I have been following the thread very intensly since I read the article that William Warren posted. I also have two locations that I wish to connect, and we were looking at 802.11b with cantennas. This may not work because it looks like there are a lot of trees between the two locations, and they may be just out of range. We weren't sure what our other options where till this came along (we really can't afford t1 connections). Qwest has stated that one of the two locations has the fiber connectivity Randy Neals mentioned below. That does put a damper on the homebrew dsl connectivity. How would an alarm company get around this? Would Qwest need to run copper into the neighborhood if any one of the people purchased an alarm? If not, how would the alarm company get the signal pushed through the fiber, and could that be done with the dsl signal? pat ----- Original Message ----- From: "Randy Neals (ORION)" <randy.neals@orion.on.ca> To: <Dan.Thorson@seagate.com> Cc: "'Austad, Jay'" <JAustad@temgweb.com>; <nanog@merit.edu> Sent: Friday, August 29, 2003 2:46 PM Subject: RE: dry pair
From: Dan.Thorson@seagate.com
From what I recall there is no guarentee that the Qwest tarrif for NB3 is actually a straight-through copper pair [section 7.3.1.B.2.a.(4)]... note the restriction of signaling frequency.... see the Terms & Conditions in section 7.3.1.B.2.a.(2).
By requesting a circuit that offers 60Hz and/or DC signalling that pretty much requires them to use Copper, if they have it available. The only way to know if they have it available is to order the circuit. After a few days the order will hit their design department which will look at the order and determine if facilities exist to provison the circuit.
Some newer office towers and subdivisons/developments may be fed with fiber using Digital Loop Carrier(DLC/SLC) equipment in a CEV hut. While there is still a copper loop to each home or business from the CEV/Hut, the loop ends at the SLC and the voice is converted to PCM over fiber to extend to the C.O.
Our Telco uses a slightly different wording in their Tariff for this lack of DC continuity disclaimer...: "The provisioning of metallic or DC continuity applied until 1993 12 31. Thereafter, the provisioning of metallic or DC continuity is provided only where metallic facilities currently exist, following normal provisioning practices. Where capacity is exhausted, or where appropriate facilities do not exist, the Company will evaluate all requests and only provide end-to-end metallic facilities at the customer's expense based on the cost incurred by the Company."
The largest concern is usually the length of the circuit because how they route the circuit is not always intuitive and the cable may take a circuitous route between your two locations. Usually they can estimate the loop length when the do the design.
The limitation on frequency/pulses is largely administrative verbiage. I highly doubt they will install a filter on the circuit to prevent higher speed. (Although it is possible) At one time I think the different speed circuits where priced differently. I suppose a few decades ago the differnce between 30 bits per second and 75 bits per second was considered a large amount of difference. ;-)
-Randy