In Sandy-Struck NJ Town, Verizon Goes All Wireless, No Copper 155
An anonymous reader writes with a bit from the Asbury Park Press: "'Devastated and wiped out by superstorm Sandy, Verizon has no plans to rebuild its copper-line telephone network in Mantoloking. Instead, Verizon says Mantoloking is the first town in New Jersey, and one of the few areas in the country, to have a new service called Verizon Voice Link. Essentially, it connects your home's wired and cordless telephones to the Verizon Wireless network.' So no copper or fiber to a fairly densely populated area. Comcast will now be the only voice/data option with copper to the area."
Emergency Situations? (Score:4, Informative)
They better design the network to be able to withstand the extra load that an emergency situation would create. Imagine the panic when a disaster happens and noone can reach anybody for help or to make sure they're ok.
Re:Emergency Situations? (Score:5, Insightful)
That won't be much of a problem. In a disaster, there'll probably be a power failure, and nobody's phone will work at all. Oops, maybe that's not a feature, is it?
Re:Emergency Situations? (Score:5, Interesting)
Let's see:
Ice storm of 98: Cell coverage was spotty. POTS worked fine.
Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine
Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine
See a pattern?
At least with the wired power has never been an issue since it gets it from the switch. Before the blackout we had got rid of our wired phone and had only cordless. At that point I was thinking of getting rid of our wired connection. That changed my mind.
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Let's see:
Ice storm of 98: Cell coverage was spotty. POTS worked fine.
Great east coast blackout: Cell coverage was non-existent. POTS worked fine
Earthquake couple years ago (it was a 6 which is huge for this area): Cell coverage was crap since every body was calling everybody else. POTS... was fine
See a pattern?
At least with the wired power has never been an issue since it gets it from the switch. Before the blackout we had got rid of our wired phone and had only cordless. At that point I was thinking of getting rid of our wired connection. That changed my mind.
When I was in an earthquake in Hawaii followed by an island-wide power outage, POTS was useless - took 20 - 30 minutes with the phone off hook just to get a dial-tone, and calling anyone (local or long distance) resulted in an "all circuits are busy" recording. Both AT&T and Verizon wireless cell sites were working for at least 6 hours hours after the power went off, I still couldn't get a voice call through, but I was able to get (slow) internet access, and send SMS messages to check on family/frien
Re:Emergency Situations? (Score:5, Informative)
POTS works during power failures because the phone line itself carries enough power to operate a low-tech phone. Outside of hotels, I haven't seen one of these in over a decade. Every home phone I've seen is cordless and needs AC power. If you've got a battery backup, you can move it from the computer over to the landline phone to use it. But battery backups in homes are almost as rare as low-tech corded phones.
Cell phones will work for about an hour at least, until the batteries in the towers give out. That should cover 99.99% of blackouts. My cell phone has always worked during a blackout. In the one extended blackout I went through (3 days because fallen trees took out all the power and phone lines), if I went outside to a high spot my cell phone could pick up a distant powered tower, and I could make calls (note that only CDMA can do this; GSM has a range limit of about 20 miles due to being sensitive to lag caused by the speed of light).
In the old days, POTS would become useless immediately after a large earthquake. The shaking would knock all the vertically mounted pay phone handsets off the hook. Same for some home phones (the kind with a separate base and handset). These phones would tie up a POTS line even though nobody was calling. If you tried to make a call then, you'd get a fast busy signal (all circuits busy). You had to wait a few minutes for the phone company to time all those lines out and forcibly disconnect them. By which time everyone else was trying to call and it could take an hour before you could finally get a dial tone. TV news would constantly broadcast to resist the urge to call relatives to tell them you're ok and please stay off the phones, so emergency services and those calling 911 could get through first.
So it's not that POTS stands up better in earthquakes. It's that much fewer people use it nowadays, while the infrastructure that still remains was originally designed to handle a much larger volume of calls. As that equipment starts to break down and isn't replaced because the call volume isn't needed, POTS service will become as (un)reliable as cell phone service after these types of widescale disasters.
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That's still possible in the U.S., but most people have "upgraded" to fancier phones that require mains electricity to function. A vanilla corded phone will run solely on POTS line power, but line power will only support a draw of up to 20 mA or so at ~12 V terminal voltage, or about 250 mW power.
The biggest category of phones that can't function on line power is cordless phones, which are also the most common. Some households do keep one corded phone around to use in case of power outages; I know my parent
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My comment was about the proposal to move everyone to wireless. As others have pointed out, regular wire lines generally work during power failures, because they are powered by the central station, which has battery backup or backup generators.
It's possible that the new wireless modems will have battery backup, which will mean they'll last through short blackouts. I would be astounded if they could be powered by standard batteries that a homeowner would have on hand once their short-term charge is gone.
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They better design the network to be able to withstand the extra load that an emergency situation would create.
A good example of what is called the "Nirvana fallacy". Rejecting a good solution because it is not perfect. Do you have any idea what kind of overcapacity you need to handle the case where everyone wants to call everyone else simultaneously? I'm sure the good people of whatever this town is called wouldn't be willing to pay for it.
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A former head of AT&T (might have been Fred Kappel, CEO in 1960s) made the comment that you have to design the network to cover the traffic on Mother's Day and everything else is free.
In the direct dial exchanges of the 70s, 20:1 ratios were the target within the towns or exchange clusters. Long distance was priced to discourage ratios that high.
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..just skimming the article blur, I think they HAD a disaster which is why their phone lines are broken in the first place.
sometimes wireless is better.
Reliability... (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who lives in a rural area and is forced to use wireless internet (still have copper for my phone though), the reliability and speed still aren't anywhere near that of wired. Speed may not be an issue for just phone, but the inconsistent connection may well be.
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Part of living in a rural area. I live in Ocala, Florida, not exactly a huge city, but we do have LTE and I get blazing fast reliable internet.
I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up. I can stream and torrent reliably.
Single digit GB/mo cap (Score:4, Informative)
we do have LTE [...] I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up. I can stream and torrent reliably.
But for how long at a time? With the 5 GB per month transfer cap that was typical of LTE plans last time I checked, a 10 Mbps transfer would eat up the entire month's allowance in one hour.
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That's terrible. A friend of mine did a run on speedtest.net using his phone yesterday and got 60/30 Mbit/s (up/down). Unlimited, naturally. Just because you're able to stream a Youtube video doesn't mean it works like it should. It's like saying "well, at least it's faster than biking" when you buy a broken car.
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I grew up in Ocala. It wasn't a rural area 20 years ago, it sure as hell isn't today. Hell florida has had full statewide cell phone coverage easily since 2000 that I'm aware of, I don't know how much before that it was.
Cedar Key, Inglis, Yankeetown, Crystal River, Okalawaha ... THOSE are rural areas.
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I get blazing fast reliable internet. ... I routinely get 12-10 megs down and 2 up.
Bless! Rural America must be, from a technological point of view, hell. The cheapest package that I'm able to buy in my area (literally, the most budget of the budget packages) is 20 MB down. And I get it too- Speed Test tells me that I'm getting 19.5 MB today.
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This isn't a rural area; this is outside NYC. It's got reasonable population density, and perhaps more importantly it's the wealthiest region in the entire state of NJ. It's also a very small region -- they could probably blanket the entire town with a single cell tower. I highly doubt they'll have any signal strength issues unless they decide to put the receiver in their freakin basement.
voice quality (Score:2)
Power failures? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Power failures? (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course, one benefit of POTS was that, in a power failure, your landline phone would frequently still work because of the giant piles of batteries at the CO. So, you could still dial 911 if, say, your aged relative's breathing assist machine needed power, or if there was some other medical emergency in the midst of what ever caused the power failure. Kind of ironic that, as a result of a disaster, they'll be somewhat more vulnerable to disasters.
This would probably be more reliable than POTS. Every household would have a backup battery. Even the POTS interfaces from the cable company come with a battery installed. Remember when cell phones were just phones and the battery lasted for days? Now imagine a bigger battery.
Also in a disaster they could easily setup mobile towers to replace towers that have been damaged or to add additional capacity. You can't just run new POTS lines in an emergency. The old system could have been down for weeks if your lines went down. Now maybe only hours or days if it even goes down. There is a lot more redundancy now too since you are not relying on a single copper connection to your house. In theory you would have the ability to connect to multiple towers, so it one fails the other will be a backup.
So it is not at all more vulnerable to disasters.
Re:Power failures? (Score:4, Informative)
Of course, one benefit of POTS was that, in a power failure, your landline phone would frequently still work because of the giant piles of batteries at the CO. So, you could still dial 911 if, say, your aged relative's breathing assist machine needed power, or if there was some other medical emergency in the midst of what ever caused the power failure. Kind of ironic that, as a result of a disaster, they'll be somewhat more vulnerable to disasters.
This would probably be more reliable than POTS. Every household would have a backup battery. Even the POTS interfaces from the cable company come with a battery installed. Remember when cell phones were just phones and the battery lasted for days? Now imagine a bigger battery.
Also in a disaster they could easily setup mobile towers to replace towers that have been damaged or to add additional capacity. You can't just run new POTS lines in an emergency. The old system could have been down for weeks if your lines went down. Now maybe only hours or days if it even goes down. There is a lot more redundancy now too since you are not relying on a single copper connection to your house. In theory you would have the ability to connect to multiple towers, so it one fails the other will be a backup.
So it is not at all more vulnerable to disasters.
I had one of these cellular home phones when I lived in a South American country. After the president of said country was temporarily ousted by the military, I carried around said phone for days in the event that the US Embassy needed to get a hold of me. The battery did indeed last for days. In fact it had to, power went out on a regular basis and no one would have phone service without a battery. It was quite handy, I will say. Thankfully they never had to get a hold of me.
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This would probably be more reliable than POTS. Every household would have a backup battery. Even the POTS interfaces from the cable company come with a battery installed.
'Right, because a bunch of batteries in random homes that are never serviced or replaced are going to work much better than the banks at the CO that are managed by people that know what they are doing ... and also have big ass generators to actually power the system. The batteries at your CO are a 5 minute solution to cover until the generators kick in.
This is an example of a time when decentralization is fucking stupid, its just as stupid as everyone having their own personal power plant in their basement.
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This is not necessarily true anymore. Several times our neighbors' phones went out with the power, but our FIOS phone and cell phones still worked (and continued to work when I plugged our terminal into a bigger UPS). I chalk it up to a bad/insufficient UPS on the copper-to-fiber switches somewhere upstream. We don't get copper back to the switch board anymore.
Also, what Verizon didn't say was how many customers in the town were actually subscribed to copper landlines before the storm. It's possibly mo
Re:Power failures? (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, an underappreciated aspect of the "copper" network, at least in the U.S., is that it's increasingly only a legacy last-mile network: there's copper under the streets of your subdivision, but once it gets out of the subdivision it's no longer on copper anymore.
If you still have a modem lying around and something to dial up to, you can get a rough idea of how far your copper goes by seeing if you can actually get 56.6 kbps downstream. The official phone standard only supports a band of frequencies (300-3000 Hz) sufficient to squeeze in about 30-35 kbps of data transfer. The 56kbps standard exploits the larger physical capacity of copper lines to push more data [michael-henderson.us] in the downstream direction, by replacing the usual DAC on the phone-company end with a codec that directly switches line voltages, with the effect of using more of the copper's bandwidth... as long as it doesn't go through another filter at any point in the process, in which case you won't be able to get better than 33.6.
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Ah, that is why I cannot get DSL (20K ft.) and CONNECT at usually 28000 (highest is 31200, but super rare; in the past was 24000 like BBS days). Also, the line noises are awful for the modems. I see my external modems' error correction lights go crazy. On good connections, my already compressed downloads are at about 3 kB/sec. :(
An easily solvable problem. (Score:2)
Wireless infrastructure still has battery backups there's nothing different there from a POTS. The only difference here is how to power the endpoint devices since the system won't power them directly. There's no reason why this couldn't be battery powered. This is actually how FTTH endpoints are usually setup, with a local battery backup at the home ensuring voice over the fibre line keeps running when your power doesn't.
There are off the shelf solutions for this problem which work quite well.
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Until next year ... when your mini-UPS battery doesn't hold a charge for shit ...
How ofter do you see these batteries replaced? Whats that? Never? Oh yea, thats exactly how often TimeWarner replaces their VoIP units in homes ...
Off-the-shelf solutions you refer to work for shit. Just because you think you know how reliable something is, doesn't make it true. You're pretending to live in a fantasy world of perfect UPSes ...
Managing 100,000 UPSes that are NEVER serviced is going to be WAY WAY less reliab
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Actually they work just fine. My telephone company sends out a new battery every 4 years with instructions on how to replace them. During our last major flood everything stayed up, except we didn't have power for over 24 hours. I couldn't call out after about 5 hours because the exchange eventually went underwater but that's not a problem of the battery.
Stop complicating very simple stuff.
Also you don't need to replace batteries every year. SLA batteries on a constant float have a shelf life of 5-10 years.
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It also reminds me of the discussion of the cell phone network going out after the bombing in Boston. A lot of people were taking the attitude, "Well it's fine for the cell phone network to go out in an emergency. It's not serious infrastructure. You shouldn't be relying on cell phones." As thought the cell phones were toys for teenagers to post Facebook posts, while landlines were for "real" stuff.
I agree with the decision to not roll copper. (Score:3)
Rolling out new copper in this day and age would be madness. But the decision to rely on wireless as anything other than a short-term emergency measure is wrong. They should, of course, be rolling out new fiber as a matter of urgency.
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Rolling out new copper in this day and age would be madness. But the decision to rely on wireless as anything other than a short-term emergency measure is wrong. They should, of course, be rolling out new fiber as a matter of urgency.
Well, it sounds like a long haul of fiber for very few customers and anything that does havoc on the copper wires might do the same for fiber optic wires as well.
"If you go down the block, there are people that are using other technologies so I can spend a fortune running copper down there and have nobody use it," (...) Verizon has its fiber-optic network in other parts of Ocean County's barrier peninsula hit hard by Sandy, including Ortley Beach, Normandy Beach and Brick. There are no plans to bring fiber to Mantoloking.
This is going to happen a lot, here in Norway they're planning a similar phase-out of copper - actually the whole central parts of the country by 2017, cannibalizing for spare parts to run the outskirts - but they're not going to lay fiber to everyone that had copper. The rest will get some form of wireless service.
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Ditto. I'd rather use dial-up with unlimited, oh wait. Thanks Verizon. :( Why don't they just deploy damn fiber?
Same thing in Fire Island. Just one problem... (Score:2)
They're doing the same thing on Fire Island. From what I heard, they were planning to run FiOS before Sandy, so I imagine this is just a stop-gap.
Which would be fine, save for one problem: their coverage *sucks* out there. When the summer season hits in less than a month, we're screwed.
Insurance windfall result in skyrocketing earnings (Score:5, Insightful)
Verizon has likely pocketed tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in insurance to cover loss of business and to 'make good' its infrastructure. Verizon then neglects to make good and proceeds with building an inferior alternative at a fraction of the cost.
It would be interesting to see if the insurance company paid for the cost of this new infrastructure; provided funds to the value of the existing infrastructure; or provided funds for the replacement cost of the existing infrastructure. In the case of the latter two, has Verizon returned the unspent portion to the insurance company (and are they required to?) or simply added this windfall to their bottom line.
It also makes me wonder how much federal and state funding was used to build this network.
Then Abolish Monopoly Privileges (Score:2)
I find the lack of reliable last miles disturbing (Score:3)
Seriously, wireless is great for when I'm out and about and all I have is my cell phone or when I'm making a quick, temporary connection with the laptop, but I would not feel comfortable living somewhere I couldn't have a physical last mile connection - fiber or cable is fine, (though I'd pay for BOTH to have redundant last mile connections)
I get that it's cheaper to go wireless, but there appears to be a great divide between Internet reliability and speed - those with last mile wired connections and those with only wireless options (satellite of local wireless carriers) and in our mad rush to make things more convenient, we're also making them slower and less reliable than they could be.
I suppose I could look at it another way - it would cost WAY MORE than the phone company could hope to make back to re-run copper, so from a business sense, I guess this works for them.
However, if I were Verizon, I'd be rolling out the fiber to premises, and give Comcast something to worry about... but instead, they're abandoning FIOS... go figure.
It's all about revenue (Score:2)
POTTS lines are heavily regulated as to rates and service levels, this is why the connection rates are cheap and anything more than lifeline service is heavily levied.
The phone company is obligated to provide 911 service and lifeline at regulated rates.
This presents a business model with limited revenue and high maintenance liability, because folks that rely on this model don't use the phone excessively and are very careful about long distance charges.
With wireless service the phone co is no longer legally
I wonder about latency.... (Score:3)
It must be entertaining to play quake. Then again if Verizon used really good AP's maybe its not much different.
Use it, or lose it (Score:3)
I think Verizon should forfeit their rights to the landline infrastructure and associated rights of way. These can, in turn, be rewarded to someone who can maintain and improve upon them.
During Ike, we found out (Score:2)
That copper to home did not mean copper from the plant to home.
In newer areas, the power failed after six hours. The phone company had fiber to a local box which had batteries and copper to the houses.
In my older area of town, the power stayed on to the phone (but we lacked electrical power for 3 weeks and only old dumb phones worked- anything with a power plug didn't).
I think the days of copper to home are going away. Hopefully we can get fiber to the home.
I would prefer to see one wide fiber pipe which
Mantoloking (Score:2)
Mantoloking is a Jersey Shore community situated on the Barnegat Peninsula, also known as Barnegat Bay Island, a long, narrow barrier island that separates Barnegat Bay from the Atlantic Ocean.
As of the 2000 Census, Mantoloking was the wealthiest community in the state of New Jersey with a per capita money income of $114,017 as of 1999, an increase of 29.8% from the $87,830 recorded in 1989. It was ranked as the 15th highest-income place in the United States.
Mantoloking, New Jersey [wikipedia.org]
Population 300. As a summer resort, 5,000.
Anything you build here will be exposed and vulnerable, I am not sure that trenching cable solves that problem.
Most of what you build here will see little or no use eight to nine months out of the year --- and little or no return on your investment.
I see a great opportunity for Google... (Score:2)
Anybody care to guess how many days it would take Verizon to change its mind about FiOS if Google showed up at the next Mantoloking city council meeting & offered to deploy Google Fiber there if the city paid the direct costs of laying the fiber itself? Oh, and offered to pay for the lawyers the city would need when Verizon and Comcast fought back the only way modern American corporations seem to be capable of competing -- by using the courts to block it, instead of trying to outdo them by offering bett
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copper wireline is expensive, what medium would you expect those DSL customers to get service delivered on?
Re:waste of money (Score:4, Informative)
Fiber would be nice and cheaper than full copper runs.
Re:waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.
In addition, running fiber not only requires the fiber itself, but you also have to have repeaters, which means you need copper power lines running parallel with the fiber lines. Sure you could depend on the power grid, but then you have to forgo the classic emergency benefit where the phone lines worked even during a blackout. This is precisely the reason why all long distance fiber lines do invariably come with copper, in fact many of which need a lot of copper (far more than voice grade lines) since one of the sheathing layers is made out of copper to make it more resilient against damage while still being somewhat flexible.
DSL itself is rather low tech, and is probably right now about as good as its going to get, likewise IMO it's not even worth bothering to rebuild it. You can only do so much with voice grade copper since it can only carry a very limited number of channels, unlike say cable which is shielded far better and is easily capable of 5.1Gbit/s if you use all available channels up to 1Ghz. (In most of the existing infrastructure you can go up to 3Ghz, it's just a matter of having better transmitters and receivers to take advantage of it. Dump the analog channels and you'll get even more out of it.)
Power cut? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Easy, use a UPS. Phones require very little power, so even a cheaper one could last a week or longer.
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six to twelve hours is how long they last, depending on whether you have one or two battery packs installed. By default they install only one battery pack, leaving one empty battery slot.
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And I wouldn't be surprised if it's completely true. People like myself have long since moved from POTS to wireless. That isn't a corporate conspiracy, that is a fact brought about by consumer choice. That being the case, why are we going to maintain old copper lines that people don't want anymore?
Virtual circuits make a lot more sense than switched circuits. This is the same reason why in every other form of communication that exists, we've moved away from TDMA (this is where the t in t-carrier comes from,
Re:waste of money (Score:5, Insightful)
But who says yhou put in voice grade copper?
I think Verizon shpuld be required to replace the downed copper. That's what the maintenence fees the customers have been paying forever were to cover.
Re: waste of money (Score:2)
+1
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But who says yhou put in voice grade copper? I think Verizon shpuld be required to replace the downed copper. That's what the maintenence fees the customers have been paying forever were to cover.
You are mistaken. The maintenance fees are for the maintenance of the bank accounts of the board of directors.
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Those maintenance fees cover the occasional fried wire, copper theft, or some derp digging where he isn't supposed to. They aren't meant to cover an entire infrastructure being demolished.
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Additionally, VDSL2 with Bonding (and eventually Vectoring) turns traditional cable p
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VDSL2 with bonding will likely cap out at practical speeds of 100Mbps or so. If you push the remotes even close to the customer, perhaps 150 or even 200. Cable with DOCSIS 3.1 fully dedicated to IP can push 10 Gbps over node sizes that are similar to GPON. My cableco is already using 10GPON-style node sizes.
VDSL2 has no long-term future, while coax can compete with the best PON fiber we've got today.
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100Mbps is plenty for a home user. Yes, yes, 640k will be enough for anyone, etc. But really, what will need more than that? That's enough for many simultaneous high definition video streams. VDSL2 allows easily good enough performance at a far lower cost than putting new cabling in.
The coax infrastructure is also far less widely available than the twisted pair. In my country, only about 50% of the population have access to it, compared to nearly everyone for the phone lines. If you're going to deploy entir
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100Mbps is plenty for a home user.
You, sir, are mentally deficient.
VDSL technologies do NOT provide a 100Mbps service.
They provide an UP TO 100Mbps service.
As the bandwidth capacity of the service is dependent on copper-length and quality the provider MAKES ABSOLUTELY NO GUARANTEES REGARDING SERVICE QUALITY.
However, with a fibre service, they DO provide guarantees, because fibre in the last mile is a truly digital service, either it works or it doesn't.
And when it works, it works at the full service specification, none of that WEASEL W
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In many countries, like Canada (mine) and the US), coax is ubiquitous. Penetration is virtually universal. VDSL2 is a nice upgrade over ADSL (I personally have 50 meg VDSL2), but it'll never get that much faster. Bonding and vectoring might hit 150ish, that's about it. Coax, which as I said is near universal, can hit much much higher speeds, and with DOCSIS 3.1 is competes directly with fiber. This is why the phone companies like Bell are using fiber to compete with coax. Yes, they still deploy VDSL2, but o
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How far are we from having everything in the cloud so home access points aren't doing anything other than running a display?
When Aussie gamers are running their games on machines at colo centres in the USA so their lag times are lower, I would say the days of getting massive amounts of data to a local computer are numbered.
If I can buy a fixed connection for $70/mo or a completely mobile one for the same amount of money at 1/2 the speed, which one are most people going to take? I think the days of having a
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No, fiber is far more expensive if you do it proper. That is, using actual glass fibers as opposed to plastic, and using lasers instead of LED. Not even just talking about the materials, actually properly terminating fiber lines requires a bit of skill and some tools that aren't cheap, unlike say voice grade copper that requires a simple punch tool.
Why do YOU get to decide what is "proper"? Who appointed you?
If plastic and LEDs work what the hell is wrong with using that?
Fiber is getting cheaper all the time. People don't steal fiber because the scrap value of glass or plastic is high.
Besides, fiber can support way higher bandwidth, by your own admission in your last paragraph.
And fiber is not a scarce commodity, whereas both copper and wireless spectrum is.
Verizon is still going to have to put fiber back into this town in order to supply bandwidth
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Well for example, plastic from the beginning isn't as clear, and over time turns yellow. This means you'll have slower data rates, and over time they get even slower. This is why for example that TOSLINK optical cable was only capable of 4mbit whereas SPDIF coax could do 10mbit, because they wanted to take into account cable degredation. Glass doesn't have any of these problems; as far as we know it can last forever.
And LED is only capable of transmitting a single channel, not to mention that like plastic,
Re:waste of money (Score:5, Informative)
"And LED is only capable of transmitting a single channel,"
Umm, we've got multi-path LED-laser arrays, multi-wavelength, that are so tiny you could couple one to a 2mm fiber.
And because they're not in a wavelength that will actually hurt the plastic transmission medium, no yellowing over time, as long as the fiber is underground and properly protected.
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If their engineers say this will work better than rebuilding the copper network from the ground up, I'll believe them.
Who said Verizon's engineers think this is a better idea? I'm sure their input was limited to,"Can we do this, instead of that?", not,"Which is the better solution?"
Re:waste of money (Score:4, Informative)
" and using lasers instead of LED"
Boy do I have some news for you. Pretty much every Laser in use today that isn't a gas laser is based right off an LED.
Source: I make LED and solid-state laser equipment.
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. . . and he should be thankful that most modern lasers are LED-based. How long do the gas tubes for lasers last, what is their failure rate, what is the response times (on/off/on cycles), and what are the power requirements?
Smaller and cheaper does not always mean inferior. The "you get what you pay for" rule is a broad generalization which often proves to be untrue when it comes to modern technology.
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Fibre as a replacement for the copper local loop doesn't need repeaters. The typical range of GPON is about 20 km, which is far longer than any copper loop. You can achieve blackout availability by the rather simple measure of having a battery at the user's premises to power the fibre terminating equipment.
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Yeah. A person who spends his time running short runs of cable would think that - because he thinks only in terms of the cost of the cable. But when you are digging up streets the cost of running the cable completely dominates the cost of the physical medium, and because of that other attributes of fibre come into play.
Firstly, it can support longer runs - as in 20 km 5km. That means it can cover 16 times the area before it is necessary to put active el
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It's one thing to run a trunk line to the towers, and a whole other thing (due to flooding) to dig up and replace the smaller lines to each individual house.
I think they're far more likely to do a better job with modern wireless than POTS anyways. Newer modulation techniques allow for far more bandwidth and signal reliability, especially given that since you aren't dealing with a tiny cell phone with limited battery you could get away with using a higher power transmitter at the customer end, coupled with a
Remember 10-10-321? (Score:2)
This is one reason, by the way, that long distance POTS calls are more expensive than long distance wireless calls, and consequently why wireless carriers make no distinction between local and long distance: they use virtual circuits instead of switched circuits.
Is that how the 10-10 dial-around carriers of the late 1990s were able to offer such low rates?
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2600 Hacker's Quarterly has a detailed explanation on the 10-10 services
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Mechanical circuit switching is long dead, and electronic circuit switching is no more limited in capacity than packet switching. The reason long distance was more expensive was that in the old days it really was very expensive to install a lot of long distance capacity, and this was true for data as well as voice. Fibre changed all that, so if they're still charging a fortune it's solely because they can. Some phone companies here in the UK offer unlimited international calls (to come countries) in their
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So they'd just stick the equivalent charge for your voice service (which is really almost entirely paying for the physical infrastructure) on your DSL bill instead. Bundling is common in such situations, because it doesn't really cost them significantly more to provide line + voice service than line alone.
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I'm currently (for the last several years) paying $40/month for 7Mbps "naked" ADSL from Verizon in NYC.
When I asked for something similar at another location they said that standalone DSL was no longer available and that I should get a voice phone line plus 1Mbps DSL for $50/month. I went with Clear instead (so far so good).
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This means that there's now a market chance for anyone willing to put down optic fiber in the area.
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You don't put fiber on poles if you are smart, you put it underground.
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Google! Google! Google! Come to me Google!
Great oppurtunity for Google to roll out fiber to the area and to break Verizon's monopoly by showing them up in the state. Maybe even get the politicians to back em.
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Why would the PSC and FCC permit this?
Why wouldn't they?
Dubyaphone (Score:3)
Why would the PSC and FCC permit this?
I guess on the same reasoning as the "Dubyaphone" program that began in 2008 and extended the Lifeline program of the Universal Service Fund to mobile phones.
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My local cell tower is connected to the same street cabinet as my landline phone, so unless the problem was between the end of my street and my house, anything that affects landlines is also going to affect mobiles.
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Does Comcast need to rebuild all their infrastructure too? There may not be any landline game in town for some time.
The engineers at Verizon aren't complete idiots, you know. I'm sure they've calculated the cost of adding some cells to handle the demand and found it cheaper than running new copper. And if the business drones are worth the suits on their backs they'll be worried about Comcast poaching customers, so they wouldn't balk at *some* investment to recover from a disaster with some of their repu
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they wouldn't balk at *some* investment to recover from a disaster with some of their reputation intact
I've spoken with folks who have made these sorts of decisions in the past at Verizon. The question is entirely dependent on whether the ROI in Mantaloking is higher than investing that same money in a different location. The reputation hit can be factored into the equation.
They have a monopoly, so there's not a competitive pressure, and rarely do they get mandates on their regulated monopoly.
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From the looks of it, it would take about 10,000 feet of fiber to cover it. Unfortunately, as a barrier island they would likely have problems making it reliable-- either dig deep or do it cheap. If the community cares, they could set up a co-op with whatever infrastructure they choose.
Vacation community (Score:2)
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America, it really looks like your only hope is Google Fiber.
Given the limited reach and aims of Google, it's not much of a hope.
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DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
Underground cables aren't a panacea that protect you from all outages -- underground cables are more susceptible to water intrusion, ground shifting (a big issue in an earthquake), digging accidents etc. And outages take longer to fix.
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DIG THE CABLES DOWN, stop putting up pylons, you morons. Take a frikkin' clue from the model all the European telcos and power companies use.
The advanced Asian countries have faster and cheaper mostly-fiber networks than the Europeans, deal with more natural disasters than they do, and once you get more than a kilometer out of central-business-district Seoul/Tokyo/Osaka, the air is thick with wires everywhichaway.
'That's what they do in Europe' isn't necessarily perfection, either.
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You would actually benefit from a more homogeneous network assuming everyone used Verizons wireless access points vs adding their own in. Properly configured wireless networks can load balance the signal and configure for the least noise. The good routers are pretty sophisticated and reliable at doing this.
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I wasn't even thinking about that aspect which is true enough. I was thinking more about a properly run network in a technological sense. I can correct myself by saying many companies could have their "good" access points working together on the same network infrastructure. I.e. Verizon and Time Warner can inter-operate with the same above mentioned technical capacity.