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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 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
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.
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...
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?
"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.
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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.
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
You can't teach an old cable new techs.
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.
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