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In Sandy-Struck NJ Town, Verizon Goes All Wireless, No Copper
An anonymous reader writes with a bit from the Asbury Park Press: "'Devastated and wiped out by superstorm Sandy, Verizon has no plans to rebuild its copper-line telephone network in Mantoloking. Instead, Verizon says Mantoloking is the first town in New Jersey, and one of the few areas in the country, to have a new service called Verizon Voice Link. Essentially, it connects your home's wired and cordless telephones to the Verizon Wireless network.' So no copper or fiber to a fairly densely populated area. Comcast will now be the only voice/data option with copper to the area."
copper wireline is expensive, what medium would you expect those DSL customers to get service delivered on?
Fiber would be nice and cheaper than full copper runs.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
They better design the network to be able to withstand the extra load that an emergency situation would create. Imagine the panic when a disaster happens and noone can reach anybody for help or to make sure they're ok.
As someone who lives in a rural area and is forced to use wireless internet (still have copper for my phone though), the reliability and speed still aren't anywhere near that of wired. Speed may not be an issue for just phone, but the inconsistent connection may well be.
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
Why would the PSC and FCC permit this?
Why wouldn't they?
Does that mean every phone call from Mantolocking will sound like it's coming from a cell phone? Blech.
Of course, one benefit of POTS was that, in a power failure, your landline phone would frequently still work because of the giant piles of batteries at the CO. So, you could still dial 911 if, say, your aged relative's breathing assist machine needed power, or if there was some other medical emergency in the midst of what ever caused the power failure. Kind of ironic that, as a result of a disaster, they'll be somewhat more vulnerable to disasters.
Rolling out new copper in this day and age would be madness. But the decision to rely on wireless as anything other than a short-term emergency measure is wrong. They should, of course, be rolling out new fiber as a matter of urgency.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
They're doing the same thing on Fire Island. From what I heard, they were planning to run FiOS before Sandy, so I imagine this is just a stop-gap.
Which would be fine, save for one problem: their coverage *sucks* out there. When the summer season hits in less than a month, we're screwed.
This means that there's now a market chance for anyone willing to put down optic fiber in the area.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
we do have LTE [...] I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up. I can stream and torrent reliably.
But for how long at a time? With the 5 GB per month transfer cap that was typical of LTE plans last time I checked, a 10 Mbps transfer would eat up the entire month's allowance in one hour.
No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.
In addition, running fiber not only requires the fiber itself, but you also have to have repeaters, which means you need copper power lines running parallel with the fiber lines. Sure you could depend on the power grid, but then you have to forgo the classic emergency benefit where the phone lines worked even during a blackout. This is precisely the reason why all long distance fiber lines do invariably come with copper, in fact many of which need a lot of copper (far more than voice grade lines) since one of the sheathing layers is made out of copper to make it more resilient against damage while still being somewhat flexible.
DSL itself is rather low tech, and is probably right now about as good as its going to get, likewise IMO it's not even worth bothering to rebuild it. You can only do so much with voice grade copper since it can only carry a very limited number of channels, unlike say cable which is shielded far better and is easily capable of 5.1Gbit/s if you use all available channels up to 1Ghz. (In most of the existing infrastructure you can go up to 3Ghz, it's just a matter of having better transmitters and receivers to take advantage of it. Dump the analog channels and you'll get even more out of it.)
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Does Comcast need to rebuild all their infrastructure too? There may not be any landline game in town for some time.
The engineers at Verizon aren't complete idiots, you know. I'm sure they've calculated the cost of adding some cells to handle the demand and found it cheaper than running new copper. And if the business drones are worth the suits on their backs they'll be worried about Comcast poaching customers, so they wouldn't balk at *some* investment to recover from a disaster with some of their reputation intact.
Why would the PSC and FCC permit this?
I guess on the same reasoning as the "Dubyaphone" program that began in 2008 and extended the Lifeline program of the Universal Service Fund to mobile phones.
It's one thing to run a trunk line to the towers, and a whole other thing (due to flooding) to dig up and replace the smaller lines to each individual house.
I think they're far more likely to do a better job with modern wireless than POTS anyways. Newer modulation techniques allow for far more bandwidth and signal reliability, especially given that since you aren't dealing with a tiny cell phone with limited battery you could get away with using a higher power transmitter at the customer end, coupled with a UPS for emergency use.
You have to keep in mind as well that POTS also has a finite number of possible links at once, dare I say probably even more limited than wireless. In a POTS connection, you are literally establishing a dedicated circuit from point A to point B by use of a series of automated switchboards. There are only going to be so many circuits that can be active at any one time in any particular area. This is one reason, by the way, that long distance POTS calls are more expensive than long distance wireless calls, and consequently why wireless carriers make no distinction between local and long distance: they use virtual circuits instead of switched circuits.
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Verizon has likely pocketed tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance to cover loss of business and to 'make good' its infrastructure. Verizon then neglects to make good and proceeds with building an inferior alternative at a fraction of the cost.
It would be interesting to see if the insurance company paid for the cost of this new infrastructure; provided funds to the value of the existing infrastructure; or provided funds for the replacement cost of the existing infrastructure. In the case of the latter two, has Verizon returned the unspent portion to the insurance company (and are they required to?) or simply added this windfall to their bottom line.
It also makes me wonder how much federal and state funding was used to build this network.
[Rent This Space]
This is one reason, by the way, that long distance POTS calls are more expensive than long distance wireless calls, and consequently why wireless carriers make no distinction between local and long distance: they use virtual circuits instead of switched circuits.
Is that how the 10-10 dial-around carriers of the late 1990s were able to offer such low rates?
Wireless infrastructure still has battery backups there's nothing different there from a POTS. The only difference here is how to power the endpoint devices since the system won't power them directly. There's no reason why this couldn't be battery powered. This is actually how FTTH endpoints are usually setup, with a local battery backup at the home ensuring voice over the fibre line keeps running when your power doesn't.
There are off the shelf solutions for this problem which work quite well.
Regardless of whether it is fibre or wireless the one problem that seems to have been overlooked is what happens in a power cut? The only reason we still have a landline is because of its reliability in an emergency. If local phone companies cut the copper link - which provides external power to a non-cordless phone - I'll dump them and switch to a cheaper net-based alternative.
That would be providing Verizon relinquishes the space on the poles - and I wouldn't bet on them doing so.
If they refuse to run copper or cable then the local government should terminate their monopoly privileges and either allow another supplier to lay the wires or open service to full free market competition.
Google! Google! Google! Come to me Google!
Great oppurtunity for Google to roll out fiber to the area and to break Verizon's monopoly by showing them up in the state. Maybe even get the politicians to back em.
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
The area that they are talking about is very much a seasonal residence. Most people I know in those areas don't have landline service anyway. They cut the cord on that years ago. It's not worth the investment if only 30% of the residences will take up the service anyway.
Seriously, wireless is great for when I'm out and about and all I have is my cell phone or when I'm making a quick, temporary connection with the laptop, but I would not feel comfortable living somewhere I couldn't have a physical last mile connection - fiber or cable is fine, (though I'd pay for BOTH to have redundant last mile connections)
I get that it's cheaper to go wireless, but there appears to be a great divide between Internet reliability and speed - those with last mile wired connections and those with only wireless options (satellite of local wireless carriers) and in our mad rush to make things more convenient, we're also making them slower and less reliable than they could be.
I suppose I could look at it another way - it would cost WAY MORE than the phone company could hope to make back to re-run copper, so from a business sense, I guess this works for them.
However, if I were Verizon, I'd be rolling out the fiber to premises, and give Comcast something to worry about... but instead, they're abandoning FIOS... go figure.
The Digital Sorceress
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
Underground cables aren't a panacea that protect you from all outages -- underground cables are more susceptible to water intrusion, ground shifting (a big issue in an earthquake), digging accidents etc. And outages take longer to fix.
But who says yhou put in voice grade copper?
I think Verizon shpuld be required to replace the downed copper. That's what the maintenence fees the customers have been paying forever were to cover.
because despite what talk radio may assert, the function of regulating agencies is not to supress improved modern technology. the only time i ever lost any coverage on my cell due to a storm was when a lightning bolt popped the cell tower near my home. blizzards, high wind, and floods all make mincemeat out of copper threads hanging from sticks anyways and buried copper is more durable but takes forever to fix when it does get wrecked.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
+1
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From the looks of it, it would take about 10,000 feet of fiber to cover it. Unfortunately, as a barrier island they would likely have problems making it reliable-- either dig deep or do it cheap. If the community cares, they could set up a co-op with whatever infrastructure they choose.
POTTS lines are heavily regulated as to rates and service levels, this is why the connection rates are cheap and anything more than lifeline service is heavily levied.
The phone company is obligated to provide 911 service and lifeline at regulated rates.
This presents a business model with limited revenue and high maintenance liability, because folks that rely on this model don't use the phone excessively and are very careful about long distance charges.
With wireless service the phone co is no longer legally obligated for 24/7/365 functional service and has dramatically reduced it's maintenance costs (as it can over subscribe it's service capabilities) and skirts the regulated fee structure. On top of that they can bring in more revenue by charging an unregulated monthly flat rate even if they give free LD.
It's all about the money....... Look at the wireless model, over subscribed, 2-3 times the monthly rates (plus overages), and now since everyone has to have a phone there are 3-5 (or more) accounts per household where there used to be only 1-2. PLUS they can cripple the phones and nickle and dime you for "features" enabled. KachING!
On the west coast Verizon sold off all of it's buried wire and fiber.....
Rick B.
It must be entertaining to play quake. Then again if Verizon used really good AP's maybe its not much different.
You would actually benefit from a more homogeneous network assuming everyone used Verizons wireless access points vs adding their own in. Properly configured wireless networks can load balance the signal and configure for the least noise. The good routers are pretty sophisticated and reliable at doing this.
they wouldn't balk at *some* investment to recover from a disaster with some of their reputation intact
I've spoken with folks who have made these sorts of decisions in the past at Verizon. The question is entirely dependent on whether the ROI in Mantaloking is higher than investing that same money in a different location. The reputation hit can be factored into the equation.
They have a monopoly, so there's not a competitive pressure, and rarely do they get mandates on their regulated monopoly.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
You should look into PON as a consumer access technology. No fusion splicing on customer premise, passive splitters, and enough range to cover entire communities with power only provided by the Central Office. All of your points are absolutely true of traditional fiber services, but PON is rising in popularity because it sidesteps all of them while remaining cheaper than copper while still delivering services up to 1 Gbps.
Additionally, VDSL2 with Bonding (and eventually Vectoring) turns traditional cable plant into a very expensive waste of money - cable loops are longer and a shared medium, while copper loops terminate directly from the customer premise to a cabinet or Central Office. This allows the ISP to deliver service with true data rates using existing copper up to and beyond 150 Mbps. Ultimately though, DSL and Cable will be replaced by PON.
America, it really looks like your only hope is Google Fiber.
Given the limited reach and aims of Google, it's not much of a hope.
I think Verizon should forfeit their rights to the landline infrastructure and associated rights of way. These can, in turn, be rewarded to someone who can maintain and improve upon them.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
But who says yhou put in voice grade copper? I think Verizon shpuld be required to replace the downed copper. That's what the maintenence fees the customers have been paying forever were to cover.
You are mistaken. The maintenance fees are for the maintenance of the bank accounts of the board of directors.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.
Why do YOU get to decide what is "proper"? Who appointed you?
If plastic and LEDs work what the hell is wrong with using that?
Fiber is getting cheaper all the time. People don't steal fiber because the scrap value of glass or plastic is high.
Besides, fiber can support way higher bandwidth, by your own admission in your last paragraph.
And fiber is not a scarce commodity, whereas both copper and wireless spectrum is.
Verizon is still going to have to put fiber back into this town in order to supply bandwidth that people want for their computer connections. Pushing voice to wireless is a short term solution at best, with no growth path, whereas pushing fiber to the premises just makes sense.
Abandoning the copper may make sense. But going all wireless is not sustainable in the long run.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
The advanced Asian countries have faster and cheaper mostly-fiber networks than the Europeans, deal with more natural disasters than they do, and once you get more than a kilometer out of central-business-district Seoul/Tokyo/Osaka, the air is thick with wires everywhichaway.
'That's what they do in Europe' isn't necessarily perfection, either.
That copper to home did not mean copper from the plant to home.
In newer areas, the power failed after six hours. The phone company had fiber to a local box which had batteries and copper to the houses.
In my older area of town, the power stayed on to the phone (but we lacked electrical power for 3 weeks and only old dumb phones worked- anything with a power plug didn't).
I think the days of copper to home are going away. Hopefully we can get fiber to the home.
I would prefer to see one wide fiber pipe which all the telephone companies share and use and compete for your service on. I think a pure wireless approach won't work at times.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
VDSL2 with bonding will likely cap out at practical speeds of 100Mbps or so. If you push the remotes even close to the customer, perhaps 150 or even 200. Cable with DOCSIS 3.1 fully dedicated to IP can push 10 Gbps over node sizes that are similar to GPON. My cableco is already using 10GPON-style node sizes.
VDSL2 has no long-term future, while coax can compete with the best PON fiber we've got today.
Those maintenance fees cover the occasional fried wire, copper theft, or some derp digging where he isn't supposed to. They aren't meant to cover an entire infrastructure being demolished.
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Mantoloking is a Jersey Shore community situated on the Barnegat Peninsula, also known as Barnegat Bay Island, a long, narrow barrier island that separates Barnegat Bay from the Atlantic Ocean.
As of the 2000 Census, Mantoloking was the wealthiest community in the state of New Jersey with a per capita money income of $114,017 as of 1999, an increase of 29.8% from the $87,830 recorded in 1989. It was ranked as the 15th highest-income place in the United States.
Mantoloking, New Jersey
Population 300. As a summer resort, 5,000.
Anything you build here will be exposed and vulnerable, I am not sure that trenching cable solves that problem.
Most of what you build here will see little or no use eight to nine months out of the year --- and little or no return on your investment.
POTS goes virtual the moment it leaves the voice switch it is terminated into. At least in any modern phone system.
Well for example, plastic from the beginning isn't as clear, and over time turns yellow. This means you'll have slower data rates, and over time they get even slower. This is why for example that TOSLINK optical cable was only capable of 4mbit whereas SPDIF coax could do 10mbit, because they wanted to take into account cable degredation. Glass doesn't have any of these problems; as far as we know it can last forever.
And LED is only capable of transmitting a single channel, not to mention that like plastic, over time it dims and you'll have that degraded performance over time I talked about. And while lasers don't last forever, they certainly last longer than LED's.
Nobody needs to appoint me, what I'm stating is just a fact. If you cut corners, you'll regret it. If you want the government to take over and build its own LED/plastic fiber network, be my guest, but don't get pissed off later when you run into problems.
And also, if you actually read what I posted, fiber still needs a lot of copper, so your copper argument doesn't work. And yes, wireless capacity can and does increase, even without increasing spectrum. For example, when we first started using wireless, we used TDMA. TDMA is horribly inefficient compared to CDMA in terms of both aggregate bandwidth and range, or the even better OFDMA modulation that LTE uses. There are also other techniques that we don't use yet such as polarization because the technology to miniaturize it just isn't there yet.
I don't think you understand the technology. In fact I don't even think I need to explain all of this. Judging by your hostile tone, I think you're just arguing just for the sake of arguing. It just so happens that Verizon has the most reliable, fastest, well covered wireless network in the US, so I think their engineers probably know pretty well what they're doing. If their engineers say this will work better than rebuilding the copper network from the ground up, I'll believe them.
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Going underground is easy (ish) to do when a community is being built up from scratch, but putting it into a place where there is existing infrastructure is a nightmare.
Anybody care to guess how many days it would take Verizon to change its mind about FiOS if Google showed up at the next Mantoloking city council meeting & offered to deploy Google Fiber there if the city paid the direct costs of laying the fiber itself? Oh, and offered to pay for the lawyers the city would need when Verizon and Comcast fought back the only way modern American corporations seem to be capable of competing -- by using the courts to block it, instead of trying to outdo them by offering better and faster service...
The big problem with Comcast is that it's unreliable, and makes no attempt at being otherwise. When a Comcast service area has a region-wide commercial power outage, Comcast goes down, and stays down, until commercial power is restored. Sometimes, it doesn't even take a regional outage. Last year, Tropical Storm Isaac took down Comcast for several hours across Dade & Broward counties. The failure's apparent cause? A power outage at a SINGLE LOCATION along their backhaul route. They talk about customers with backup power, but it only works if your house is literally the only one on the block without power. The moment the blackout extends to your neighborhood, or any point along the backhaul route between your house and their network center, your internet service is gone.
Ten years ago, a fragile market compromise existed between "the company that used to be the phone company", and "the company that used to be the cable company". The phone company had DSL. It wasn't as fast as cable, but it was built to run on carrier-grade infrastructure and enjoyed most of its same robust backup power and reliability. The cable company had DOCSIS. It was faster than DSL, but nowhere near as reliable. So, consumers kind of had a choice... slower service that rarely went down, or faster service that had daily interruptions & got knocked down for the count whenever ANYTHING significant happened to the local power grid. Then... our wonderful regulators decided to allow the phone company to neglect its infrastructure and allow it to degrade to the non-reliability of cable, and now we have lots of places where there really ISN'T anything that approaches the former reliability and robustness of landline phone service.
Wireless might be fast to bring back up after a storm, but buried copper with battery power at the central office didn't used to go down at all. There were people who came home to neighborhoods wiped away by Hurricane Andrew, and were greeted by phones making "off hook" noises from under the rubble. It was the lucky consequence of having mostly buried telecommunications infrastructure that was built to survive a 20-megaton nuclear bomb falling within 2 miles of downtown Miami, and another pair of bombs falling within a mile or two of Homestead Air Force Base. Today, U-verse isn't quite as bad as Comcast (AT&T still owns generators that were purchased years ago, though the state no longer requires them to maintain or use them), but the sad truth is that our nation's telecommunications infrastructure today is a pale, ghetto-fabulous shadow of what it used to be. Reliability and availability can no longer be taken for granted at any level unless you own your own fiber and have direct control over its endpoints so you can provide your own backup power. Even services like Frame Relay that were once protected by ironclad SLAs and stiff, automatic penalties with teeth, are now at risk of carriers just looking the other way and making a business decision to pay the fines and let the network go down because it's cheaper to take a hit for a few days now than to invest the capital into five-nines or better uptime.
100Mbps is plenty for a home user. Yes, yes, 640k will be enough for anyone, etc. But really, what will need more than that? That's enough for many simultaneous high definition video streams. VDSL2 allows easily good enough performance at a far lower cost than putting new cabling in.
The coax infrastructure is also far less widely available than the twisted pair. In my country, only about 50% of the population have access to it, compared to nearly everyone for the phone lines. If you're going to deploy entirely new cabling, you might as well make it fibre and avoid the need for powered equipment in the field - the coax, like the twisted pair, is only worthwhile because it's already there.
" and using lasers instead of LED"
Boy do I have some news for you. Pretty much every Laser in use today that isn't a gas laser is based right off an LED.
Source: I make LED and solid-state laser equipment.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Mechanical circuit switching is long dead, and electronic circuit switching is no more limited in capacity than packet switching. The reason long distance was more expensive was that in the old days it really was very expensive to install a lot of long distance capacity, and this was true for data as well as voice. Fibre changed all that, so if they're still charging a fortune it's solely because they can. Some phone companies here in the UK offer unlimited international calls (to come countries) in their bundles, but there's now a (regulator enforced) competitive market. The old monopoly telco, BT, would never have done anything like that.
"And LED is only capable of transmitting a single channel,"
Umm, we've got multi-path LED-laser arrays, multi-wavelength, that are so tiny you could couple one to a 2mm fiber.
And because they're not in a wavelength that will actually hurt the plastic transmission medium, no yellowing over time, as long as the fiber is underground and properly protected.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
So they'd just stick the equivalent charge for your voice service (which is really almost entirely paying for the physical infrastructure) on your DSL bill instead. Bundling is common in such situations, because it doesn't really cost them significantly more to provide line + voice service than line alone.
Fibre as a replacement for the copper local loop doesn't need repeaters. The typical range of GPON is about 20 km, which is far longer than any copper loop. You can achieve blackout availability by the rather simple measure of having a battery at the user's premises to power the fibre terminating equipment.
You don't put fiber on poles if you are smart, you put it underground.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
If their engineers say this will work better than rebuilding the copper network from the ground up, I'll believe them.
Who said Verizon's engineers think this is a better idea? I'm sure their input was limited to,"Can we do this, instead of that?", not,"Which is the better solution?"
The US government have made it clear that we have no inalienable rights; any we do not defend vigorously will be taken.
. . . and he should be thankful that most modern lasers are LED-based. How long do the gas tubes for lasers last, what is their failure rate, what is the response times (on/off/on cycles), and what are the power requirements?
Smaller and cheaper does not always mean inferior. The "you get what you pay for" rule is a broad generalization which often proves to be untrue when it comes to modern technology.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Copper just won't float. In all seriousness even string fiber may not be wise as what we know in Florida is that when storms hit usually storms will hit again. Sadly plans to survive a major hurricane strike are not simple at all and usually take many decades to get right. They have a rising sea level and erosion which are battles yet to be won, anywhere. With warmer oceans the strength and frequency of hurricanes will increase. The land fall sites at which they tend to strike may also be highly effected. The homes in N.J. and New York that were destroyed would not last at all in South Florida. I went through the eye of three major hurricanes in one summer six years ago. As bad as they were they were far from the worst i have been through. The concrete floor of my building was vibrating with a distinct hum at one point. The concrete building was actually threatening to decompose at that point. An identical building one hundred yards away had its roof land in the lake. The car dealership near by pancaked. Our grocery stores universally had roof portions destroyed and lost all food within. It took three weeks after Katrina before I had power and it was two days before enough trees were pushed off of the streets to even get out of my complex.
Best hint Buy and store a sterno stove with plenty of sterno. That way you can have some hot food and coffee while you wait it out. Liquid fuels are unsafe in storms and run out way too quickly after storms. If you try to use a generator to keep things going and it is a month before power returns you will need to have about 300 gallons of fuel which you will not be able to buy after the strike. Propane is the alternative.
100Mbps is plenty for a home user.
You, sir, are mentally deficient.
VDSL technologies do NOT provide a 100Mbps service.
They provide an UP TO 100Mbps service.
As the bandwidth capacity of the service is dependent on copper-length and quality the provider MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEES REGARDING SERVICE QUALITY.
However, with a fibre service, they DO provide guarantees, because fibre in the last mile is a truly digital service, either it works or it doesn't.
And when it works, it works at the full service specification, none of that WEASEL WORDING like "up to" which means they can charge you for 100Mbps service but if all you can get is 2Mbps YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO RECOURSE.
This is ONE of the MAJOR problems with ALL copper-in-the-last-mile services, it's all about THE PROVIDER legally being able to provide a FUCKING AWFUL SERVICE and still charge you premium service pricing.
AAAAND don't get me started on the MASSIVELY HUGE difference in upload speed between copper vs fibre in the last mile.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
In many countries, like Canada (mine) and the US), coax is ubiquitous. Penetration is virtually universal. VDSL2 is a nice upgrade over ADSL (I personally have 50 meg VDSL2), but it'll never get that much faster. Bonding and vectoring might hit 150ish, that's about it. Coax, which as I said is near universal, can hit much much higher speeds, and with DOCSIS 3.1 is competes directly with fiber. This is why the phone companies like Bell are using fiber to compete with coax. Yes, they still deploy VDSL2, but only where they haven't got around to deploying fiber yet.
The big difference is that the coax is already there, and has been for decades, while the fiber is only just starting to see decent deployment.
How about we stop building permanant housing along the coast.
I used to be
How far are we from having everything in the cloud so home access points aren't doing anything other than running a display?
When Aussie gamers are running their games on machines at colo centres in the USA so their lag times are lower, I would say the days of getting massive amounts of data to a local computer are numbered.
If I can buy a fixed connection for $70/mo or a completely mobile one for the same amount of money at 1/2 the speed, which one are most people going to take? I think the days of having a line run to everyone's home is numbered.
I'm currently (for the last several years) paying $40/month for 7Mbps "naked" ADSL from Verizon in NYC.
When I asked for something similar at another location they said that standalone DSL was no longer available and that I should get a voice phone line plus 1Mbps DSL for $50/month. I went with Clear instead (so far so good).
Ya... coax penetration is nothing even remotely close to universal in the US. It's virtually non-existant in rural America.
My local cell tower is connected to the same street cabinet as my landline phone, so unless the problem was between the end of my street and my house, anything that affects landlines is also going to affect mobiles.
I wasn't even thinking about that aspect which is true enough. I was thinking more about a properly run network in a technological sense. I can correct myself by saying many companies could have their "good" access points working together on the same network infrastructure. I.e. Verizon and Time Warner can inter-operate with the same above mentioned technical capacity.
Ditto. I'd rather use dial-up with unlimited, oh wait. Thanks Verizon. :( Why don't they just deploy damn fiber?
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I agree.
Yeah. A person who spends his time running short runs of cable would think that - because he thinks only in terms of the cost of the cable. But when you are digging up streets the cost of running the cable completely dominates the cost of the physical medium, and because of that other attributes of fibre come into play.
Firstly, it can support longer runs - as in 20 km 5km. That means it can cover 16 times the area before it is necessary to put active electronics and air-conditioning in the street. Secondly, it lasts longer. No one really knows how long because it doesn't break, but manufacturers are currently offering 50 year guarantees. And it is water proof.
So, yes while fibre may be slightly more expensive to run - particularly for short runs, the longer term maintenance costs are far smaller. Quite apart from anything else, simply doubling the amount of time before you have to re-run the cable dwarfs any savings you might make medium.
So you are dead wrong. When running new cable for the last mile fibre is the cheaper option in the long term. No one in their right mind would run copper nowadays.
When I took my laptop into the Verizon store and asked for wireless support for Ubuntu Linux, I was told that "Linux was not available on personal computers. It was only for big, expensive computers such as those in Universities and in Hollywood." One of the kids at the store had briefly worked at Pixar. I booted up my laptop to show them, and they were astounded, as if I'd brought a tiger or a cobra into the store. Sprint, by accident, supports Linux on broadband. Verizon is casual about the responsibilities of their position as a utility. Why shouldn't they be casual? This is the United States of America, where near-monopolies are encouraged, right? Their only duty is to provide profits for shareholders, and otherwise they've already paid for ... what was on sale when the government auctioned the airwaves. Ask Verizon about Apple, then, or Windows. Or ask for a phone. Or ask for directions elsewhere.
I cannot believe no one has yet rebutted your comments.
You, sir, are an idiot. (I would have used an expetive pronoun, but that would have been unprofessional.) You have absolutely no idea at all about the market forces or pricing when it comes to a fiber vs. copper plant, nor do you have any understanding about how *real* fiber is made or used, or glaringly obviously do not understand the technology driving the fiber.
Here are a few examples:
1) "... using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic". There is no "plastic" fiber in use for professional infrastructure communication. We're not carrying your audio signal between your blu-ray and receiver, or lighting your dashboard.
2) "... lasers instead of LED" LEDs are ONLY used in some multimode applications. Obviously, we need more than that type of range. All infrastructure fiber is based on 1400+ NM wavelengths (other than RF overlay), which requires real lasers.
3) "... you also have to have repeaters" Wrong. Fiber ONT SFPs easily communicate to 10 KM, and there are more powerful versions that will communicate with their OLTs at 60+ KM.
4) "... then you have to forgo the classic emergency benefit where the phone lines worked even during a blackout" Wrong. ONTs are installed using a small UPS that keeps the ONT available. Also, ONTs will deactivate all ethernet connections (subscriber-side) during an outage to preserve power.
5) "since one of the sheathing layers is made out of copper to make it more resilient against damage while still being somewhat flexible" Nope. Aluminum and kevlar are typically used.
I am not a cable plant operator, so I do not know the specs of cable plants. However, I do know my fiber infrastructure has (as far as we know) close to unlimited capacity: terabit speeds have been presented in lab settings, and 100 Gb is very common, over the exact same fiber that goes to a subscriber's home. I use "unlimited" here as a marker that we have not yet found the physical limitation of fiber, and may not for a long time to come.
If you don't know about a subject, don't post about it.