On Sun, 2009-07-19 at 11:54 -0400, James Knott wrote:
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. I don't know where you are, but around here, both phone and cable companies moved to fibre many years ago, as it's the only way to carry all the bandwidth necessary today. In new developments, fibre to curb is common and also to large office, apartment & condo buildings. Copper is simply too bandwidth and distance limiting. Many people are too far from the central office to get ADSL, let alone VDSL.
This has not been my experience. At my employer we were on a last-mile Fiber connection in the mid-90s with two facilities linked by the fiber and WAN service to other facilities as T1 provisioned over the fiber. But when that telco was purchased we were moved to copper (~ year 2000) as the "fiber was too expensive to provision" [all the fiber equipment went out the building into the dumpster]. Our WAN is still on copper T1s, but last year we paid to have a second fiber run installed [last-mile] to our facility for Internet access [from a different telco]. It terminates next to the old [dark] fiber that is still not in use. On the other hand my [residential] neighbor just had Verizon's new broadband/TV/phone package installed which is fiber-to-the-doorstep. The point here is that it varies widely based upon corporate governance/politics, region, and provider incentive. The tech, I believe, is only a small fraction of the actual cost over right-of-way, tarriffs, and political concerns. In the USA, some municipalities that have installed fiber themselves have in turn been sued by telcos for unfair competition. I've seen no evidence that telcos provision for new developments or structures on anything but a reactionary basis. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org