Well, it helps to have the phone box with a battery backup in case your home electricity goes out. If cable is still working in that event, then you still have telephone service. I can't count the number of tornadoes I've lived through and had no power for hours while the telephones continued to work. Then again there were times when both went out.
I didn't say it was a bad idea to have a phone box with a battery backup. I take issue with their idiot salespeople telling people that battery backups means it will keep working when the power goes out. That battery backup means it might continue working. If the whole neighborhood goes down then odds are it won't continue working.
Basically, shit happens, and the more the service providers can do remotely and locally to ensure that service interruptions are kept to a minimum, the better. Cable companies are very serious about rolling out telephony (due to FCC and state regulations regarding telephony) and generally have a very high uptime in the areas they offer the service.
Generally have a very high uptime vs never goes down is not a hard decision to make in my book. Personally I don't understand the appeal behind cable telephony at all. If you are willing to cut the cord to POTS then get a cell phone and go that route. At least you can take the cell phone with you. That's my approach. Cell phone and dry loop DSL. If I ever move somewhere without cell service then I'll have a POTS line.
actually all of our power supplies (that power the amplfiers/nodes) have battery backup. In my area they are regularly serviced and checked and usually have an uptime of around 45 minutes. They also have alarms that signal us as to when commercial power goes out. Long enough for us to get a generator out there and power it. Anything else?
That must explain why all my neighbors using cable telephony came over to my house to use my POTS line to make calls during the floods back at the end of June when my neighborhood (note: not the area, just my neighborhood) had no power.
The amplifiers are line powered. The cable trunk has a few hundred volts DC across it. Not to mention, cable companies often have UPSs installed on poles. Ever see the big gray boxes that say "Alpha" on them? Those are UPSes.
Wow, all that redundancy must explain why I have no cable service when the power goes out.
Thanks for the info! To be clear, my DSL service has not gone down once. I have had some outages with cable, and power-out does take out Comcast here but not DSL.
Yeah, I also read right past your comments about voting with your wallet. This was another reason I went with DSL. $44.95 for Roadrunner vs $29.95 for DSL. Heck if it wasn't for that pesky thing known as bittorrent I could probably have the $14.95 768/128 package:) I'm a cheap SOB!
Also, my telco is AT&T, so my local ISP is forced to use them. I worked for an ISP that had Verizon as the telco, and I found their DSL setup to be a bit better.
Verizon does seem to invest more money then the other telcos (mainly Frontier) that I've dealt with. I've had huge issues with them in getting change orders/new business executed properly (spent 12 hours on the phone with them over three days trying to get business lines installed once) but generally speaking once the service is installed and working properly you never have to mess with it again. You don't think about it -- it just works.
My CO for Ma Bell (I mean Indiana Bell(I mean Ameritech(I mean SBC(I mean AT&T))))
Hahaha, nice:)
is in the sticks and is very old. There are hardly any businesses that feed off of it, so I don't think they invest in the lines or equipment any more than they need to.
If you want to talk about the sticks I could tell you some Frontier stories. Back in the days of dial-up I worked for a small ISP. We couldn't get digital trunk lines so we ordered individual POTS lines for all of our modem banks. Eventually we had some 450 POTS lines coming into that building (you should have seen the size of the cable coming off the pole), roughly 60% of the total installed lines for that entire exchange! Another sticks story is my current employer who happens to be in Frontier land. We have a 38,000 foot loop length. That's right, thirty eight thousand feet! We can't get DSL (gee, wonder why?) or cable, so we had to settle for satellite internet. Eventually we got the funding to get a T-1. They had to install five repeaters to get it to us!
However, I'm like 13,000+ feet from the CO, so my DSL line has at least 30ms just to get to the CO. Bad weather, wind speed, and political polls seem to affect the quality of my DSL line, and my Vonage calls are consistantly lower quality than being on cable.
Umm, I'm 14,000 feet according to Verizon and I get rock solid 1.5/384 service. I missed the cutoff for 3.0/768 service by only a few thousand feet. It could be an issue with the technology that your DSL provider uses? Who knows. In my particular case I got sick of waiting for Time Warner to solve my problem with Roadrunner. My DSL isn't as fast (RR is 5.0/384 here) but it's never once gone down and I have 16 months of netsaint logs to prove that. Heck, I ran my PC off a generator during the floods here (had no power for four days) and my DSL was still working. Think I had cable TV service? Nope.
don't regret my decision, I still want to vote with my cash. But cable, from a performance standpoint, was better for my Vonage than DSL.
You go with what's best for you. I used RoadRunner for over three years without any major problems. It would go down for 10 or 15 minutes here or there (once every three months or so), but if I didn't use Netsaint odds are I wouldn't even have noticed. If I did a lot of downloading then I'd probably still want it.... although if I could get Verizon's 3.0/768 tier I'd take that over 5.0/384 in a heartbeat. 768 would be a lot nicer for my share ratios on bittorrent:)
But in any case, I only wanted to share my opinions and experiences. You can probably use cable in 90% of the country with no problems. If all I cared about was data then it wouldn't even bother me much. But if I'm reling on VoIP phone service as my own method of communication then I want the data circuit that's more reliable. And generally speaking that's DSL.
Try living next door to a guy who occationally welds in his garage at night without your knowledge and see how long it takes to figure out why your POTS line disconnects on some evenings...
Hmmm........ I don't see why that would cause a problem but I guess I'll take your word for it.
Cable generally is pretty crappy, but if it doesn't survive power outages in your area then you have a particularly terrible provider. There is probably a battery alarm somewhere that they are just ignoring.
The people at the office claim it does survive. According to their field techs the reason it does not survive is that they don't have a provision for backup power for the amplifiers in the field. I wouldn't care if it was just cable TV (how much TV do you watch with no power?) but it bothers me that they sell digital phone with a battery backup and claim it will work when clearly it does not. Maybe other cable providers do have provisions to back these things up. In my area though and with Time Warner they do not.
I'm skeptical about your 45 year old TV story though. If it was true, and the tech was worth his paycheck, it should have taken them under a day to figure out the problem. They were probably lying. They may not even know why your service started working again.
Eh, they weren't lying. If it was the office people I'd say they were but the field techs are generally pretty easygoing and don't have a lot of motivation to lie to you. It took him that long to figure it out because the problem was highly intermittent and would vanish by the time he got to my house. When they finally managed to get a tech out there when it was happening they tracked it down in a single afternoon. It was intermittent because it only happened when that TV was turned on. In any case I'm not blaming them for not being able to solve the problem quickly. Just pointing out that the last mile of a telco network wouldn't have had it in the first place. Dedicated circuit vs shared medium.
Incidentally the problem was so bad that I'd see static on channels 2 and 3 when it was happening. It killed my upstream channel on RR -- but the downstream (and channels higher then 3) were unaffected.
The telco is obliged to connect a pair of wire from the telco office to your premises for voice service. They can use any pair to the neighborhood, any pair to the pedestal and any pair to your house. Some of that wiring is older, some of that wiring is damaged, some of that wiring has other equipment attached. It's not uncommon for bad crossconnects to be made. The telco can change what pairs are providing the loop to your house at any time, perhaps to pairs that are of lower quality than you previously had, and subject again to the possibility of bad crossconnects. All of those things have an effect on internet service over POTS lines, and hence, VoIP over DSL.
And if you have a decent telco they will fix problems caused by a bad pair. I've also never known a telco to "change the pairs at any time". Generally speaking, once service is provisioned they don't touch the pairs. Often times the pair to your house is already figured out and when you order service all they do is plug it in at the switch/turn it on. Sometimes you already have dial tone (albeit only for 911) before you order phone service.
It's not fair to say that a bad pair will ruin your DSL service. A decent phone company will correct this. Verizon does. Frontier does. A bad phone company will ruin DSL service just as quickly as a bad cable company will ruin cable modem service. I'm comparing the technologies. What's more reliable in your experience? Coax based ethernet (a signal node brings down the whole segment) or cat5 with a decent switch/hub that can isolate a bad port? Shared RF medium vs decicated circuit.
Cable, on the other hand, has far fewer "moving parts." Fewer pieces of physical equipment and cabling lowers the likelihood that there will be breakage in the normal course of operations. And when there is breakage, it's not just the one phone line to one place has a little extra noise on it - the symptom is more widespread, meaning the company is (should be) more motivated to fix it. "Noise on the line that effects DSL speed" isn't usually cause enough for the telco to make repairs, since they only really have to give you phone service. If it's not affecting phone service, tough luck.
And cable is orders of magnitude easier to interfere with. Can you picture a scenario in which a bad phone in your neighbors house messes with your POTS/DSL service? Unless he is on a party line with you his circuit is completely separated from yours. And "tough luck"? If my DSL isn't provisioning at the speed that I was sold then Verizon will fix it.
Sorry, not true. In the USA, the major phone carriers did change to digital years ago (about 20 years for AT&T). But each digitized voice call was placed on a particular *channel* of a DS1/DS3/OCx circuit between each switching node, and it stays on that channel through the duration of the call. The whole set-up of the PSTN is that the separate signalling network is used to set up a path which is dedicated to one call for its duration.
Good point. But the guy you replied to missed my original point anyways. I wan't talking about the PSTN. I was talking about the last mile. My point was that the last mile of telco technology is more reliable and harder to mess with then the last mile of cable technology, which is basically a shared RF medium.
This may change as services like FiOS takeover for the cooper local loop (FiOS is a shared optical medium) -- but until that happens I'll take dedicated pair of copper over shared coax network any day of the week.
Note: I'm not saying cable service sucks. If you care more about download speed then you'd probably rather have cable modem service. If you care about fault tolerance and reliability then you want DSL.
You've apparently never dealt with BellSouth before. My mother's BellSouth service is down on average once a month. Sometimes I'll try to call her and I get what sounds like a fax machine - at the same time, they are unable to call out or even get a dial-tone. This has been occurring for the past 10 years, and lasts about 2-4 hours every occurrance.
Then she needs to document these problems and complain to her state regulatory agency. In virtually every state in the country POTS service is regulated and held to standards of reliability. In New York State you'd solve that problem with one phone call to the public service commission.
Give the telco two or three attempts at fixing it. Then call up the PSC/whatever your state's equiv is. You don't have this appeals process with cable/cell phones, because they have fought tooth and nail against being regulated.
So an HFC network with BPI+ implemented affords more security than a POTS/DSL line since it is encrypted from end to end.
You choose to ignore the "jammed" part of my statement.
Explain to me why something as simple as a old TV that's leaking RF onto the cable plant is enough to completely disable the upstream channel of a cable modem across an entire neighborhood? Explain to me what happens when somebody malicious figures this out and jams Roadrunner/VoIP service for an entire node? It took Time Warner six months to isolate the problem in my neighborhood (because it was intermittent). That's six months of shoddy Roadrunner and digital phone service.
I'm sorry but for a last mile solution there's no way you can claim shared RF cable is as reliable as dedicated circuit from the CO -> your house. Cable has it's own sets of advantages that may come into play (cable modem service is usually faster then DSL unless you live next door to the central office) but if reliability is the overriding concern then DSL is the clear winner.
Note: This doesn't make any consideration for crappy DSL providers. If the DSL provider in your area sucks then obviously cable is the winner. I'm just comparing the underlying technology. A crappy DSL or cable provider will ruin any advantage in technology and might have you wishing for dial-up.
Battery backup is not on the modem in this case, it's in the digital phone box on the side of your house. Generally they like to install these on a garage wall near a power outlet on the inside wall. The battery backup is inside the box itself but it draws power from that inside outlet.
Then they are using a different system then Time Warner's digital phone product, which is just a combined cable modem/teleco thing. And in any case how does backup at your house help if the repeaters on the cable network aren't backed up? Which, (at least in the case of Time Warner in my area) they aren't.
Actually the cable company provides battery backup boxes for their phone service to satisfy telco laws. They must have 9 9's uptime on the phone service due to 911 requirements.
Battery backup on the modem means nothing if they don't have battery backup on the amplifiers installed around your neighborhood.
I always had a UPS on my Roadrunner modem. Think I could use it during power outages? Nope! I have a UPS on my TiVo. Think it records anything during power outages? Nope! That battery backup will help you if your house loses power -- but if the whole neighborhood goes down then you are still SOL.
During my experimental phase, the POTS line went out of service 8 times.
Pffft, and who are you getting phone service from? I've never seen a POTS line go down for any other reason then physical damage to infrastructure (car hits telephone pole). If your line was down eight times for hours on end and they didn't fix it then you should have filed a complaint with your state regulatory agency. An option you don't have if you rely on VoIP or cell for your phone service.
I've had my share of issues with Verizon or Frontier when it relates to changing service. Getting an order properly completed can be a major PITA. But once it is properly setup you don't need to think about it anymore. It just works.
DSL is no better than Cable. While you are somewhat more electrically isolated from your neighbors, it's still ultimately shared...
My point wasn't about the internet being shared. My point was that a bad telephone in my neighbors house can't kill the last mile in the entire neighborhood on POTS the way it can on cable.
My Roadrunner problems stemmed from interference on the last mile caused by a bad TV somewhere else in the neighborhood. It was leaking so much RF onto the lines that it showed up as snow on channels 2 and 3. It killed the upstream channel on Roadrunner and TW's digital phone service. But they could never track it down because it was intermittent and by the time they got out here it was gone. They finally found it due to dumb luck more then anything.
I don't care what the rest of the PSTN or the internet is -- circuit or packet switched. The fact is that a circuit switched last mile is more reliable then a packet switched/shared RF one. How do you dispute that?
Actually it's slightly more secure only because SS7 is a simple protocol compared to SIP (tunneled of course). It's also more secure in that a non-authorized person (like a private investigator) could not tap a VoIP connection without gaining entry to the premises. A POTS connection can be tapped by anybody who can access your line (anywhere). Comcast's VoIP likely uses similar technology to Vonage and so is probably just as secure.
Define "secure"? POTS/DSL/Vonage-on-DSL has an inherent level of security and reliability above cable/cable-VoIP/vonage-on-cable because telco technology is [b]circuit based[/b]. Your line isn't dependant on a shared RF medium that can potently be snooped/jammed/interfered with by anybody else on the same node. Doubt that? Then explain why it took Time Warner six months to figure out that the problem with my Roadrunner service was a friggen 45 year old TV down the block leaking RF onto the cable plant? Had I TW's digital phone/vonage I would have been royally screwed. I can't recall the last time that my POTS/DSL service was taken down by a 45 year old phone next door....
Anybody that relies on VoIP service over a cable connection is insane. My DSL service is circuit based and survives just about anything including power outages. My cable service doesn't even survive thunderstorms and dies during power outages, presumably because the repeaters aren't line powered.
You do know that SAC no longer exists, right? And even during the Cold War the days of 24 hour alerts and constantly having a portion of the fleet airborne stopped after the accident at Palomares Spain in 1966. After that SAC would send nuclear armed planes into the air only during alerts (i.e: Yom Kipper War).
In fact according to treaty and announcements by both sides the only forces that are currently deployed with nuclear weapons are SSBNs -- the Ohio Class SSBNs and the various types of Russian "boomers". Granted, we also retain ICBMs, but I don't know if you call a fixed missile "deployed".
In any case we don't deploy bombers with nuclear weapons as a matter of course these days. And we haven't in awhile.
Great. What are the arguments against the use of a RTG then? If there isn't any "real" damage aven locally why does it seem to such a big issue?
Because tree huggers have an irrational fear of anything called "nuclear"?
I'm an environmentalist and I realize that the future of mankind lies in the atom. Be it fission or fusion, unless we are prepared to accept a major reduction in our standard of living, we will need something to replace fossil fuels.
I don't know of any political reform that actually addresses this issue, but there it is.
The political reform I would like to see is Congressional districts drawn differently. I don't know how you draw them differently (therein lies the problem) but I do think it's a bad thing for our Republic when they are drawn with the sole purpose of keeping incumbents in power.
If re-election wasn't such a sure thing for Congress-critters then they would be leery of accepting the support of outsiders that went against the best wishes of their constituents.... and you'd solve "campaign finance reform" with no restrictions on money/speech at all. Do you think that John Q. Congressman is going to accept massive amounts of money and support from Verizon and then oppose net neutrality if most of his constituents want it and his district isn't drawn to ensure his re-election?
Maybe I'm just a crank. BTW I don't necessarily believe your assessment of Bush on Iraq is wrong - as I said, I simply happen to think it was a good idea for unrelated reasons.
It may turn out to be. I just wish we had captured Bin Ladin.
I think the USA in the 1940s was different from the USA now. Different people in charge too.
You want to bring back the 1940s? Works for me. In the 1940s we would have carpet bombed every major city in Afghanistan and then nuked them to force a surrender when the prospect of a ground war became unappealing.
I think you missed my point. The prospect of destruction makes just about everyone grow up fast. I think the Mullahs want to have nuclear weapons, but they don't intend to use them. Nukes are more of an insurance policy to ensure that they will not be invaded like the Iraqis were.
If they wanted nukes as a perceived trump card against the United States it wouldn't bother me. North Korea isn't halfway as scary as Iran is, IMHO. North Korea hasn't called for the destruction of Israel or any other country the last time I checked.
Oh yes, nuclear weapons have been the ultimate deterrent against terror attacks.
I didn't claim them to be a deterrent. I simply made a statement. When you attack a nuclear armed state you run the risk of being hit with nukes yourself. Did you know that while 9/11 was going down there were people in the Pentagon with calculators figuring out the energy contained in all that jet fuel to see if it rose to the level of a weapon of mass destruction? It's not at all hard to picture a scenario in which nuclear weapons were used on that day. I'm glad it didn't happen -- but don't think for a second that it wasn't considered.
(BTW - the Taliban never killed any Americans. Bin Laden and his associates were Saudis.)
The Taliban aided and abetted him. If you insist on treating terrorism as a simply legal matter (the formality of extradition) then I could point out that the Taliban were guilty of obstructing justice, aiding and abetting and harboring a fugitive.
Being objective, I realize that deliberate attacks against civilian targets is a tried-and-true military tactic that is as old as dirt. Many other Western nations have had to deal with terrorist attacks on their own soil, and none of them reacted in the way the US did, by deposing a foreign government that may not have been directly involved in the attacks.
They weren't directly involved? Heck, Al Quada was for all intents and purposes running that country towards the end. And the Taliban supported them.
It would also be reasonable to consider the effect that US foreign policy has had on the parts of the world where the attackers came from. The sort of blind hatred manifested in the 9/11 attacks simply does not develop over night.
And if you've read any of my other posts (go look at my posts in the Tomcat story from a week ago) you'll know that I agree with you. I've argued for a different US foregin policy before. I've argued that if the "common man" in the street didn't hate our guts that Osama wouldn't matter because he'd have no support. It just upsets me when I hear blind anti-American bashing.
Hindsight being 20/20, I am not sure that overthrowing the Taliban was entirely wrong. I am certain that abandoning Afghanistan shortly thereafter was, and it is not just the Americans who are to blame. Much of the first world promised aid to the Afghans and promptly forgot about it once the press-conference was over.
And my biggest beef with Dubya is that we focused on Iraq instead of trying to build a lasting peace in Afghanistan. If we had the 140,000 troops that are in Iraq in Afghanistan we might have caught Bin Ladin. If we had them over there we could probably support the actual elected Government -- instead of that Government relying on warlords and poppy production to prop itself up. If we spent a fraction of what we have spent in Iraq on aid and rebuilding for Afghanistan....
I think you'll see that I don't disagree with you on too many points. And we are apparently having a rational discussion about this. So why can't everybody else do that without resorting to cheap American insults?
You ask about letting 9/11 go unanswered. I would say no, but in return I would ask you who should be held accountable?
The leadership of Al Quada. Anybody that supported them (financially or otherwise).
I am a US citizen and I reap some benefit from the US hegemony, but also substantial cost. My take is that the US's current hegemony isn't sustainable and is corrupting the US on many levels. If there was a better way, I'd be interested in implementing it. But the "five and a half billion people don't like it" argument isn't good enough. They wouldn't like it if things fell apart or if the US hegemony was just replaced by the same hegemony under different management.
Well said. Perhaps they'd like it better if we had "gone home and minded our own business" as they advise and allowed Hitler or Stalin to establish their own hegemony after WW2. Because, odds are, that without the US, one of them would have been the victors of WW2. I don't see the British Empire surviving.
The death of Democracy and the establishment of a Eurasian-wide dictatorship would have been the end result. Consider that before you rip into the United States.
Was there a formal extradition treaty with the former government of Afghanistan? If not, should they be under any legal obligation to oblige?
Legal obligation? So I fly over to Kabul to rape and murder some chick and then escape back to the US should I escape justice just because there's no piece of paper between two countries? And what legal obligation did we have to let Bin Ladin get away with it? Nation-states will take whatever measures they deem to be in their own best interest. You don't get to slaughter 3,000 citizens of a country and have it go unanswered. Make no mistake: Any other country would have gone after them too. Do you forget the fact that every single nation in the world (besides Iraq and the PLO) condemned the attacks of 9/11?
Do you realize that attitude is precisely why Iran is trying to build a nuclear arsenal? Let's hope the Mullah's develop a more mature outlook than you have.
I hope you were exaggerating about the nuclear attack. I (for one) fail to see how committing crimes against humanity would make your nation any safer.
I'll worry about the Mullah's when they have a delivery system that can reach the United States and overpower our missile defenses. Do you really advocate them trying to adopt a MAD posture vs the US? We bankrupted the Soviet Union when they tried that. I think we'll be able to handle Iran.
And I didn't advocate nuking Afghanistan. I merely pointed out that when one attacks a nuclear state one is putting oneself at risk of nuclear retaliation. They might want to think about that before they murder innocent American/Russian/British civilians.
For a variety of reasons, many people around the world view the Americans as the villains, not the guys wearing the white hats.
Have you ever wondered why?
Yes. No thanks to our idiot fearless leader, the "decider", who invaded Iraq without cause or provocation. I'm not going to disagree with you there. But we are talking about 9/11 and our response to it. Try to look at this without considering the Iraq war (because it hadn't happened yet). What were the feelings towards the US then? Did we deserve 9/11? Should we have let it go unanswered? Try to be objective about it.
Which would be a mass murder of civilists you obviously would wholeheartedly support.
Did I say I supported it? I said that is one of the potential consequences of attacking a nuclear armed state. Don't put words in my mouth. Do you take issue with his mass murder of civilians?
I think the lesson to be learned here is when the "nuclear armed state" fucks arround with people around the world and invade their countries one by one not even their nuclear weapons can prevent scenarios like 9-11 or Beslan.
Please, refresh my memory as to which countries we invaded one by one prior to 9/11. The First Gulf War? We were kicking him out of a country he invaded with the full backing of the UN. Kosovo? We intervened with the support of our NATO allies to stop genocide. His big issues are our support for Israel and our "occupation" of the "Holy Land". Does our support of one nation or the fact that we were in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government excuse the murder of 3,000 Americans? Does Russia's foreign policy warrant the wanton slaughter of children? I think not.
Just withdraw your troops from the rest of the world, dont molest them and leave them alone, and youll be fine. If for example another large country Brasil can live on without attacking another country every five years, the US maybe could learn too to not live by the sword (and not having to fear anybody wearing a box cutter.) (Why the fsck do I have to explain it to you, isnt this obvious?!?!)
Again, what part of our foreign policy do you think warranted 9/11? And even if they had a legitimate gripe that I could acknowledge what should we have done after 9/11? Said "You know, we've been wrong all these years! We'll just pull out now and let the murder of 3,000 Americans go unanswered" Bitch about America all you want. I don't hear solutions to geopolitical problems. All I hear is anti-American ranting and raving. It's nothing but hypocrisy. If America or Russia kill Muslim children by accident the criticism is never ending. But when they go out of their way to deliberately target children you blame us! When has the US or Russia purposefully targeted children? Think about that one for a little one.
The Taliban's did agree to hand over bin Laden (and the requested intelligence officers). Not only that, they even suggested the war criminal court in Hague as a suitable place for a trial (considering the Taliban view on Western courts, that was as much bending over as there can be).
Do you have a source for this claim? They agreed to hand him over to be tried in an Islamic court. Hardly acceptable.
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Well, it helps to have the phone box with a battery backup in case your home electricity goes out. If cable is still working in that event, then you still have telephone service. I can't count the number of tornadoes I've lived through and had no power for hours while the telephones continued to work. Then again there were times when both went out.
I didn't say it was a bad idea to have a phone box with a battery backup. I take issue with their idiot salespeople telling people that battery backups means it will keep working when the power goes out. That battery backup means it might continue working. If the whole neighborhood goes down then odds are it won't continue working.
Basically, shit happens, and the more the service providers can do remotely and locally to ensure that service interruptions are kept to a minimum, the better. Cable companies are very serious about rolling out telephony (due to FCC and state regulations regarding telephony) and generally have a very high uptime in the areas they offer the service.
Generally have a very high uptime vs never goes down is not a hard decision to make in my book. Personally I don't understand the appeal behind cable telephony at all. If you are willing to cut the cord to POTS then get a cell phone and go that route. At least you can take the cell phone with you. That's my approach. Cell phone and dry loop DSL. If I ever move somewhere without cell service then I'll have a POTS line.
actually all of our power supplies (that power the amplfiers/nodes) have battery backup. In my area they are regularly serviced and checked and usually have an uptime of around 45 minutes. They also have alarms that signal us as to when commercial power goes out. Long enough for us to get a generator out there and power it. Anything else?
That must explain why all my neighbors using cable telephony came over to my house to use my POTS line to make calls during the floods back at the end of June when my neighborhood (note: not the area, just my neighborhood) had no power.
The amplifiers are line powered. The cable trunk has a few hundred volts DC across it. Not to mention, cable companies often have UPSs installed on poles. Ever see the big gray boxes that say "Alpha" on them? Those are UPSes.
Wow, all that redundancy must explain why I have no cable service when the power goes out.
Thanks for the info! To be clear, my DSL service has not gone down once. I have had some outages with cable, and power-out does take out Comcast here but not DSL.
Yeah, I also read right past your comments about voting with your wallet. This was another reason I went with DSL. $44.95 for Roadrunner vs $29.95 for DSL. Heck if it wasn't for that pesky thing known as bittorrent I could probably have the $14.95 768/128 package :) I'm a cheap SOB!
Also, my telco is AT&T, so my local ISP is forced to use them. I worked for an ISP that had Verizon as the telco, and I found their DSL setup to be a bit better.
Verizon does seem to invest more money then the other telcos (mainly Frontier) that I've dealt with. I've had huge issues with them in getting change orders/new business executed properly (spent 12 hours on the phone with them over three days trying to get business lines installed once) but generally speaking once the service is installed and working properly you never have to mess with it again. You don't think about it -- it just works.
My CO for Ma Bell (I mean Indiana Bell(I mean Ameritech(I mean SBC(I mean AT&T))))
Hahaha, nice :)
is in the sticks and is very old. There are hardly any businesses that feed off of it, so I don't think they invest in the lines or equipment any more than they need to.
If you want to talk about the sticks I could tell you some Frontier stories. Back in the days of dial-up I worked for a small ISP. We couldn't get digital trunk lines so we ordered individual POTS lines for all of our modem banks. Eventually we had some 450 POTS lines coming into that building (you should have seen the size of the cable coming off the pole), roughly 60% of the total installed lines for that entire exchange! Another sticks story is my current employer who happens to be in Frontier land. We have a 38,000 foot loop length. That's right, thirty eight thousand feet! We can't get DSL (gee, wonder why?) or cable, so we had to settle for satellite internet. Eventually we got the funding to get a T-1. They had to install five repeaters to get it to us!
However, I'm like 13,000+ feet from the CO, so my DSL line has at least 30ms just to get to the CO. Bad weather, wind speed, and political polls seem to affect the quality of my DSL line, and my Vonage calls are consistantly lower quality than being on cable.
Umm, I'm 14,000 feet according to Verizon and I get rock solid 1.5/384 service. I missed the cutoff for 3.0/768 service by only a few thousand feet. It could be an issue with the technology that your DSL provider uses? Who knows. In my particular case I got sick of waiting for Time Warner to solve my problem with Roadrunner. My DSL isn't as fast (RR is 5.0/384 here) but it's never once gone down and I have 16 months of netsaint logs to prove that. Heck, I ran my PC off a generator during the floods here (had no power for four days) and my DSL was still working. Think I had cable TV service? Nope.
don't regret my decision, I still want to vote with my cash. But cable, from a performance standpoint, was better for my Vonage than DSL.
You go with what's best for you. I used RoadRunner for over three years without any major problems. It would go down for 10 or 15 minutes here or there (once every three months or so), but if I didn't use Netsaint odds are I wouldn't even have noticed. If I did a lot of downloading then I'd probably still want it.... although if I could get Verizon's 3.0/768 tier I'd take that over 5.0/384 in a heartbeat. 768 would be a lot nicer for my share ratios on bittorrent :)
But in any case, I only wanted to share my opinions and experiences. You can probably use cable in 90% of the country with no problems. If all I cared about was data then it wouldn't even bother me much. But if I'm reling on VoIP phone service as my own method of communication then I want the data circuit that's more reliable. And generally speaking that's DSL.
Try living next door to a guy who occationally welds in his garage at night without your knowledge and see how long it takes to figure out why your POTS line disconnects on some evenings...
Hmmm........ I don't see why that would cause a problem but I guess I'll take your word for it.
Cable generally is pretty crappy, but if it doesn't survive power outages in your area then you have a particularly terrible provider. There is probably a battery alarm somewhere that they are just ignoring.
The people at the office claim it does survive. According to their field techs the reason it does not survive is that they don't have a provision for backup power for the amplifiers in the field. I wouldn't care if it was just cable TV (how much TV do you watch with no power?) but it bothers me that they sell digital phone with a battery backup and claim it will work when clearly it does not. Maybe other cable providers do have provisions to back these things up. In my area though and with Time Warner they do not.
I'm skeptical about your 45 year old TV story though. If it was true, and the tech was worth his paycheck, it should have taken them under a day to figure out the problem. They were probably lying. They may not even know why your service started working again.
Eh, they weren't lying. If it was the office people I'd say they were but the field techs are generally pretty easygoing and don't have a lot of motivation to lie to you. It took him that long to figure it out because the problem was highly intermittent and would vanish by the time he got to my house. When they finally managed to get a tech out there when it was happening they tracked it down in a single afternoon. It was intermittent because it only happened when that TV was turned on. In any case I'm not blaming them for not being able to solve the problem quickly. Just pointing out that the last mile of a telco network wouldn't have had it in the first place. Dedicated circuit vs shared medium.
Incidentally the problem was so bad that I'd see static on channels 2 and 3 when it was happening. It killed my upstream channel on RR -- but the downstream (and channels higher then 3) were unaffected.
The telco is obliged to connect a pair of wire from the telco office to your premises for voice service. They can use any pair to the neighborhood, any pair to the pedestal and any pair to your house. Some of that wiring is older, some of that wiring is damaged, some of that wiring has other equipment attached. It's not uncommon for bad crossconnects to be made. The telco can change what pairs are providing the loop to your house at any time, perhaps to pairs that are of lower quality than you previously had, and subject again to the possibility of bad crossconnects. All of those things have an effect on internet service over POTS lines, and hence, VoIP over DSL.
And if you have a decent telco they will fix problems caused by a bad pair. I've also never known a telco to "change the pairs at any time". Generally speaking, once service is provisioned they don't touch the pairs. Often times the pair to your house is already figured out and when you order service all they do is plug it in at the switch/turn it on. Sometimes you already have dial tone (albeit only for 911) before you order phone service.
It's not fair to say that a bad pair will ruin your DSL service. A decent phone company will correct this. Verizon does. Frontier does. A bad phone company will ruin DSL service just as quickly as a bad cable company will ruin cable modem service. I'm comparing the technologies. What's more reliable in your experience? Coax based ethernet (a signal node brings down the whole segment) or cat5 with a decent switch/hub that can isolate a bad port? Shared RF medium vs decicated circuit.
Cable, on the other hand, has far fewer "moving parts." Fewer pieces of physical equipment and cabling lowers the likelihood that there will be breakage in the normal course of operations. And when there is breakage, it's not just the one phone line to one place has a little extra noise on it - the symptom is more widespread, meaning the company is (should be) more motivated to fix it. "Noise on the line that effects DSL speed" isn't usually cause enough for the telco to make repairs, since they only really have to give you phone service. If it's not affecting phone service, tough luck.
And cable is orders of magnitude easier to interfere with. Can you picture a scenario in which a bad phone in your neighbors house messes with your POTS/DSL service? Unless he is on a party line with you his circuit is completely separated from yours. And "tough luck"? If my DSL isn't provisioning at the speed that I was sold then Verizon will fix it.
Sorry, not true. In the USA, the major phone carriers did change to digital years ago (about 20 years for AT&T). But each digitized voice call was placed on a particular *channel* of a DS1/DS3/OCx circuit between each switching node, and it stays on that channel through the duration of the call. The whole set-up of the PSTN is that the separate signalling network is used to set up a path which is dedicated to one call for its duration.
Good point. But the guy you replied to missed my original point anyways. I wan't talking about the PSTN. I was talking about the last mile. My point was that the last mile of telco technology is more reliable and harder to mess with then the last mile of cable technology, which is basically a shared RF medium.
This may change as services like FiOS takeover for the cooper local loop (FiOS is a shared optical medium) -- but until that happens I'll take dedicated pair of copper over shared coax network any day of the week.
Note: I'm not saying cable service sucks. If you care more about download speed then you'd probably rather have cable modem service. If you care about fault tolerance and reliability then you want DSL.
You've apparently never dealt with BellSouth before. My mother's BellSouth service is down on average once a month. Sometimes I'll try to call her and I get what sounds like a fax machine - at the same time, they are unable to call out or even get a dial-tone. This has been occurring for the past 10 years, and lasts about 2-4 hours every occurrance.
Then she needs to document these problems and complain to her state regulatory agency. In virtually every state in the country POTS service is regulated and held to standards of reliability. In New York State you'd solve that problem with one phone call to the public service commission.
Give the telco two or three attempts at fixing it. Then call up the PSC/whatever your state's equiv is. You don't have this appeals process with cable/cell phones, because they have fought tooth and nail against being regulated.
So an HFC network with BPI+ implemented affords more security than a POTS/DSL line since it is encrypted from end to end.
You choose to ignore the "jammed" part of my statement.
Explain to me why something as simple as a old TV that's leaking RF onto the cable plant is enough to completely disable the upstream channel of a cable modem across an entire neighborhood? Explain to me what happens when somebody malicious figures this out and jams Roadrunner/VoIP service for an entire node? It took Time Warner six months to isolate the problem in my neighborhood (because it was intermittent). That's six months of shoddy Roadrunner and digital phone service.
I'm sorry but for a last mile solution there's no way you can claim shared RF cable is as reliable as dedicated circuit from the CO -> your house. Cable has it's own sets of advantages that may come into play (cable modem service is usually faster then DSL unless you live next door to the central office) but if reliability is the overriding concern then DSL is the clear winner.
Note: This doesn't make any consideration for crappy DSL providers. If the DSL provider in your area sucks then obviously cable is the winner. I'm just comparing the underlying technology. A crappy DSL or cable provider will ruin any advantage in technology and might have you wishing for dial-up.
Battery backup is not on the modem in this case, it's in the digital phone box on the side of your house. Generally they like to install these on a garage wall near a power outlet on the inside wall. The battery backup is inside the box itself but it draws power from that inside outlet.
Then they are using a different system then Time Warner's digital phone product, which is just a combined cable modem/teleco thing. And in any case how does backup at your house help if the repeaters on the cable network aren't backed up? Which, (at least in the case of Time Warner in my area) they aren't.
Actually the cable company provides battery backup boxes for their phone service to satisfy telco laws. They must have 9 9's uptime on the phone service due to 911 requirements.
Battery backup on the modem means nothing if they don't have battery backup on the amplifiers installed around your neighborhood.
I always had a UPS on my Roadrunner modem. Think I could use it during power outages? Nope! I have a UPS on my TiVo. Think it records anything during power outages? Nope! That battery backup will help you if your house loses power -- but if the whole neighborhood goes down then you are still SOL.
During my experimental phase, the POTS line went out of service 8 times.
Pffft, and who are you getting phone service from? I've never seen a POTS line go down for any other reason then physical damage to infrastructure (car hits telephone pole). If your line was down eight times for hours on end and they didn't fix it then you should have filed a complaint with your state regulatory agency. An option you don't have if you rely on VoIP or cell for your phone service.
I've had my share of issues with Verizon or Frontier when it relates to changing service. Getting an order properly completed can be a major PITA. But once it is properly setup you don't need to think about it anymore. It just works.
DSL is no better than Cable. While you are somewhat more electrically isolated from your neighbors, it's still ultimately shared...
My point wasn't about the internet being shared. My point was that a bad telephone in my neighbors house can't kill the last mile in the entire neighborhood on POTS the way it can on cable.
My Roadrunner problems stemmed from interference on the last mile caused by a bad TV somewhere else in the neighborhood. It was leaking so much RF onto the lines that it showed up as snow on channels 2 and 3. It killed the upstream channel on Roadrunner and TW's digital phone service. But they could never track it down because it was intermittent and by the time they got out here it was gone. They finally found it due to dumb luck more then anything.
I don't care what the rest of the PSTN or the internet is -- circuit or packet switched. The fact is that a circuit switched last mile is more reliable then a packet switched/shared RF one. How do you dispute that?
Actually it's slightly more secure only because SS7 is a simple protocol compared to SIP (tunneled of course). It's also more secure in that a non-authorized person (like a private investigator) could not tap a VoIP connection without gaining entry to the premises. A POTS connection can be tapped by anybody who can access your line (anywhere). Comcast's VoIP likely uses similar technology to Vonage and so is probably just as secure.
Define "secure"? POTS/DSL/Vonage-on-DSL has an inherent level of security and reliability above cable/cable-VoIP/vonage-on-cable because telco technology is [b]circuit based[/b]. Your line isn't dependant on a shared RF medium that can potently be snooped/jammed/interfered with by anybody else on the same node. Doubt that? Then explain why it took Time Warner six months to figure out that the problem with my Roadrunner service was a friggen 45 year old TV down the block leaking RF onto the cable plant? Had I TW's digital phone/vonage I would have been royally screwed. I can't recall the last time that my POTS/DSL service was taken down by a 45 year old phone next door....
Anybody that relies on VoIP service over a cable connection is insane. My DSL service is circuit based and survives just about anything including power outages. My cable service doesn't even survive thunderstorms and dies during power outages, presumably because the repeaters aren't line powered.
People laugh at that now, but maybe in a few centuries people will wonder why this mentality persisted for so long.
Which mentality is that? The presumably sexist mentality or the mentality that takes a simple quote out of context?
It's a mistake to judge the past by the standards of today.
You do know that SAC no longer exists, right? And even during the Cold War the days of 24 hour alerts and constantly having a portion of the fleet airborne stopped after the accident at Palomares Spain in 1966. After that SAC would send nuclear armed planes into the air only during alerts (i.e: Yom Kipper War).
In fact according to treaty and announcements by both sides the only forces that are currently deployed with nuclear weapons are SSBNs -- the Ohio Class SSBNs and the various types of Russian "boomers". Granted, we also retain ICBMs, but I don't know if you call a fixed missile "deployed".
In any case we don't deploy bombers with nuclear weapons as a matter of course these days. And we haven't in awhile.
Great. What are the arguments against the use of a RTG then? If there isn't any "real" damage aven locally why does it seem to such a big issue?
Because tree huggers have an irrational fear of anything called "nuclear"?
I'm an environmentalist and I realize that the future of mankind lies in the atom. Be it fission or fusion, unless we are prepared to accept a major reduction in our standard of living, we will need something to replace fossil fuels.
I don't know of any political reform that actually addresses this issue, but there it is.
The political reform I would like to see is Congressional districts drawn differently. I don't know how you draw them differently (therein lies the problem) but I do think it's a bad thing for our Republic when they are drawn with the sole purpose of keeping incumbents in power.
If re-election wasn't such a sure thing for Congress-critters then they would be leery of accepting the support of outsiders that went against the best wishes of their constituents.... and you'd solve "campaign finance reform" with no restrictions on money/speech at all. Do you think that John Q. Congressman is going to accept massive amounts of money and support from Verizon and then oppose net neutrality if most of his constituents want it and his district isn't drawn to ensure his re-election?
Maybe I'm just a crank. BTW I don't necessarily believe your assessment of Bush on Iraq is wrong - as I said, I simply happen to think it was a good idea for unrelated reasons.
It may turn out to be. I just wish we had captured Bin Ladin.
I think the USA in the 1940s was different from the USA now. Different people in charge too.
You want to bring back the 1940s? Works for me. In the 1940s we would have carpet bombed every major city in Afghanistan and then nuked them to force a surrender when the prospect of a ground war became unappealing.
I think you missed my point. The prospect of destruction makes just about everyone grow up fast. I think the Mullahs want to have nuclear weapons, but they don't intend to use them. Nukes are more of an insurance policy to ensure that they will not be invaded like the Iraqis were.
If they wanted nukes as a perceived trump card against the United States it wouldn't bother me. North Korea isn't halfway as scary as Iran is, IMHO. North Korea hasn't called for the destruction of Israel or any other country the last time I checked.
Oh yes, nuclear weapons have been the ultimate deterrent against terror attacks.
I didn't claim them to be a deterrent. I simply made a statement. When you attack a nuclear armed state you run the risk of being hit with nukes yourself. Did you know that while 9/11 was going down there were people in the Pentagon with calculators figuring out the energy contained in all that jet fuel to see if it rose to the level of a weapon of mass destruction? It's not at all hard to picture a scenario in which nuclear weapons were used on that day. I'm glad it didn't happen -- but don't think for a second that it wasn't considered.
(BTW - the Taliban never killed any Americans. Bin Laden and his associates were Saudis.)
The Taliban aided and abetted him. If you insist on treating terrorism as a simply legal matter (the formality of extradition) then I could point out that the Taliban were guilty of obstructing justice, aiding and abetting and harboring a fugitive.
Being objective, I realize that deliberate attacks against civilian targets is a tried-and-true military tactic that is as old as dirt. Many other Western nations have had to deal with terrorist attacks on their own soil, and none of them reacted in the way the US did, by deposing a foreign government that may not have been directly involved in the attacks.
They weren't directly involved? Heck, Al Quada was for all intents and purposes running that country towards the end. And the Taliban supported them.
It would also be reasonable to consider the effect that US foreign policy has had on the parts of the world where the attackers came from. The sort of blind hatred manifested in the 9/11 attacks simply does not develop over night.
And if you've read any of my other posts (go look at my posts in the Tomcat story from a week ago) you'll know that I agree with you. I've argued for a different US foregin policy before. I've argued that if the "common man" in the street didn't hate our guts that Osama wouldn't matter because he'd have no support. It just upsets me when I hear blind anti-American bashing.
Hindsight being 20/20, I am not sure that overthrowing the Taliban was entirely wrong. I am certain that abandoning Afghanistan shortly thereafter was, and it is not just the Americans who are to blame. Much of the first world promised aid to the Afghans and promptly forgot about it once the press-conference was over.
And my biggest beef with Dubya is that we focused on Iraq instead of trying to build a lasting peace in Afghanistan. If we had the 140,000 troops that are in Iraq in Afghanistan we might have caught Bin Ladin. If we had them over there we could probably support the actual elected Government -- instead of that Government relying on warlords and poppy production to prop itself up. If we spent a fraction of what we have spent in Iraq on aid and rebuilding for Afghanistan....
I think you'll see that I don't disagree with you on too many points. And we are apparently having a rational discussion about this. So why can't everybody else do that without resorting to cheap American insults?
You ask about letting 9/11 go unanswered. I would say no, but in return I would ask you who should be held accountable?
The leadership of Al Quada. Anybody that supported them (financially or otherwise).
I am a US citizen and I reap some benefit from the US hegemony, but also substantial cost. My take is that the US's current hegemony isn't sustainable and is corrupting the US on many levels. If there was a better way, I'd be interested in implementing it. But the "five and a half billion people don't like it" argument isn't good enough. They wouldn't like it if things fell apart or if the US hegemony was just replaced by the same hegemony under different management.
Well said. Perhaps they'd like it better if we had "gone home and minded our own business" as they advise and allowed Hitler or Stalin to establish their own hegemony after WW2. Because, odds are, that without the US, one of them would have been the victors of WW2. I don't see the British Empire surviving.
The death of Democracy and the establishment of a Eurasian-wide dictatorship would have been the end result. Consider that before you rip into the United States.
Was there a formal extradition treaty with the former government of Afghanistan? If not, should they be under any legal obligation to oblige?
Legal obligation? So I fly over to Kabul to rape and murder some chick and then escape back to the US should I escape justice just because there's no piece of paper between two countries? And what legal obligation did we have to let Bin Ladin get away with it? Nation-states will take whatever measures they deem to be in their own best interest. You don't get to slaughter 3,000 citizens of a country and have it go unanswered. Make no mistake: Any other country would have gone after them too. Do you forget the fact that every single nation in the world (besides Iraq and the PLO) condemned the attacks of 9/11?
Do you realize that attitude is precisely why Iran is trying to build a nuclear arsenal? Let's hope the Mullah's develop a more mature outlook than you have.
I hope you were exaggerating about the nuclear attack. I (for one) fail to see how committing crimes against humanity would make your nation any safer.
I'll worry about the Mullah's when they have a delivery system that can reach the United States and overpower our missile defenses. Do you really advocate them trying to adopt a MAD posture vs the US? We bankrupted the Soviet Union when they tried that. I think we'll be able to handle Iran.
And I didn't advocate nuking Afghanistan. I merely pointed out that when one attacks a nuclear state one is putting oneself at risk of nuclear retaliation. They might want to think about that before they murder innocent American/Russian/British civilians.
For a variety of reasons, many people around the world view the Americans as the villains, not the guys wearing the white hats.
Have you ever wondered why?
Yes. No thanks to our idiot fearless leader, the "decider", who invaded Iraq without cause or provocation. I'm not going to disagree with you there. But we are talking about 9/11 and our response to it. Try to look at this without considering the Iraq war (because it hadn't happened yet). What were the feelings towards the US then? Did we deserve 9/11? Should we have let it go unanswered? Try to be objective about it.
Which would be a mass murder of civilists you obviously would wholeheartedly support.
Did I say I supported it? I said that is one of the potential consequences of attacking a nuclear armed state. Don't put words in my mouth. Do you take issue with his mass murder of civilians?
I think the lesson to be learned here is when the "nuclear armed state" fucks arround with people around the world and invade their countries one by one not even their nuclear weapons can prevent scenarios like 9-11 or Beslan.
Please, refresh my memory as to which countries we invaded one by one prior to 9/11. The First Gulf War? We were kicking him out of a country he invaded with the full backing of the UN. Kosovo? We intervened with the support of our NATO allies to stop genocide. His big issues are our support for Israel and our "occupation" of the "Holy Land". Does our support of one nation or the fact that we were in Saudi Arabia at the request of the Saudi government excuse the murder of 3,000 Americans? Does Russia's foreign policy warrant the wanton slaughter of children? I think not.
Just withdraw your troops from the rest of the world, dont molest them and leave them alone, and youll be fine. If for example another large country Brasil can live on without attacking another country every five years, the US maybe could learn too to not live by the sword (and not having to fear anybody wearing a box cutter.) (Why the fsck do I have to explain it to you, isnt this obvious?!?!)
Again, what part of our foreign policy do you think warranted 9/11? And even if they had a legitimate gripe that I could acknowledge what should we have done after 9/11? Said "You know, we've been wrong all these years! We'll just pull out now and let the murder of 3,000 Americans go unanswered" Bitch about America all you want. I don't hear solutions to geopolitical problems. All I hear is anti-American ranting and raving. It's nothing but hypocrisy. If America or Russia kill Muslim children by accident the criticism is never ending. But when they go out of their way to deliberately target children you blame us! When has the US or Russia purposefully targeted children? Think about that one for a little one.
Fuck you and the horse you rode in on.
The Taliban's did agree to hand over bin Laden (and the requested intelligence officers). Not only that, they even suggested the war criminal court in Hague as a suitable place for a trial (considering the Taliban view on Western courts, that was as much bending over as there can be).
Do you have a source for this claim? They agreed to hand him over to be tried in an Islamic court. Hardly acceptable.