitor can use the wire as well? And condos/coops? Yeah, just try and get them to agree on a wiring plan--kind of like herding cats.
The whole point of my one line post--this is more to push cable out. If verizon uses coax to deliver its service, then a customer is unlikely to be able to choose cable TV from the cable company and phone and/or internet from Verizon. The net effect of this will be--forced bundling.
Ever since the FCC ruled that all household coax cable belongs to the home owner, cable companies have been more vulnerable than phone companies to the competitor using wiring they often paid to install in the first place. Cable companies are younger than the telcos. Many have not yet recouped all their initial build costs (especially since they had to rebuild only 10-20 years depending on community for internet/phone). If you are going to pay money--any money--to wire a building, you don't want your competitor to use that for free. Verizon's move will definitely tick off the cable companies
I don't really care who wins or loses--both big cable and big telephone companies are evil in my mind. This could get nasty before all is said and done. Expect the government--blech--to have to step in to mediate.
By eliminating the need to rewire every house for Cat5 (or higher), Verizon can cut down on time to wire large areas for FIOS itself. They don't just reduce their cost. Home owners can then later upgrade their home wiring to use the full capacity of FIOS, with or without the support of Verizon.
Verizon (and investors, including in a small part myself) doesn't know if FIOS will be profitable yet. There are a lot of competing techs that are a threat. They can't compete in speed, but they make up for it in their assumed lower cost. Verizon is spending a TON of money on FIOS in the Tampa area and from what I've seen is making very little real profit on it yet.
I'm a bit disappointed that Fibre is being put in by a private company. In my opinion, it should be installed just like streets are--public utilities funded by federal, state, and local governments. It would be a massive upfront cost but the economic gain would, in the long term, be massive. Lease the lines to private companies to provide the actual service. The only thing that would worry me is the government feeling it has the right to monitor all traffic, but I'm sure that isn't too far off from how it is now.
I'm excited for FIOS. My neighborhood is set to be wired in about 2 months.
You can't teach an old cable new techs.
"I used to run my school computer lab on co-ax. What a pain. The connectors were always breaking. They didn't have to completely break either, they just had to go slightly bad and they'd take down the whole network. Anyway I suppose they will come up with a solution that has 'more conventional' connectors because most NICs don't have co-ax connectors."
Hmmm... sounds like the token fell out. Why don't check to see if it rolled under your desk?
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Did no one read the article?
The article? Hell, I didn't bother to read your whole response! As a typical slashdot reader I am far to busy thinking how to vote in the next poll to read anything. I just post here.
What was it you were saying again?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
270mbps AROUND the home, not TO the home
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
Here's the funny thing: 270 Mbits over coax has been around since the early 1990's. It was called CCIR601, but then the ITU dissolved the CCIR so the standard is now known as ITU-R BT Rec.601 or some such alphabet soup. It was also called (inaccurately) "D1 video" (D1 is/was a digital video tape format). Since then, the 270 Mbit transport layer has been used for moving MPEG around, which is called DVB-ASI (that's right, as in the European "Digital Video Broadcasting"). ASI stands for Asychronous Serial Interface, and is the common transport for data between MPEG-2 encoders, IPE's, and MUX's at DTV head ends throughout the world. So, the idea that you could move lotsa stuff around at 270 MBits, even on crappy home-installed RG-6, is not rocket science. Making products that can do that CHEAPLY in the HOME is NEWS! (A DTV head end is a $million or 2.)
(-1, Uninformed)
I switched from Comcast cable modem service to FIOS this past December.
1) Comcast was ~$45/month for 6.6/512k. With FIOS, I splurged and I'm paying $54/month for 30/5. You can, however, stay at $45/month with FIOS and get 15/3. Not to be biased, Comcast is rumored to be increasing their speeds to 16/?? without a price raise, at least around here. But, as a previous reply mentioned, torrents on a 30/5 line are rather sweet.
2) I'm a pure Linux shop at home. The installers had no problem with that. They were more concerned with my Linksys router which I was told has issues with PPPoE at or above 15Mb/sec. They welcomed me to plug it back in, so it wasn't a sales pitch. I eventually found many FIOS forum posts from people experiencing exactly what they described.
3) Their TV service isn't actually available here yet (Comcast stronghold, currently in legislation), but I know from other areas that it isn't IPTV. Their initial test area was somewhere in Texas I believe, and it's interesting to read their reactions to the service, which is extremely good.
Looks like you're wrong on all points. That must suck. A lot.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.