In a message written on Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 10:20:49PM -0400, David Andersen wrote:
The Washington Post article claims that: [snip]
b) Fresh new wire installed after WWII
I have to wonder what percentage of the population is using phone lines installed before WWII? I live in a suburb that didn't exist 20 years ago other than maybe 50 buildings around the train depot. My neighborhood did not exist 10 years ago, it was a cow pasture. Where's all this old cable? While I'm sure you can find some row houses in $big_city that have old copper I find it hard to believe that "pre WWII wire" is holding us back. Wasn't it Sprint back in like 1982 or 1984 made a big deal about their entire long haul network being converted to fiber? In a message written on Mon, Oct 22, 2007 at 09:44:34PM -0500, Frank Bulk wrote:
A lot of the MDUs and apartment buildings in Japan are doing fiber to the basement and then VDSL or VDSL2 in the building, or even Ethernet. That's how symmetrical bandwidth is possible. Considering that much of the population does not live in high-rises, this doesn't easily apply to the U.S. population.
While the US does not have as high a percentage in high rises, let's look at the part that is "in the right place". What percentage of US high rises have fiber to the basement and high speed Internet offered to residents? Shouldn't NYC be on par with Tokyo by this point? Chicago? Miami? Doesn't the same model work for low rise apartments, the kind found in suburbia all across the US? Why don't any of them have building provided services, rather relying on cable modems for ADSL all the way back to the CO? Why are no major us builders installing FTTH today? Greenfield should be the easiest, and major builders like Pulte, Centex and the like should be eager to offer it; but don't. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org