North American Network Operators Group

Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: BitTorrent swarms have a deadly bite on broadband nets

  • From: Tim Franklin
  • Date: Tue Oct 23 12:29:26 2007

On Tue, October 23, 2007 4:06 pm, Jack Bates wrote:

> Errr, 8 pairs per customer? Even 4 is a step backwards. If we're going to
> do construction at that level, might as well drop in fiber. We're still
> enjoying the fact that ADSL runs on 1/2 a pair while the customer's
> phone service is out.

Doing (or getting the incumbent to do, where the last mile is a monopoly)
a little bit more of what you already do seems to be an awful lot easier
than doing something completely different.  Certainly in the (admittedly
all European) countries where I've seen it done, getting 4 or 8 copper
pairs from a customer site to the exchange is an order of magnitude or
more difference in both cost and lead time to doing anything at all with
fibre.

Every house I've lived in has had 4 pairs already going from the house to
the first street cabinet, with just the first pair connected for voice,
and getting a second line has always just needed a patch onto a spare pair
from the cab to the exchange.  Obviously if *everyone* wants 4 or 8 pairs
to their house, there's going to need to be a lot more copper between the
exchange and the street cabs.  It's not clear that *everyone* wants
upstream though, and 2M to 5M on a single pair (depending on distance /
quality) is quite possible if you wanted to think in terms of ubiquitous
symmetric service.

I take it that getting spare / new copper in the US is more painful?

Regards,
Tim.