On Sunday 12 September 2010 22:46:17 Per Jessen wrote:
Ilya Chernykh wrote:
What is definite is that the cable which connects my building has capacity 1 Gbit/s, optical or not. The higher-level cable is almost certainly optic because it should have higher capacity.
Your building is almost certainly also connected with fibre, 1GigE copper ethernet only goes so far.
Gigabit Ethernet allows copper connections: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabit_ethernet You know, any network card 9and motherboard) now supports gigabit Ethernet. Thus some providers, for example, in St.Petersburg as I already mentioned provide Gigabit Ethernet to end users via a copper cable. Some people even can convince a normal provider like mine to connect them via a gigabit end-user link because any hub as I mentioned has one unused gigabit port. Some indeed did so via good personal connections, but for gigabit ethernet to become a mainstream the provider has to upgrade their equipment so each hub had multiple gigabit ports and a thicker uplink. No upgrade on the end-user side is needed and no support for optics on the motherboard.
I'm surprised it was worth the extra investment in the infrastructure, but I guess xDSL wasn't suitable for some reason.
There are providers who advertise xDSL, for example, a telephone company, but they are competitive only in buildings which are not connected to the Ethernet (the number of them decreases with the majority now have multiple Ethernet providers). Ethernet is a standard here at least from mid-90s, the only major change for a end-user being change of the end-user connection capacity from 10 Mbit/s to 100 Mbit/s which was mostly completed by the end of 1990s.
I'm really surprised that it was worth rewiring entire apartment buildings with Cat5 cable, when VoIP didn't exist. I mean, in the mid-90s the internet had barely been invented, people were happy dialling into Compuserve at 56K (or 64K in ISDN countries). It's totally surreal to hear you explain about 10Mbps speeds to an internet that barely existed (to Joe Bloggs).
People just stretched cables from window to window to get the LAN working. Internet in those time was only a supplement to the LAN, it was expensive, although technically it was already possible to have a 10 Mbit/s connection. Even 3 years ago in 2007 the normal speed for an internet connection was 128 Kbit/s on speed-limited tariffs (this is not the technical speed limitation, which always was 100 Mbit/s but an artificial limitation on unlimited-traffic tariffs, on pay-for-traffic tariffs you could have 100 Mbit/s but would pay more money for traffic). But you could download films, programs etc from the LAN with speed of 100 Mbit/s for free. That's why existence of LAN was a great competitive advantage for any provider those times. Now this is not so important because the average speed of Internet connection (according the tariff plan) catches up with that of LAN.
The tariffs changed greatly in the last 3 years and now one can have a 50 times faster connection (of more traffic if the tariff is traffic-based with unlimited speed) for the same money than 3 years ago.
Here they haven't changed a lot - one significant change was in 2008, when the Swiss government made Swisscom provide a certain minimum of xDSL to every Swiss household that wants it. (Grundversorgungspflicht).
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