Per Jessen wrote:
Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
about it. Around here it's the electricity companies promoting fibre, I didn't know you could use fibre to carry electricity. ;-) Yes, they are using the new kind with the holes. It is primarily a legal/cost issue. Power companies have the right-of-ways to install the cable (and the labor force).
So do the telcos, but I think they saw fibre as being too expensive whereas the existing copper could be reused for VDSL at very little cost.
Interesting discussion. It's obvious that different locales have different technologies. I saw somewhere that the US is significantly lagging the rest of the first-world countries in high-speed bandwidth availability. Is Japan number one? To add to the mix, I'll describe what's available at my home in San Ysidro, California. San Ysidro is physically separate from, but administratively part of San Diego. We're served by Cox Communications and (at this time) AT&T. Cox has been good for us, but AT&T has lived down to my expectations as being second only to Microsoft as the world's most evil companies. AT&T, and previously Pacific Bell, provide basic plain old twisted pair service (POTS) from a central office about 2,000 wire-meters away. Note that basic phone service is ALL that AT&T provides. We still can't get even basic DSL service from them. I just checked again on their web site and they suggested purchasing their satellite broadband service! Satellite service in the middle of what's supposed to be a high-tech area? I honestly don't know what AT&T is thinking. Cox, on the other hand, ran fiber down every street in their metropolitan service area in 1996. It runs right in front of my house, but they run coax to the individual houses. They have distribution amps at the curb that feed about eight houses. Cable modem service was initially provided by @Home, with Cox taking over when they went out of business. So I had broadband since 1996, no complaints there. It provides about 5-MB/sec down, about 768-KB/sec up. A some years ago Cox also started offering POTS telephone service via their infrastructure. I jumped at it in order to finally dump AT&T! They pulled a new coax cable from the street that included two power leads. The leads power a small box that terminates the coax on the side of the house. Phone twisted pair and cable connections are provided at the output to plug into the existing house wiring. So Cox now provides my phone service at about 2/3's of the cost of the Evil Empire. They provide the HD television feed too. It would be nice to have symmetric fiber right to the house, but coax will do for now. For now, I'm AT&T free! Regards, Lew -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org