The Fibre question ~ anyone with insight?

Hi All

Now it is my understanding that all the backend infrastructure in the UK now is fibre that includes the linkages between exchanges.

The current 'debate' is whether "fibre to the box" of indeed "fibre to the house" is a viable option.

Now take my case for example ~ my line attenuation is 56db i.e. roughly equals approx 5.6 km wire line to the exchange. But and I have seen them there is main trunk fibre running through the area no more than 1km from me and seeing the number of street side boxes around creating a FTTB point and bypassing miles of copper (and aluminium!!!) to improve the service looks to my eye a great solution.

I would surmise that much of the country is simliarly placed so why the delay to roll out what should be the most cost effective 1st step to bring much of the country into the 21st Century comms???

Yes, much is spoken of how much this all will cost but where is the willingness on the part of the likes of BT and the governing bodies to give us the consumers a timetable now for the rollout. What on earh happened to a pro active approach to providing an improved service as a matter of course.

Right, rant mode off

I have too many things to rant about this morning - must be the heat - so will try to keep this short.

The problem appears to revolve round who owns it and who benefits from it. I have fibre at the end of my drive going back a number of year when Nynex dug up the entire footpath system of my town and then went bust.

Currently the supplier is VM. I don't want VM but clearly VM would not be happy with PN using their cable! I'm quite happy with a 4Mbs connection as I still remember 14.4k modems. It would seem however that the only way I will actually get a higher speed in my lifetime is by changing to I supplier I don't particularly want!

Its all very complicated.......

Meldrew

Interesting that you mention "cabling" yes now you remind me they were trenching around our area a few years back but never came onto our estate ~ I thought that was rather strange at the time.

Having said that I was refering to the BT fibre in my OP but yes I do wonder if that other cabling is available for use ~ a little like an abandoned house needing a new tenant :lol:

Fibre doesn't work the same as gas or electric (sorry, that sounds incredibly stupid but I will explain...).

With gas or electric if a supply with sufficient capacity is running near to your property it is possible to take a direct splice into it and run a feed. There is a single "grid" for both of these services and therefore connecting gives you access to all suppliers.

For fibre they are point to point connections. The fibre goes back to a connection to a specific network. That connection may be a private business and therefore not part of the "broadband" network. In the case of VM it goes into their own core network and they would have to redesign that in order to provide services for other ISPs. Having fibre passing your door is of absolutely no help if it is not on the right network.

There is of course quite a lot of dark fibre out there but it still has to be going to/from the right place. If it isn't then it would require further work to extend/shift the end points.

Hmmm! but isn't that the point of FTTB or FTTH i.e. 'they' are creating the point to point as we have now with the wires now. Such that BT would be the prime supplier and having said that if the UK has a network of as you call it dark cable/fibre then yes added work would be need to to "take it over" but surely it makes sense to do that rather than try to run all new fibre where this dark ones already run???

Digging the road is arguably the most expensive part of any infrastructure changes but in the case I OP with the possible cost is low compared to the gain in customer usage & satisfaction!

In reply to a post by ian72:

Fibre doesn't work the same as gas or electric (sorry, that sounds incredibly stupid but I will explain...).

With gas or electric if a supply with sufficient capacity is running near to your property it is possible to take a direct splice into it and run a feed. There is a single "grid" for both of these services and therefore connecting gives you access to all suppliers.

For fibre they are point to point connections. The fibre goes back to a connection to a specific network. That connection may be a private business and therefore not part of the "broadband" network. In the case of VM it goes into their own core network and they would have to redesign that in order to provide services for other ISPs. Having fibre passing your door is of absolutely no help if it is not on the right network.

There is of course quite a lot of dark fibre out there but it still has to be going to/from the right place. If it isn't then it would require further work to extend/shift the end points.

The problem is that each point to point link essentially needs a dedicated wire. So, either you need individual links from the exchange to each property or you need to have intermediate nodes - but each one of these nodes will need active and powered equipment to be able to route the traffic (and I don't think the current street cabs have this).

There is dark fibre but it is unclear to me how much there is - all sorts of rumours but they were installed by private companies and not sure how well the situation is really known (especially as I think a number of those companies may have gone bust since).

Any fibre already in use would be difficult to tap into - so even though it could be running past your front door if it doesn't terminate in the right place on the right networks it is useless to you. Fibres linking exchanges are likely to be on different logical points of the network than home connections - and depending on the network design they are probably totally unsuitable for direct consumer connection.

Sometimes the simplest "sounding" things are much more complex (read as expensive) than meets the eye.

In reply to a post by Routefinder:

Sometimes the simplest "sounding" things are much more complex (read as expensive) than meets the eye.

Indeed, in that I would say you are quite correct...

Fibre, and the laying there-of is pretty cheap, especially if you take the approach that people like H2O are - using existing infrastructure and minimising digging (I actually heard a story of them stringing links up through undergrowth, but I think that was early days and they have improved somewhat). Remember that fibre is just blown glass - it costs pennies. That's not even half of the story though. There may be a high speed rail link to the continent passing my uncle's house, but it still takes him hours to drive somewhere where he can board one of the trains.

What is expensive in fibre terms is terminating the fibre and presenting it to your property in a usable way - a piece of glass on its own won't be much use to you. Pushing the fibre to the green cabinet (or a sub-loop cabinet next to the green box), and then using existing copper distribution mechanism for the last few hundred meters always sounded like the most sensible approach to me. However you'll still need a DSL technology to convert the signal and push it down the final bit of copper. That's the expensive bit. That said, I'm personally very excited about where next generation broadband is going to get to, and I think in a couple of years the entire landscape will be changed, at least for the urban population. It can't come soon enough in my opinion - we've been a backwater for too long*.

Ian

* That said, I'm currently trying to buy broadband for an office in a big business park in San Ramon, California. If anyone can find me a quote better than 1.5Mb/s down @ $350 a month I'd love to hear about it. It certainly makes you realise how lucky some of us here are.

Ian?

Apart from agreeing with you that in actual fact the UK provision is pretty good, in that a reasonable and cheapish connection is available to the vast majority as opposed to headline speeds in other countries, ...

I thought you got the ISP tag removed??????

So am I mistaken, or are you back again with Plusnet? Or with a different ISP? Or am I totally confused and thinking of someone else?

Bob: Demon dialup >> Freeserve dialup >> BT Broadband >> Prodigynet >> Newnet >> O2 Standard.
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