Bell Canada → Re: [Aliant] Bell FibreOP coming to Greater Sudbury!

In reality, we are sparsely populated. I don't know what swedish stuff you're talking about with Bredband2 and stadsnat, and I just don't feel like looking it up, but here's the reality of the situation.

...Underground infrastructure. 50 years ago things were different. People weren't as crazy about roads being torn up and whatnot as they are now. The man power and the expense of pulling permits, getting locates, making sure everything is safe is very expensive in an underground infrastructure.

Since Fibreoptics are not "inherently dangerous" they can just be thrown up on utility poles next to the cable lines and the phone lines as they sit right now. Throw up wire, staple, tack it on, place the associated support equipment at the appropriate support intervals and you're good to go. You can wire up a city in a matter of months.

Underground means that it has to run where the current equipment is...who's lawn gets that shiny little box which they don't want and will fight tooth and nail as they'll be afraid their property values will be diminished as a result. The digging, trenching, because as it sits right now, cable is supposed to be at the top roughly 6-18" below ground in an underground infrastructure....where does this Fibreop line go? There's not much room left to manuvere...do they pull out the phone lines as they go? What if people don't want to upgrade? And the associated backlashes of that as a result.

Imagine in a big apartment building in Toronto. Ok, so Bell takes all the work of pulling equipment into the basement of the apartment building....now what.

Are you going to use phone lines to travel up to the 22nd floor? Are you going to use cable lines?

The reality is you can't pull Fibre up to each individual apartment. Could you run ethernet? Who's going to bear the cost of that?

Anyways, we'll see if this actually flushes out but I'm excited. Unfortunately Vianet which would seem to have a head start on the competition is major league dropping the ball as you can't get a price from their website and you can't get a location as to definitively where they are available, so for me, they're out...

Glad someone else is!

There are hundreds of old neighbourhoods across the GTA that have aerial infrastructure and the best Bell tells us they can do here is VDSL2. Fiber is impossible because Toronto is not dense enough we are told.

FYI, you keep pointing at hydro wires in your pics .

There are instances where hydro is aerial, but telco/cable is underground...heck there are some instances where hydro runs front yard and cable/telco run in the backyards...

Just saying .

You said yourself that doesn't make a difference, fiber optic cables are not affected by EMI.

But if you really want to be picky about it:

What is the cable in your pictures above? I see them run along a road i travel on each day and wonder what it is and who owns it.

The first pic is a Rogers cable tap, node, and the Alpha box is a power supply/battery backup system.

The second is pic, minus the arrow furthest to the left, is all Bell plant, F2 cables and a spaghetti splice job. You can read more about how copper loops are generally designed here: »www.privateline.com/OSP/No.html

The 1st pic is not a node FYI. Nodes will sit on the ground and typically are not suspended in the air as they are quite heavy.

In the 1st pic what you are seeing is a Line extender, with obviously power to continue to transmit the signal along the wires.

I'm not familiar with Phone wiring technology so I have to trust what he said is correct.

In Cable terms the tap is what is actually to the left of the picture that's not in the box. Its where the cable runs from the outside plant usually down to the CSE or down into the subscribers home.

Hey, nothing is stopping you from pulling equipment and wires and setting up your own FTTH service..just get capital, go through the regulations, the CRTC, and poof...

Its going to be a 30 million dollar investment in Sudbury apparently according to the news and whatnot...so...30 million for potentially 50k + homes passed = $600/home... $600 x 2 million homes = 1,200,000,000 or... $1.2 Billion dollars....now you can see why they'd rather have spent the money buying part of the Maple Leafs . I would too. (counting roughly 2 million homes in the GTA total)...

They have nodes that suspend from the air too, you can't always tell just from looking at a blurry streetview photo, trunk amps line extenders and nodes and can have similar looking enclosures. The giveaway is that there is an auxiliary power source, the Alpha box: »www.alpha.com/Products/A ··· closure/

I admit what I know and admit what I don't know.

Its not a node. That's a line extender. I know cable, I know the physical technology. A node will not suspend from the air, there is just too much stuff that's in one to suspend it off a pole.

Its not an auxiliary power source. Its a power source. How do you think that the cable signal gets to your home? It gets powered!! How? Through these boxes. That's why sometimes when the cable signal goes out and you would call in and they'd say "There's a power outage somewhere", even though you'd say "Hey I have lights, what gives?"...well if the power is out in another area or on another street, and the power supply is run from that area, you get no signal regeneration...which is what the line extender does.

....Trust me, I know what I know.

Anyhow, don't be jealous that we're going to have real fibre service before you do getting back On topic.

I say auxiliary because it has batteries for power outages. The giveaway is that the Alpha box is twice as large as ones traditionally used for single trunk amps or line extenders.

»[News] West Chester, PA Comcast Node Splitting.

From the Comcast forum, 5 years ago:

quote:

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"They [Comcast] continue to replace existing In-line amplifiers with drop in fiber nodes. Scientific Atlanta makes Fiber nodes that drop into their existing Amplifier housings, and it appears Comcast is making good use of them."

"The upgrades are subtle, because Comcast put a decent amount of dark fiber up when they did their total rebuild of Chester County 6 or 7 years ago."

"Since the new fiber nodes bolt into the existing amplifier housings there is little line work to do, they pretty much cut the hardline feeding the existing amplifier, cut the node into the fiber and drop it into the old amplifier housing, and what was an amplifier extending the reach of the original node now becomes a separate node in of itself."

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Look at the before and after pictures, we have exactly the same setup. You couldn't tell what it is for sure unless you had hi-res of the labels on the enclosure or you worked for Rogers.

FYI, you took this off topic by nitzpicking on which utility poles I chose to post. The fact remains, there are hundreds of neighbourhoods across the GTA (Hamilton, Toronto, Mississauga) with tens of thousands of homes and aerial infrastructure, where it costs less money for ISPs to do FTTH than it does for them to do it in Sudbury because there are at least fifty times more customers per square kilometer. Therefore, the Ceh-neh-deh is too big eh argument used by Bell spokespersons and forum shills was always just a cop out.

The reason Bell won't do FTTH in the GTA is because they don't have to. Who are they competing against? Less than 0.5% of the population has access to FTTH.

As for do it yourself. Some ISPs (hint, not Robell-Savvy) are trying, but they will not immediately get proper scale because incumbents and incompetence have put up generations of red tape no amount of money will make go away. For now we are at the mercy of Big Red and Big Blue. But we have time, all the time in the world to change things and to truly make them better.

How it should be done in any city, and how even the proposed Beanfield Metroconnect fiber network is being built, is open access. Metroconnect is the work of a private finance initiative between Beanfield, private property developers and a government organisation - Waterfront Toronto. Unfortunately, this is Beanfields first big project (big for an ISP going from serving less than 500 residential FTTH customers at Toy Factory Lofts to over 10,000 at this new location) and it is and not scheduled to open until 2027, or 2022 at the earliest.

Then, through the not-so-magical use of Ethernet VLANs, people on this open access fiber network can have access to hundreds of different service providers for Internet, IPTV and VoIP:

set vlan 101 description ""InternetSurf 250"" gateway auto multicast no option_82 configurable switching_rule ip_validation transit_link ethernet_port 26 uplink ethernet_port 25
 
set vlan 102 description ""IPTV 243"" gateway auto multicast igmp_snooping option_82 configurable proxy_ip_address 10.215.25.135 switching_rule ip_validation transit_link ethernet_port 26 uplink ethernet_port 25
 
set vlan 103 description ""VoIP 237"" gateway auto multicast no option_82 configurable switching_rule ip_validation transit_link ethernet_port 26 uplink ethernet_port 25
 

Imagine, being able to choose Internet or IPTV or VoIP from more than two service providers at the click of a button on a web portal, with no $50 technician truck-rolls or install charges! That is the power of properly planned infrastructure.

Well, you were nitpicking about poles, and I was just explaining.

Again, as for the do it yourself, if there is so much red tape how come they're able to do it in yahoo-ville Sudbury where we don't even have 24 hour grocery stores in a city of 160k??? True story.

Again, it doesn't add up. Bell isn't going to get proper scale here because of the density as you say, so again it doesn't make sense why they decided to do it this way here, vs going with VDSL2/ADSL2+ down in Southern Ontario.

So, why don't you cobble together $30 million and get your neighbourhood community fibre project off the ground?

I'd say it's a couple of things:

1) Bell has already spent a lot doing the ADSL2/ADSL2+/VDSL2 installations over the past several years in the GTA/Golden Horseshoe, before the FTTH work started in Atlantic Canada or Quebec, so to turn around and start to overlay all that with fiber would be loss of sunk costs;

2) A lot of the GTA/GH is underground plant (not all, but most of the areas built in the past 40 years) while Sudbury has less of it, like Quebec City, so it's cheaper to start in Sudbury than further south;

3) Sudbury hasn't seen major infrastructure upgrades to ADSL2+/VDSL2 in the recent past, so moving directly from older ADSL to FTTN makes greater financial sense;

4) screw with the minds of the I WANT SPEED AND FIBER IMMEDIATELY AND I LIVE IN TORONTO SO I'M THE CENTRE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DEMAND MY RIGHTS TO HAVE THE BIGGEST AND THE BEST AND CHEAP AND RIGHT AWAY AND FIRST crowd.

I don't think this holds water. In Atlantic Canada, we had FTTN for only a couple of years, then we were upgraded to FTTH.Nothing is stopping Bell from rolling out FTTH to areas where there are overhead wires.

Thanks . Its nice that we get some speed upgrades up here. Again, I just got ADSL1 service back in 2008....that's right, 2008.

I know where I live currently won't get Fibre service, but at least I have options and others have options to get the service.

Which means were going to skip ADSL2 here which I was really hoping to get an upgrade as I'm pretty sure I could sync at 12mbit with my current lines...

But it is what it is, I'm glad that were getting infrastructure here and that hopefully it'll spur more investment in the city. While Sudbury has been commercially "wired" since about 1999/2000 with Fibre services, it never really trickled down to the residential level.

So, at least I'm excited again about this investment, and again to others, you can always create your own services.

Not all engineers are business mavens. Not all politicians constituents are computer literate so you can't easily tax it either. Find me $100 million dollars and I will start a community FTTH project.

The general lack of Canadian technological advancement and intellectual curiosity is becoming more and more obvious as we fall behind the curve. Christian Paradis only makes one-off press appearances and dithers on a digital economy strategy. We have Rogers selling iPhone 4s for 50 bucks at the dollar store and our population's consensus is that that they have no utility and parents are spoiling children by buying them one... Unless you're in the content business and own a media empire like Bell you are really fighting against the trend.