Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
Part of the reason for this is "U-Verse" is FTTN, Fiber to the Node. AT&T has run fiber to my neighborhood, I believe the node in my case is about 1000 feet away (I drive past it on the way out). The electronics sit there, so the old model of colocating in the CO and getting the dry pair is no longer possible, the copper stops at the node and it's a largeish (6' wide, 3' deep, 5' tall) cabinet, so there's no colo.
We have that exact same stuff in my area too: I've actually talked to the AT&T tech who was setting that cabinet up on one of our streets. The explanation he gave me was that even though they want everyone to go to this new-fangled fiber thing, they still have to maintain a small number of copper pairs running all the way to the real CO like it used to be. The reason is that if some kooky customer like me wants a service like ISDN that's only available from the real Class 5 switch and not from the "U-Verse" remote terminal, they are still required to provide that as a regulated telco. Ditto with CLECs like Covad-now-MegaPath: even though they don't get access to the FTTN infrastructure, no telco is evicting their legacy CO presence. Therefore, if a kooky customer like me wishes to forego fiber speeds and prefers the slower all-copper solution, I can still get SDSL from the CLEC, and the ILEC (AT&T) will be required to provide a direct copper pair from that CLEC's cage inside the CO to the customer premise, no matter how much they wish for these copper pairs to die. Long live copper! MS