That fact that this delivers 3.5 MBit/s really makes you wonder how many low speed connections out in the wild are literally broken cables that still have some amount of coupling somewhere.
I lived in a forested area as a kid and the copper wire was always breaking for various reasons (falling branches, old deployment, temperature and humidity, etc). The ISP would always attempt to reduce the speed and leave it at that. It took a lot of effort as well as personally locating the breakage to get them to come and repair it properly (and it still took forever).
Potentially apocryphal, but Telstra's copper cable network supposedly had its insulation made of paper, not rubber. I remember when it rained the curbside pits fill with water, causing slowdowns and frequent ADSL dropouts (until things dried out).
It took over a year for Ziply to repair the land line of my 90-year-old parents. 30+ hours on the phone with support, multiple visits by techs who were simply not interested in doing any work. I had a tech tell me, literally to my face, "this line is working fine" when the line was stone dead. Another told me that I had to buy all new phones because the ones my parents had were "out of date". (To humor him, I bought a $15 phone from a local electronics store, plugged it in and showed the tech that it wasn't working. He did nothing).
I have now learned that the WA state utilities commission is pretty interested when providers try to pull stunts like this. You can also dig out useful company contact information from the commission's website.
> I have now learned that the WA state utilities commission is pretty interested when providers try to pull stunts like this.
A number of years ago I worked at a CLEC, during that short window of time when they could exist. One of the more useful things I learned is how much power the PUC has. Every phone company has a team that deals with complaints coming in via the PUC and they are eager to resolve them. Not something I'd necessarily use in lieu of regular old customer service for most issues, but when the first and second attempts fail, calling the PUC will work 100% of the time.
I think this is common in places where they don't expect moisture to reach, but then things change and it gets there anyway.
If your POTS lines are down and the telecom company is telling you a "wet pulp repair" is underway, your phones are going to be down for a while because a bunch of paper-insulated cables need to be manually rewired because they got wet and corroded.
I know there are some telecom folks on here that may be provoked to correct me but pulp was standard before the advent of cheap plastic insulation in the 1950s on up. I live in the midwest and my brother is a lineman for AT&T. There is an astonishing amount of pulp-insulated phone line still in service today.
In order to keep it dry, the conduit that the pulp lines are run through is pressurized to 5-10psi. Anyone that has worked with air compressors knows that pumping ambient pressurized air down into underground pipes is a recipe for condensation, so high capacity air driers are required to remove the water before it goes underground.
Any kind of outage on the compressor or dryer is effectively an emergency because water infiltration can happen almost immediately, creating an outage and extremely expensive repair.
> I know there are some telecom folks on here that may be provoked to correct me
Aka Cunningham’s law
> Any kind of outage on the compressor or dryer
I’m confused: isn’t a bigger concern any physical damage to the conduit anywhere in the run that is too large for the compressor to overcome? Or are we talking football-field-sized compressors here?
The more you learn about this ancient cable technology the more absurd it becomes. We shower these fuckers with money but they would rather keep their paper insulated phone lines with permanent compressors and dryer running than braindead simple fiber. No wonder it is permanently broken and they can't keep a single 9 of reliability.
Fiber may be simple, but the way we use it is not. Unlike copper, a GPON fiber install is going to have active electronics and splice trays for every several dozen subscribers.
Plenty of opportunities for water ingress to still cause problems.
Also, sending a singal across fiber is definitely not easy.
ADSL is basically modulating a radio wave over a cable directly to another device.
Fiber requires high quality optics, high quality lasers, tons of active hardware if you want to do it at scale. (not to mention the mind boggling physics and manufacturing required for things like DWDM, optical path switching etc).
Fiber optics have existed since the 80's yes, but prices of high quality fiber solutions have only dropped massively in the last decade or so.
Exactly. That all sounds infinitely easier than buried air pipes. Mind boggling physics are what gives us CPUs, but the final product is reliable bar none.
yes, but this does not scale if you want to build residential connectivity.
GPON makes this scalable and affordable, but at the cost of technical complexity.
Fiber (as in, the cables themselves) is far cheaper to produce compared to copper, but this has mostly to do with the price of copper and not manufacturing techniques.
Don't go for GPON, if you have a chance.
Direct cabinet-to-apartment single-mode fiber (can be a pair that gets BiDi optics if one of the fibers fails, though only worth it if correlated failures aren't the bulk of issues) is future-proof.
Also GPON tends to not get anywhere near the awesome pings 1G-LR and 10G-LR provide in sub-lightpseed regional situations.
It depends on the country, but originally our Telephone Companies were motivated by Quality of Service. However all that changed when the companies were privatised and profits became their only concern.
Historically there was a continuous upgrade of equipment as the technology improved. Manual exchanges became automatic, step-by-step gave way to cross-bar which gave way to electronic exchanges. Analog phones were replaced with digital and ADSL. And had that steady improvement continued, ADSL would have routinely been replaced with Optical fiber.
What stopped the perpetual upgrades was the arrival Thatcher/Regan/Howard and the advent of Neoliberalism. Which meant that anything which provided a Public Service (gasp Socialism!) was completely abandoned. We are only now starting to realise the long term cost of their vandalism.
There is still a lot of it in service. Sometimes you'll see a tank of nitrogen chained to a pole. It is there to put pressure through the cable to keep water out of a cut/nick on the lead sheath. The lines are pressurized normally from the central office and if the monitoring shows a drop in pressure (a cut in the sheath), they roll out cable maintenance.
Many parts of rural Prince Edward Island (PEI) has DSL running on a phone system that’s probably original from modernization initiatives in the 1960s - 1980s. Party lines were the norm in some areas up west until late-1980s.
Back when a whole family had the same number and you had to ask whoever answered that you want to talk to so and so. Now days everybody has their own number and with caller id you (sometimes) know who is calling.
My daughter is gonna grow up not knowing any of the “shared phone line” etiquette because it is largely obsolete.
The party lines I’m talking about are shared loops between a group of residents in a rural area.
Some of the first-hand accounts I’ve read talked about neighbours listening in on conversations. People could tell a snooper was on the line because the volume of the other caller would drop. There was a social aspect to the whole enterprise because you could tell the one nosy neighbour to get off the line and the volume would magically raise.
Front door etiquette still works basically the same way. A doorbell rings and the whole house hears it. Once person goes to answer it, then passes off the conversation to whoever it's actually for.
This not strictly true: The original pairs were paper insulated, but they were enclosed in a lead sheath which prevented water entry. Plus the cable was pressurised with dry nitrogen to keep out any water. Plus the flow of Nitrogen was monitored so that any pinholes could be detected before they caused a problem. Of course when Telecom was privatised all these quality control issues went out the window.
But there's a further point, the problem with moisture in the lines is the corrosion caused by electrolysis, which in turn is caused by the 50V DC on the lines. So even with modern plastic insulation, the copper would be corroded away by any electrolysis.
One last point: Rubber was almost never used as an insulator on phone lines.
Sums up my youth on ADSL in the hills of LA. Couldn't get a static IP address on coax/cable so I convinced my family to pay out the ears for speakeasy.net DSL w/ a static IP. Performance was terrible!
I had a bonded DSL line for a while when I lived in the Bay Area with service coming from two different twisted pair lines. One line was consistently ~18Mbps, the other barely 3-5. It was pretty clear that one of the pairs was good and the other was broken somewhere alone the way. The lines were all in a bundle, with no way to discern what was what any individual strand was in the bundle (or which was broken or shorted). No one had any motivation to find the break and repair it. And because the line was technically “working”, ATT wouldn’t move it to a different pair. Sonic was the ISP with ATT handling the physical lines.
You can do time domain reflectometry to find out where the breaks, sharp corners and reflections are in the cable.
Some modems have special debug modes in that can do this too - then you get to know exactly how many meters along the wire the break is. When you get close, you can hook a resistor to the line and rerun the test and it'll tell you how many meters forward or back you need to go to find the issue.
Yeah, this was in a neighborhood bundle with many… many lines together. No one was going to dig into that to find which line a mouse or squirrel had chewed the insulation off of. I remember running a few diagnostics, but as it was “working”, no one was going to try to fix it. The ISP couldn’t even convince ATT to move the bad line to a different pair. Which was sad. I was supposed to be in the 40Mbps range, but could only get ~18-20. Also — this was enough bandwidth for us at the time, so I just ran off of the single line and was good. Given some of the dsl horror stories, we weren’t too and off.
