darksun9210 wrote:
ok. my basic understanding of "broadband"
broadband's basic specification is 2.2mb (megabit) download speed, as this is the minimum bandwidth required for a full stream, full motion video, digitaly compressed TV. the upload speed is based on the providers discretion.
This could be the legal/regulatory specification in a particular area, sure.
this is why providers are able to offer "business 2000" 2mb links and charge the earth, when it is using the same hardware as for the "home 500" 512kb link. its all capped in software at the providers end. just they want more cash for opening the taps a little more on your connection speed
In the US, they have to worry about bandwidth costs; not so much in terms of whether the capacity's available, but whether they'll be able to show a profit. No idea how the money flies for the peering arrangements in the UK, but just as US telcos once flopped and wavered over the idea of supporting all the extra data traffic over fiber deployed with voice in mind, I get the impression BT isn't hot on the expense of upgrading... whatever needs upgrading.
thing that REALLY REALLY gets me, is, i want a nice fat 2mb link, even 512kb would be nice. and i see adverts for broadband every second advert, and i would gladly pay for it
/me waves money at BT
(maybe even quit smoking to afford it :lol: :lol: )
but i too far from a broadband exchange to get a reliable adsl signal = not in a broadband area. i even had to shout at BT to turn up the gain on the phone link as my DIAL UP connection signal was too weak. :pissed: hey guys! ever heard of AMPS? :pissed: :pissed: :pissed:
How's the old analog Advanced Mobile Phone Service going to help?
Nah, seriously, the way SBC solved this (and generally all DSL-provisioning ILECs do here; I just had to keep track of SBC because they're my local carrier) is by deploying "RT"s. The "Remote Terminal" is a big box on the side of the road that acts as a remote "Central Office;" pairs from the neighborhood terminate at it, and everything runs over new fiber or possibly high-speed copper back to the CO. Apparently the idea is to drop one atop/next-to an old cable, so you can just splice all the customers on that cable in without anyone noticing. (At my old residence, you could actually see the old copper cable to the CO chopped off at the ground, all its hundred pairs or so now visible and open to the weather.)
So in a sense, the RT is a giant copper-to-fiber (or whatever the telco uses for mid-haul networking) bridge, with room for DSLAMs and all else (so DSL users' data packets ride as data packets -- probably IP or PPP over ATM -- from the RT, and get routed to the various ILEC and CLEC backbones at the CO... I think.)* It doesn't make sense to just amplify the pairs, because while that might work for voice, it'd be just as expensive to deploy low-noise amplifiers that'd work for both current DSL and whatever improvements are invented down the line... and probably a good bit more fiddly.
SBC in particular went on and on about how impossible things would be, then when the accountants' math worked out unveiled "Project PRONTO" (something you'd never hear of if you weren't a DSLReports user), and got majorities of area in their DSL-less states covered with RTs in about three years. (You now get better service in those states than outside of them, since, of course, all the equipment is the same, just like Ma Bell.) From what I hear of BT, they're playing some interesting 'petition' games to ensure they'll never have to deploy RTs anywhere that won't pay the cost for them. (Guess the "universal service fee" here does count for something, as IIRC RTs do count as a voice provision for rural users, and SBC could dip into the fund to make it happen.)
I hear users in some areas of Jersey or Philly are screwed, because whoever is/was incumbent down there deployed RTs for voice just before DSL hit it big ("info superhighway" days), and strung juuuust enough fiber to replace their voice capacity, while all that equipment still has to depreciate... Oops. Those could probably provision ISDN, but ISDN has a crazy stigma over here, and the telcos used to push back the costs of line provisioning (similar to those for DSL - clearing bridge taps and loading coils, getting rid of obsolete trunking systems in favor of RTs or copper straight to the CO) onto the early adopters -- meaning you could pay into the thousands just to have the line 'installed.' (These days, 56k or 128k shared with voice just isn't compelling to most people, and it's probably cheaper for everyone to deploy that level of service over wireless!)
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*Dunno what the politics are for CLECs (and/or what the ILECs are required to provide to the CLECs)... it'd make
sense to ride everything over ILEC fiber and sort it out with routing at the CO, but the CLECs might have to rack their own equipment in the RTs and lease capacity back to the CO (or run their own fiber to
their office).
