Ethernet Over Assorted Materials 323
saridder writes: "Cisco has demonstrated their latest last mile technology,
and not only can you now have 10 MB Ethernet over Cat3, Cat2, Cat1, try lamp
power cord, battery jumper terminals, barbed wire, etc. This may have solved the last mile problem, and at 10 MB, it blows DSL out of the water."
With @Home and ATT... (Score:2, Funny)
Ooh (Score:2, Funny)
5000 ft != MILE (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Of course, what I really want is fiber to my home, but only ATT seems to be into that since it's required for cable modems (although even then it's only fiber to the pole outside your home). Unfortunately, ATT's horrible customer service has made them my last possible choice for providors of anything.
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Sad. Geek dreams...
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Last time I checked the going rate for long distance providors was $.04US/minute, meaning that's what Sprint has to pay your local telco for the privelege of providing you with long distance service. Basically that pays for maintenance of the physical lines. I don't know what the surcharges are for providing other services.
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
(monthly)
Cable TV: $30? couldn't find an online quote
Cable Modem: $40
Phone line (1): $30 or so
Hmm...what I have above costs nearly as much, but it's nowhere near the quality of what is supposedly being offered. HDTV + Digital channels will outdo normal cable TV. A 10MB conenction is better than any cable modem I've ever seen, and 4 phone lines are better than 1.
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Ow...where the hell do you live that you get ripped off like that? A single POTS line ought to run closer to $15/month or so (excluding long distance). Analog cable should be closer to $25 (excluding pay-TV channels). $50 for high-speed access sounds about the going rate, as long as you're getting a static IP with it. (Some .ca posters would probably disagree with that last assessment, though.) $110 for the fiber-to-the-home service described earlier ends up a little more expensive...if they can really deliver anywhere near 10 Mbps both ways to the Internet (not just among their customers), it might still be worth a look. They'd need to have a fat-enough pipe to the 'net to make it worthwhile, though (the 1.5 Mbps downstream I get from my cable modem is fairly consistent).
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
Impossible? I've been paying about that much for nearly a decade.
There's no need to be insulting or condescending about it. I'm very much aware of what's in there. Since you asked, though, I haven't lived in a dorm since 1990. I haven't lived with my parents since 1992. Thanks for playing, though.
Maybe if you live in some bastion of tax-and-spend liberalism like New York or Los Angeles. We have our share of left-wing kooks here in Las Vegas, but the prevailing opinion is that people know better what to do with their money than government. Taxes account for maybe a dollar or two of my phone bill.
Re:5000 ft != MILE (Score:2)
bad solution . . . (Score:2)
>robots to get fiber to the basements
>of buildings, and then use the existing
>cat-
Yeah, like that's going to work. Little thing crawls out and runs around with a string, and you think the cat won't attack???
:)
hawk
Strange for of dyslexia? (Score:3, Funny)
This solves nothing (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is money. Nobody wants to spend the dollars necessary to hook us all up with data cable. That's why all the hullabalo about cable ISPs and DSL--they both utilize an existing physical connection.
In other words, the answer will not come from Cisco, it will come from somebody with deep pockets. And the only pockets deep enough in this case belong to the federal government.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2, Informative)
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2, Insightful)
If you're not going to read the article before you post, at least have the decency to read the /. summary:
The whole point is that Cisco's technology does -- in theory, at least -- take advantage of existing physical connections. Whether this is actually useful for practical implementation, as another poster questions, is a separate issue. If the press release says 5,000 ft., you can probably safely assume that that is the current upper bound.
Maybe I missed something (Score:2)
Re:Maybe I missed something (Score:2)
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2, Interesting)
BTW, not everyone deserves a high speed connection to the internet. I think that if you really want to have high speed access then you need to move to an area where other people want the same thing. You can't expect to live in the middle of nowhere and have a high speed connection.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2)
High speed internet is a luxury. Hell, the internet is a luxury.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2)
Or your friendly neighborhood local monopolist.
Plenty of companies would jump at the chance to install the channel - as long as they would be guaranteed exclusive access and unregulated pricing power forever amen.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2)
yeah, and nobody expected the typical individual to tell them to shove Irridium where the sun don't shine either. Now we have a network of dozens of pretty, sparkly, useless, and VERY expensive satellites - because someone thought that the pricing threshold of $200/mo. was affordable.
I think $75/mo is too much for broadband. $50 is pushing it. Yet, no company finds that profitable enough.
Re:This solves nothing (Score:2)
Barbed wire? (Score:5, Funny)
I guess I'll just have to reattach the alligator clips for my Ethernet-over-city-sewer connection.
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:2)
http://www.citynettelecom.com/cities/index.html [citynettelecom.com]
Slashdot did a story on it a while back, you can dig that url up though.
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:2)
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:2)
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:4, Informative)
I had lunch with a Cisco sales rep, and apparently thier demo for this stuff includes several feet of barb wire. They unhook it, and re hook it up, to prove its working.
The demo starts out with like 1000 feet of Cat 3, then cat 1, then lamp cable, then the barb wire, then more cable, reavaling each section as they talk about it to wow you. I haven't seen it, the sales guy just told me about it.
Sounds pretty interesting... it says 10 Mbps at 5000 feet... I assume you get less Mbps the farther you go out... actaully the sales rep was supposed to get me this info, and never did... I'll get on his back about it....
-Tripp
Re:Saw the demo (Score:5, Informative)
They have built a big wooden frame, about 1.2 metres on a side. Across the front of it they have a number of strips of cloth, held in place with velcro. The spiel starts about putting a signal down cat5 cable, and how expensive that can be. The rep pulls off the top strip of cloth, revealing some cat5 running between two RJ45 plugs, at the top is a connection to a LRE switch, and coming out of the bottom still hidden by 4 or 5 more strips of cloth is another RJ45 going to another LRE switch with a signal light. The rep makes a point to plug and unplug the cat5 to show the signal lights going on and off.
Then the pitch starts talking about cheaper cable, and then he pulls off the next strip, showing cat3 phone cable. The jumper from the cat5 RJ45 goes into the RJ45 for the cat3, and the jumper on the other side goes down to the next level which is still hidden.
Soon the pitch talks about pushing signal over anything, and the sales rep pulls off the next cloth, revealing two strips of lamp cord. And finally the bottom strip reveals four strands of barbed wire between 4 insulator posts, with RJ45 connectors at either end. BFD.
The final result is that the LRE signal is running over a bunch of impedence mismatched wires for a total distance of about 5 metres. If the rep is doing this canned demo in a conference room and there is 10bT available, try running a regular 10bT signal through this frame, it will probably still work.
They may also have a 200-250 metre spool of twisted pair phone wire with RJ45s at either end. That is impressive, since 10bT will have lots of error at such a distance, but LongReachEthernet will back down to about 2 Mbps and still function.
And this isn't a direct plug replacement for ethernet, LRE requires both dedicated blades in their switches for distribution, and very expensive receiving units for the far end. They are targetting places with old wiring going to a wiring closet, they can't actually compete with DSL at this time. But there is always a question about using these switches for neighborhood distibution when a telco has a small remote switch serving customers at the end of a fibre loop. The rep will not make any committment to that.
the AC
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:2, Informative)
Actually, it's 10Mbps up to 4000 ft but that's just an estimate and it depends on the quality of cabling etc. I've briefly tried LRE at 15Mbps over 1430m (4691 ft) of old telephone cabling and it seemed to work just fine.
Cisco LRE Rates and distancies from their white papers [cisco.com]:
5-Mbps symmetric rate (up to 5,000 feet)
10-Mbps symmetric rate (up to 4,000 feet)
15-Mbps symmetric rate (up to 3,500 feet)
Re:Barbed wire? (Score:2)
So it's only 2000 feet after the fence rusts?
hawk
really bad idea, anyway? (Score:2)
Think of the consequences. Who lives by the barbed wire?
That's right, the cows. The ones we eat. And what do cows produce?
Right again, *staggering* quantities of methane. Now think a second. Suppose you're a cow. You can't be *all* that thrilled about your future prospects (unless, of course, you're a dairy cow). So you start thinking slow cow thoughts between transferring your cud between stomachs. But it eventually comes to you.
If they can send ethernet over the barbed wire, how much harder can it be to send *methane*. As they work it out, the first signs will be press reports about herds of cattle charging barbed wire fences backwards. The second wave will be the explosions in switchboxes and phone relay centers. But once they have the bugs worked out, every farmhouse in the United States will be destroyed in a matter of days! What will we eat! Stop trnasmission over barbed wire NOW!
hawk
It's distance-limited.... (Score:5, Insightful)
So, once again, 90% of the population is too far from the CO for this to bring broadband into the home.
The problem isn't the last mile, contrary to the buzzwords... the problem is getting the pipe to run many, many miles to actual end users' homes.
Re:It's distance-limited.... (Score:2)
...or find a place to live that's real close to a CO. I bought a house that's about 7000 feet, but my DSL comes off of a Remote Terminal that's presumably in the big beige box down the street about 500 feet away. (I wonder if SBC can offer the 6 Mbit ADSL download speeds from RT DSLAMS.)
One thing the article doesn't mention is if lower speeds are available at longer distances, or if the technology supports repeater boxes in un-air conditioned cabines.
Sigh... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Sigh... (Score:2)
Good god! I didn't catch that the first time around.
That has to be the winner of the "Worst. Name. Ever."
The dude's parents should be put in jail for that.
Re:Sigh... (Score:2)
Re:Sigh... (Score:2)
Still only useful for 5K feet (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Still only useful for 5K feet (Score:2)
We use it (Score:5, Interesting)
Has anyone heard the Cisco story about ethernet over barbed wire? Our salesrep tells a story about a facility in Kuwait (I think) that was having a terrible time keeping a link up between two buildings. The locals kept stealing the cable they were using for the valuable copper. They ended up getting ethernet to run over a piece of barbed wire running between the buildings. The error rate was high, and the sustainable throughput was abismal, but with TCP's error correction they were able to get a useful connection through.
I don't know how true that really is, might be a Cisco myth told to impress customers or something.
Re:We use it (Score:2)
Re:We use it (Score:2)
.
Short on Detail? (Score:3, Interesting)
Anyway, it seems like a good idea, however, is there another block here that can be achieved by a company (ie the bells last mile influence on dsl)? Broadband to the masses ideas seem to come and go with the wind lately, and most seem never to pan out.
Yes, ethernet over barbed wire. Big deal. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you follow the link to Cisco's site, there is a link on the right for the video presentation.
Barbed wire over ethernet (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Barbed wire over ethernet (Score:2)
Pat
Irrelevant (Score:2)
No it does not solve the last mile problem (Score:2, Insightful)
This is all smoke and mirrors. What you do not realize is that the cross section of all of these materials is large. That is the real problem of data transfer when you break it down. It is the number of electrons that can be pushed over a data source without the cross section of the wire breaking down (over heating and glowing red is usually the indicator of this). What Cisco does not say in this article is if we can still use the phone lines for what they are intended for, phones, once we use this technology. this is not really an advantage if I have to rewire the building anyways so I can still make phone calls. Might as well have put in the regular cat 5 then making the advantage of this pointless.
The final last mile problem has a third part not adjusted by this technology. this is the ancient switches that this must travel through. The thing that has stopped the broadband revolution is the time and effort necesary to switch over all of the network to be able to use this tech. Phone companies are slow to roll these things out. When I worked for an ISP we once had to wait 6 months to install a dial-up location as the local telco had Lost their back hoe and did not want to rent one. How you loose a back hoe I will never know. SO don't hold your breath, this revolution is still born.
Re:No it does not solve the last mile problem (Score:3, Funny)
Lost backhoes (Score:2)
The moral dilemma is this: do I spend a fortune getting someone to bring a rough-terrain lowloader hundreds or possibly thousands of km out into the scrub to pick up my worn-out bulldozer, or do I lose it and have the insurance company (whose investigators are *not* about to spend hours on a jet, more hours on a prop-driven buzzbox and more hours - possibly days - in a rented 4WD just to get to the general area) replace it with a new one?
You might think that following the tracks would be an easy answer, but if the 'dozer's been busy in the area, and if the company takes its time reporting the incident, things ain't so simple. In a day, a 'dozer might be 100 or more km away, representing over 300,000 sq km to search for it in.
Moral justice is sometimes done, however, when a strap comes off or a big rock or tree turns the 'dozer so that it either comes back to camp or goes the wrong way and crosses a road or a fence-line where it will be noticed.
Riiight ... and where will the bandwidth come from (Score:5, Informative)
But where the *hell* is all this bandwidth going to come from? I mean, server bandwidth is expensive. I know a few people who donate Debian mirrors, and it costs them a pretty penny, that's for sure.
I mean, I'd still want to have this; if for nothing more than great community networks. (Community as in physical locality)
But this won't solve all our problems, it will probably bring us new ones.
Not that we still shouldn't do it
Re:Riiight ... and where will the bandwidth come f (Score:5, Funny)
Me.
If I had a 10MB connection to my house, I'd mirror shit just to mirror it. I'd download kernels and patches, and tell the maintainers to put me on the list of mirrors. And I wouldn't be alone.
That's one of the reasons that P2P networks work so well. There are so many nodes to get the information from.
Server bandwidth is expensive because it is a scarce commodity. How much do you pay per month for the 100MB connection between your workstation and your server? If you (conveniently) don't count the cost of the infrastructure, the price is zero. Factor in the cost of the infrastructure, and amortize it over the life of the equipment and that number is still ridiculously low. ($70 for two NICs, $80 for a half-decent switch (optional), say it's only good for a year. That's $12.50 a month!)
Server bandwidth is expensive because servers are concentrated into little high traffic nodes. Spread the traffic out (ala freenet, gnutella, morpheus, etc.) and costs drop dramatically. Make bandwidth a commodity, and you will start paying commodity prices.
Re:Riiight ... and where will the bandwidth come f (Score:3)
Where _does_ bandwidth come from ?
I get bandwidth from my isp, they get it from 2 or three places... and it goes "up the line" until you get networks that are simply moving traffic that doesn't belong to them..
Does UUNet create bandwidth ? Does sprint ? Why dont they create a bunch more ?
Where is the top of the food chain of bandwidth ?
Obviously, its in their interest to keep charging ridiculous fees.
Why doesn't someone else "make more bandwidth" ?
I pay $65/mo for 128/768 DSL with static ip. I think thats because tahts what I'm willing to pay, not because theres any cost structure supporting that price.
There is no peice of technology that I can think of that doesn't become trivial amortized over even a year. Yet T1 and DS3 line charges are still astronomical. Why ?
ISP's overselling bandwidth implies that they cant afford more upstream, implying that upstream bandwidth is expensive, which I've seen plenty of evidence of. Why is this upstream b/w so damn much money ?
Sorry for the incoherency. I just don't understand the cost structure for broadband.
Re:Riiight ... and where will the bandwidth come f (Score:5, Informative)
At present, 6.4 Terabits can be shifted on a single fiber, although I don't think that has been deployed in any serious way, ~100Gb/s or so are much more common. If you need more bandwidth, add another wavelength (cost: a millionish); or if the fiber is full (rare right now, but will happen more and more often in a few years or a decade), then you need to lay new fibers- that costs 100s of millions; but we are talking significant bandwidth from that- you don't lay 1 fiber you lay 50 or so and keep most of them for expansion or sell them to other telecoms companies to pay for your layout.
Re:Riiight ... and where will the bandwidth come f (Score:2)
Re:Riiight ... and where will the bandwidth come f (Score:2)
However your point about the comics is a bit flawed, if the server at your ISP has the comic image cached and you download it from that ISP that image still has to travel over a trunk line between the ISP's POP and your local CO. This does cost money. It costs money in terms of space required to cache it and the trunk bandwidth used to send it to you. The only way you'd get away with nearly free bandwidth was if your local phone company was also an ISP and housed its computer equipment in the CO building itself. With cable or DSL you don't have a whatever megabit connection to the internet, you've got a whatever megabit connection to a DLC and are lucky if that bandwidth is maintained once it goes out to the rest of the world. Letting you personally cache stuff would only work if you could talk directly to others on the local loop. No cable or DSL provider I know of does this because they're all structured to connect you to the internet, not connect you to your neighbor.
LRE (Score:5, Informative)
Cisco's LRE product offering requires two pieces:
1. An LRE-capable switch at the head-end (such as a 2900XL LRE [cisco.com]), which terminates the LRE and has a standard Ethernet handoff to your normal data equipment. In an intergrated voice/data setup (where you're reusing existing voice cabling to carry voice AND data) you would then use their LRE 48 POTS Splitter [cisco.com] at the head-end and hand off to the PBX before bringing everything in to the 2900XL LRE.
2. Cisco 575 CPE [cisco.com], which uplinks to the head-end and splits off the voice and the data. Very similar to Cisco's 600 series.
Sound like DSL? It essentially is, just on a smaller scale (3500XL/2900XL LRE costs a whole hell of a lot less then a carrier-class DSLAM). In fact, scanning over the Cisco 575 CPE Overview [cisco.com], Cisco declares the technology to be "based on VDSL".
Draw your own conclusions, but I have never heard this positioned as a last-mile replacement. The article never seems to hint at it either, but simply reiterate their marketing the product line for multi-tenant facilities.
Re:LRE (Score:3, Informative)
All things considered, their public wireless LAN access point and Mobile IP technology is much more interesting, and applicable to many of the same situations.
So when do we get... (Score:2, Funny)
Whatever you cannot build in a quick and dirty way with duct tape is worthless to me.
More info here (Score:3, Informative)
Hats off to Cisco's engineers for putting this into hardware - with the emerging IEEE standard, hopefully there will be others.
What about RFI? (Score:3, Interesting)
The nice 10 MHz square waves going over an unshielded wire are going to make a whole lot of harmonics (and products) all up and down the radio spectrum. Depending on the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire (and with a transmitting antenna a mile long), I'm pretty sure you'd run afoul of any number of FCC regs. Plus, it would probably just irritate the cows :-).
Re:What about RFI? (Score:5, Informative)
If this is really VDSL-based, there will be several modulated sine waves in use.
Depending on the power you'd need to push your signal down a mile of barbed wire
Easily determined by the required bitrate, available bandwidth, and noise floor. Millivolts, although they'll probably use a couple volts (like standard 10/100/1000baseT) to make the parts cheaper.
with a transmitting antenna a mile long
Properly-designed transmission line does not radiate (much). This is primarily done by either running a balanced signal down two twisted conductors (twisted pair) or running an unbalanced signal inside a grounded shield (coax).
Re:What about RFI? (Score:2)
Umm...apparently you didn't even read the blurb at the top of this article. The story is about running 10Mbps over Cat1 cable [newtechnologyhome.com] (non-twisted pair) or random wires (non-coaxial).
Straight bare metal is pretty much the definition of an antenna. Physics dictates that there must be radiative loss here.
Re:What about RFI? (Score:2)
To clarify: the twist is only for preventing differences in the cable and local environment from affecting one wire of a balanced pair more than the other. The pair won't magically radiate more if you untwist it (and you were specifically talking about line losses due to radiation, whereas the previous poster was talking about RFI). Your 3500' run of cat1 may only do 5mbit, but a 3500' run of cat3 (which a lot of phone line is these days) may well do 15.
Straight bare metal is pretty much the definition of an antenna.
If that's all there was to it, we'd all have to live closer to powerplants. Read up on transmission line theory. The losses (radiation) for travelling waves are a few orders of magnitude lower than if a standing wave were created on a resonant line.
Properly designed barbed wire? (Score:2)
How about properly designed barbed wire? Does that radiate much? Does the strainer, dropper or wire-run spacing make a difference? Is razor wire better or worse? Does the mile include the twists used as barbs, only the actual barbs, or none of it? (-:
If Cisco has sold you ... (Score:2)
(Yes, I know that they claim you can continue to use the same line for speach communication, and I hope that they don't implement this using Voice Over IP.)
Re:If Cisco has sold you ... (Score:2)
Not as good as... (Score:2)
Unfortunately, the problem with dropped packets is not nearly as bad as the problem with droppings.
Re: (Score:2)
Speed and DSL comparison gripes (Score:2, Informative)
Thats 10Mb(it), not 10MB(yte). DSL is capable of this speed too. Like DSL, its pretty good at running over crap cable, but quality varies with the wiring.
This is a different (fault-tolerant) modulation format for ethernet frames. DSL is a different (fault-tolerant) modulation format for ATM frames.
I think this is interesting, because ethernet doesn't have as many things to mess up, like, for instance, matching the VCI and VPI up on both ends. On the other side of the coin, though, you don't get the subnet seperation and traffic shaping that ATM offers natively. In terms of moving packets from point A to point B, the technologies seem roughly equivelant to me.
Also remember, DSL is capable of 10MBit, and I don't know how much HFC cable is capable of, but if you ever see an ISP deploying this, don't expect them to give you the full capabilities of the wire - broadband ISPs never do (all of the ones I've tried cap bandwidth higher up in the network regardless of what the technology is capable of).
What about DSDN? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hate to sound like I'm marketing it, but what about DSDN? It's true that it doesn't run over existing technologies, but for 10 Mbps Internet access it's considerably cheaper than the current alternatives (such as direct fibre-optic lines) and is supposed to cost about as much for the end user as their cable or DSL ISP already does.
It's already in use in Denver as well as a section of Utah, and it's supposed to be very fast in practice - not just theory. The Denver ISP has a site at wideopenwest.com [wideopenwest.com] and the company that designed the technology is at switchpoint.com [switchpoint.com]. Switchpoint is the one testing it in Utah as far as I know.
I also know that Slashdot has mentioned this tech before, but it bears repeating this for others; we'll never get past sub-standard cable and phoneline solutions if people don't demand alternatives.
LRE is not vapor, it works quite well (Score:5, Interesting)
Out to 3000 feet 15 megabits is normal, between 3000 and 5000 only 5 megabits is typical, but it depends on the quality of the cable.
This technology is based on VDSL and works using the same principals, but runs at a higher data rate, limiting the distance. Also, LRE transports Ethernet frames directly, without any ATM protocol overhead, unlike most of the other DSL solutions. This greatly reduces costs.
The Cisco 575 LRE device is much like the low-end Cisco 600 series DSL routers in appearance, but has no active layer 3 capabilities. Basically, the remote 575 port appears to the 2924LRE as if it were a local port, allowing trunking and vlan assignments as supported by the 2900 series switch.
If you could order a number of "alarm pairs(dry copper)" from your local telco, between a friendly ISP and your houses, and the distance was less than 5000 ft., this would be a pretty economical solution. Otherwise, it's not of much use for the average homeowner.
-Falcor
Uhm, ARCNET? (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't new or suprising. This technology has been around for years. God, I remember using ARCNET to communicate thru barbed wire back in 1995 (as a test to prove it could).
Fiber-Optics Over Fishing Line (FOOFL) (Score:3, Funny)
Someone needs to convert pound-test to bandwidth, and there you go.
Another last mile solution (Score:2)
For those unfamiliar with RFC1149, here are the details: http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html [faqs.org]
Its probably a bit slower than barbed wire, but damn it... its more fun!
Which company? (Score:3, Funny)
Ethernet in the {First,Last} Mile (Score:2)
Audio cable good coax replacement.... (Score:3, Interesting)
That guy's name.. ouch (Score:2)
You and at least 30 others... (Score:2)
Is this news? (Score:2, Funny)
my room-mate discovered that 4 conductor telephone wire was like 2 ¢ / foot when CAT5 was selling for more like 50 ¢ / foot.
He networked our house for like four bucks.
The RJ45 ends were difficult to crimp to the cable
because the cable is so much smaller.
His solution:
Wrap electrical tape around the cable to increase its diameter.
Keep in mind that a 10 base T network only needs 4 of the 8 conductors, but you'll need 8 conductors for 100 Base T.
I do not remember having any bad connections via the cheap cable, but I wouldn't reccommend it unless you're on a college sided budget. Cat5 is cheap.
Um, wireless? (Score:2)
[1] Or 54mbps.
Re:Um, wireless? (Score:2)
Somebody then proposes I switch to a wireless scheme. It gets set up in a cell structure like the cell phone system. One merely replaces the DLC and wires with a WiFi tranceiver to serve the people formerly served with wires. I gain the advantage of not having to tear up pavement in order to connect end users to a trunk line. However there are disadvantages. When more nodes exist in a cell than planned for either 1) the tranceiver is saturated by either having to maintain X number of nodes as active links or 2) because bandwidth is spread too thin to effectively serve all the nodes. In either case I'm lucky if the least of my problem is some users get network busy messages. Try making a cell phone call in midtown San Fransisco and you'll see the limits of cellular networks. On a wireless network a given cell has X bandwidth on a given band. If the number of nodes in a cell doubles you can't merely add a tranceiver to double your bandwidth. You're very limited on how scalable your bandwidth can be. With a wired setup you can add another trunk line or replace an low bandwidth trunk line with a high bandwidth trunk line (and associated DLC[s]).
Thus finally wireless is only cheaper in some cases where you've got a hard limit on the number of nodes on the network. If you've got a fairly dense population in an area you're going to have so many wireless tranceivers it is going to cost you just as much as using wires. Besides the fact that almost anywhere you go has a form of wiring going from it to somewhere else.
My Connection... (Score:3, Funny)
"Oh yeah?! I've got a barbed wire Ethernet line!"
"A what?!"
"A barbed-wire Ethernet line. Haven't you heard of that?"
"Umm... No, I can't say I have."
"Oh... ACME Networks installed it for me last month. It cost a fortune, because there are no barbed wire fences around where I live, so they had to upgrade their entire barbed wire infrastructure; they billed me for like 20 miles of barbed wire fencing."
This can be useful (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, isn't the first mile now the offical problem? (Score:2)
Work needs to be done to reduce the price of traffic over the internet backbones.
Hell ATT@Home had a potential 40mbp/s line running to my house (heck, one time I got 2MBp/s. Yes thats MegaBits per second) but eventualy the price of providing that much bandwidth to their users cause the current scenario of bandwidth now being capped.
What good would a 10mbp/s line do me when I am capped at 1.5mbp/s?
::sighs::
Re:Uh, isn't the first mile now the offical proble (Score:2)
MegaBYTES per second MegaBYTES.
I once got a 2MegaBYTES per second download.
Recycle the OG Network! (Score:2, Funny)
;-)
Did anyone read the article? (Score:3, Insightful)
Cisco's LRE is a LAN technology. This doesn't have one rat fart to do with any part of the last mile. It works over existing Cat1-3 (phone) premise wiring for distances of up to 5000ft. This is not a replacement for Cable Modems, DSL, or ougie boards. And no, it does not "blow DSL out of the water." If you are within 5000ft of a CO, you can get very good DSL rates over ONE (30AWG) pair (not the 4pairs that comprise CatX cables.)
This is technology for multi-tenate units like apartment buildings, hotels, offices, malls, etc. The article spells this out in perfectly plain engligh:
- Owners of multi-unit buildings such as hotels, apartments buildings, business complexes, universities, hospitals, manufacturing floors and government agencies are now able to deliver an unprecedented number and a variety of new, broadband applications to users.
You will not see this being run through the public telephone grid.There actually is an IEEE standards body for "Ethernet in the Last Mile" -- I don't know the number for it off hand. And companies are designing hardware to provide 10M ethernet connections with further reach than SDSL. And this is last mile technology. (I'm too far from the CO in any case.)
Re:Obviously a Hoax (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Obviously a Hoax (Score:2)
Re:Am i missing something? (Score:2, Informative)
2. It covers any place that has wires, not just hotels. Homes have cat3 or cat1, so it will work there too.
3. My original headline was Ethernet over barbed Wire. Every time I submit a story, Slashdot changes my titles.
Re:Huge BareAss? (Score:3, Funny)
(ok, think about it a bit before you mod me down)
MadCow.
Re:MB or Mb (Score:2)
It's bits. Please get that front page fixed
By the way, 10Mbps doesn't blow DSL out of the water, it just blows the current implementations of DSL out of the water. There are standards in place for DSL up to 54Mbps (or even higher, I haven't been keeping current).