We bought a new house a couple months back and had to surrender my ADSL set up as my house doesn’t have “copper” going to it, its fibre optics… which apparantly doesn’t support DSL.
However, I’ve heard it has far more “potential” than Copper does… which makes sense to my uneducated mind.
So, what is it? The people I spoke to at my phone co don’t seem to have any idea or are unwilling to tell me. What is the next thing to expect? How fast is it compared to what is out there now? I need a fix for my dial up woes (cable is not an option)… or at least something to look forward to.
What the telco is telling you seems silly. Very few homes have optical built right to them. Even if they did you’d have to have a box in your basement converting the analog phone signal from your phones to digital. If this wasn’t the case you’d need to buy digital phones for your whole house and they are quite expensive compared to their analog counterparts.
The reason DSL doesn’t work over optical is the following. A copper wire pair to your house has a frequency range capacity of (just making something up here for the example’s sake) 10Khz-2000Khz. Somebody noticed that when you talk on the phone the voice component of the signal only used 10Khz-200Khz. The range from 200Khz-2000Khz is essentially left empty. As a result you can shoot data down the line at that frequency and not interfere with the voice traffic. (Again…the numbers I used are strictly made up but that is the sense of the whole thing.)
Optical, while it has more bandwidth available to it, is strictly digital. So while your voice traffic on a fiberoptic line only takes a smidgen of the available bandwidth using the rest of the bandwidth is not a DSL technology. Basically, once your voice is converted to digital, it is treated like any other data packet. Adding computer data to a voice digital line is trivial as long as equipment at both ends (routers) understand the difference between voice and data and can route them appropriately.
So, if you really do have fiber to your house I would think you should be happy unless the telco for some boneheaded reason put voice-only routers at the junction box (which would seem majorly stupid since they could sell the unused bandwidth of the fiber and I guarantee you aren’t using more than a fraction of your available bandwidth with voice only over fiber).
What the telcos use between each other along their backbones is something called SONET (Synchronous Optical Network). In fact, sooner or later most voice calls get converted to digital/optical for transmission over longer distances. The signal is then turned back into an analog signal back at your central office.
My guess is the people at your telco have their heads up their ass. They may not have DSL available in your area but the reasons they are giving you don’t seem to make much sense.
They probably do have their heads up their asses but I have been told by others (including a city councilman) that the city did indeed come to an agreement with the main telephone co (Telus, in my case) to have Fibre going to the homes in “new developments”… of which I live in.
Interestingly enough, my old house which is in an older development not 3 blocks away from where I lived now had 1.5MB DSL… once again, when I quized them as to why I couldn’t get it since I live so close by, they said it was because of the “fibre lines” to my new house.
All I know is, I want something to look forward to!
When they talk about ‘fibre lines to your house’ it may just mean that they haven’t installed the necessary hardware in your local exchange to make DSL possible, so you go straight from the copper local loop to fibre at the exchange with no DSL box in between.
One day, I suppose we’ll have fibre right up to the phone, but DSl has a bit more growth potential yet; the next thing to sell us is SDSL (balanced upload/download bandwidths) and lower contention ratios (or uncontended services - Redstone in the UK is currently offering uncontended SDSL and as such is way ahead of BT)
justa wag here. When you have DSL you are using basically an unused portion of bandwidth but with fiber you are tieing up valuable bandwidth to get to/from the CO which commands a high price. If you are willing to pay I bet you could get a T1 (or fiber equivlant)
Ya’ll might notice that bernse is in Canada. There is a federal government initiative toward getting high-speed broadband access available in all Canadian communities by 2004. According to the Smart Communities website:
(Scroll down to the heading “Municipal Fibre Optic Networks”)
but I have been told by others (including a city councilman) that the city did indeed come to an agreement with the main telephone co (Telus, in my case) to have Fibre going to the homes in “new developments”… of which I live in.