US Telco Support > AT&T > AT&T U-verse > Distance to fiber equipment?

Distance to fiber equipment?

But I'm wondering if they can really deliver ...

It's very hard to tell until you have the service. There's more than just distance when it comes to the speed and reliability of your service. You have to factor in wire gauge, number of splices, quality of ground, and just plain wire quality.

There have been people who have been 1500 feet from the VRAD and had excellent service and yet there could be another person who's the same distance and their service has lots of issues. It all comes down to the quality of the lines.

But... based on some quick conversions, at roughly 7920 feet I highly doubt you'll be able to get anywhere near 12 Mbps. VDSL drops off pretty badly in the speed department at around 3000 feet, anywhere beyond that and you're looking at significant signal degradation. Even with pair bonding it's questionable.

Honestly... if I were you, I'd stick with Comcast. I know you probably don't want to hear that but really they are your best bet.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | Droid Charge TweakStock by dwitherell

Actually, I'm going to be amazed if AT&T can deliver service good enough for me to agree to pay even the first billing. If they do deliver it will be $100 + $29/month intro, so I'm going to let them try.

Comcast has a literally "fat" and hard coax coming right up to my house -- it's the same stuff they use for long runs along the street. When I first moved and had some trouble, the service guy didn't have the tools or parts to reconnectorize it and had to call in their long lines guy - after that signal level and SNR came into spec and it was easy sailing... So Comcast has the "pipe" right to my house and the whole Comcast Internet is pretty darned good in my 'hood. Good enough that phone and video works with glitches few and far apart.

It's just the pricing that bugs me.

(Also before I cut over to Netflix streaming and such, I went through a few of the Comcast set-top boxes and they were all buggy/crappy/cheap as heck. But that's another forum. For Internet, I got my own (refurbed/cheap!) cable modem - works great.)

I'd like to see some real competition - AT&T is marketing on bill boards, by mail and so forth in my area now -- but I don't see the trucks rolling with fiber and new boxes like I did in NY where I had FIOS more than 6 years ago. There FIOS had better latency and, of course, bw than Cablevision - made VOIP glitchfree, which it wasn't on Cablevision.

And I did hear a story last year - AT&T promised the world to an acquaintance of mine - the "professional" installation didn't work at all - left a mess in the L/R - then AT&T wouldn't even come out to replace less than 100 feet of 60+ year old overhead copper from home to street - a job any cable company would do to catch or keep a customer.

So, no. Not cancelling the bad-old Cable unless AT&T comes through with flying colors...

They aren't doing fiber, that's the thing; it's only fiber to some neighborhood gateway (VRAD). That's why you haven't seen any fiber trucks, there aren't any to be driven around. It's not like FIOS where they bring the fiber to your house, it's VDSL over the same shitty copper we've been using for the last half century and expecting it to work.

IMO, it was a horrible decision to stay with copper. But... the bean counters and their brain dead stockholders got their way and now AT&T is slipping. Not surprised at all. I saw this a mile away.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | Droid Charge TweakStock by dwitherell

So if the VRAD is three miles down the street, they won't pull another fiber and install a little DSLAM/VRAD/whatever to serve the next 200 customers? I understand it's big bucks to pull a fiber to every house -- with modern signal processing we can "squeeze" 12Mbps or more onto twisted pair for a few hundred feet - so one fiber to a pole might serve 10s or 100s of more customers... That was the promise of FTTC/FFTN as opposed to FTTH. But if they won't go the "extra" mile, then IMO, they're just not serious about being suburban service provider.

They have halted deployment of new VRADs, that much I know. They're banking on something called vectoring but who really knows if it will work correctly.

One person I talked to about this said that VDSL+Vectoring has been working great in the UK but then again, the UK has a much more consistent telephone network quality standard than we do here in the states. All of the telephone wire in the UK is pretty much post-WW2 considering that they had to rebuild all of it after the WW2.

The US is still working with copper installed back when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was in office in many places. It's been patched, spliced, and re-spliced for many years and had seen decades of neglect.

VDSL+Vectoring may work fine when all of the telephone wires are of consistent quality from pair to pair, but in the US one pair may work where another pair barely can handle a simple electrical connection let alone a VDSL signal or simple telephone conversation. And those two pairs are in the same bundle! Yes, there are bundles where only half of the pairs in it are usable due to age of the bundle and the amount of squirrels it has seen.

AT&T needs to realize that despite the fact that they are so deathly afraid of spending money, even with their Holy Grail Technology known as VDSL+Vectoring, they will still need to spend money to get all of the cable bundles up to a decent quality for it to work. Sadly, I don't think that their brain dead stockholders will let them do that so I figure cable will continue to eat their lunch and smile all the way to the bank.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | Droid Charge TweakStock by dwitherell

Then it does indeed seem that AT&T is doing a version of low fruit/cherry picking in this first go-round - if customer is satisfied/lucky they've got revenue without doing the hard work and expense of upgrading their cables. They're risking what's left of their brand and reputation. I can see many customer who still had POTS+CableTV+AT&T cell service jump ship completely when AT&T fouls up on U-Verse for them. I guess there are still too many managers and execs left over from the days when "we're the phone company - we don't have to care"
(

It's worse than that. At some point you come up against Physics and Information theory. A long while ago a genius named Shannon showed how any channel is limited by its SNR. And then you have the physics of EM propagation over twisted pair... then knock the most optimistic estimates down by some fudge factor to take into account real world crud like splices, punch down blocks, fluorescent lighting, vacuum cleaners, etc, etc.

OTOH - the Cable companies won't have to pull fiber for a long time, if ever to a single family dwelling -- there's plenty of headroom on ordinary coax. You've easily got about 5 Gigabits even with todays' technology. (My now obsolete Docsis 2.x modem gets about 30Mpbs on one old fashioned 6Mhz Tv channel. So, roughly speaking 150 channels gives us 4.5Gbps without resorting to any new signal processing tricks. Docsis 3 does channel bonding, to get higher bit rates, from what I read, does not introduce any new modulation scheme.)

A consumer household with 4 pairs of eyeballs can only consume some tens of megabits of information per second. Again, there's physical limits built into our eyeballs, brains and ears.

My point being that VDSL2 is already approaching the limit of what you can do on 1000 meters of twisted pair. So they're just about out of gas -- they can keep tweaking and putting more computer signal processing smarts on both ends -- and if I read the science correctly -- they will won't get much more on a line that long. Now if they pull fiber to within 100 meters and go on half-way decent twisted pair the rest of the way - then a big jump would be possible - say 1 Gigabit or more -- theory and practice are already close - we have 1Gbps ethernet at commodity prices already.

Then again, the electric company also has a good run of copper within 100 meters of your house already, has the right of ways, etc, etc. Too bad regulation and corporate inertia is keeping them from getting into the game.

Ref:

»www.ericsson.com/ericsson/corpin···l2.shtml

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_6···m_length

»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadband_···er_lines

BTW -- Shannon worked for the phone company way before they (yes the phone company!) invented transistors. Then there were some guys in the 1990s exploring just how many bits you can push through twisted pair.... Even in the bad old days, when AT&T didn't have to care, they had a great laboratory research program...

reply to bobTeatow

Granted, not all areas are as bad as I describe but in a lot of the older deep urban areas this is the case, especially in the more poorer areas of the cities. These are the areas that are neglected the most since, I'm sorry to say, most people in those areas have discounted phone service from the government and AT&T needs to accept whatever they are given as part of the discounted program. My area, especially in what are known as "The Projects" in East Cleveland, this is the case.

But, that's the extreme side of the bad news that AT&T's infrastructure is. There are better kept areas but usually you'll only find that in richer areas where people have more money. In between, it's extremely hit and miss as to whether or not your phone line will be decent.
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Tom
Boycott AT&T uVerse! | Tom's Android Blog | Droid Charge TweakStock by dwitherell

Back in Westchester, I was in an upper-middle-class neighborhood, but my phone wires were in the same bunch that served multi-million dollar neighboring Bedford NY mansions -- gentlemen's horse country.

Lots of problems, as you say, even on voice calls. When it rained, service got really bad with hums and noise. I was trying to get my dialup modem working at something approaching 9600bps, so I called for service... Chatting with the techs who actually work on the lines - I found out that there were lots of long forgotten splices wrapped in tape and buried in mud. The main junction box for my neighborhood was just barely above ground and right next to a swamp/pond. I imagine it's much the same all over the east coast - all this was done before the (first) AT&T breakup.

About seven years ago Verizon did "follow the money" and FIOS came to Westchester, leaving all the old copper in the ground.

reply to trparky

I've done some googling - lot's of horror stories on U-verse.

Bottom line seems to be anything approaching or more than 1 kilo = 3280 feet from the VRAD is fahgeddaboutit.

Even if you're well within that limit, there's no service promise - many reports of service that intermittently "freezes" - that's the primary symptom for U-verse video - no doubt the underlying modems get a noise hit or some glitch and then takes a while to sync up again. Actually I was in coffee shop the other day and I noticed a U-verse connected TV go from that state to an error screen...

This is quite weird to me. In the old days, and even now in Verizon/FIOS territory - if the phone company brought a line to your house - they would generallly work to make it work.

From what I gather here, and on other BBs - AT&T apparently has no plan to fill-in the gaps in its service areas - that would require pulling new (fiber) cables and installing more VRADs (or some other fiber to copper thingies), and fixing/replacing lines (with either new copper or fiber) from the street where the distances are within spec but the last leg of copper is too distorting/attenuating/noisy/reflective to carrry VDSL2 signalling to the home. Perhaps the plan is to jump to a 4G or WiMax or other wireless solution to cover the gaps...? That's already a viable option is some areas.

So it seems that AT&T never should have accepted my order - BUT - the 2Wire box came yesterday and today is "install day" - so we shall see. I'll be amazed if it works at all, flabbergasted if it works well enough to replace my Comcast internet service. AT&T provided a pre-paid return mail sticker and an 800 number to call for an RMA...

To wind up the original question - the tech arrived on the scheduled day - and essentially said "no way, no how - anything more than 3000 feet is too far". (I rechecked by my car odometer - it is at least 1.5 miles) He started tracing and/or measuring the line - but I had an appointment so I don't know what he found out -- he left the connector box (NID) open and I can see the the connection between AT&T and my house is cut. And BTW, according to the tech, there is no plan to install any new cables or vrads anywhere in my 'hood...

So a few phone calls and VRU hell to get AT&T to cancel the service and back the modem goes.