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ozetel
10-10-2012, 10:33 PM
Howdy all,

Here in Australia, the business and residential communities are a buzz with the happening of what we call the NBN or National Broadband Network.

It is an independent company set up by our government to roll out fibre optics to all (well 95% or so) businesses and residential properties within the next 8 to 10 years.
It is huge for us because it will bring us up to the level of most countries around the world that, well, smash us when it comes to quality optics availability.

The word is that this will be the new basis of phone communications and that in fact all "copper" based telephony will be removed by the major carriers eventually.

What have others around the world found with such a feature?
How long have you had it already anyway? (not sure how our ego's will take the answer)
Is it realistic that the copper infrastructure will actually be removed in your experience?

Just a discussion and where we may be heading as it is a very topical thing at the moment.

Appreciate it.

MyITGuy
10-10-2012, 11:22 PM
It's a mixed bunch here.

Verizon is currently the largest provider of Fiber to the Premise here in the US and they stopped their deployments last year with no sign of moving forward in the foreseeable future. They are currently offering phone/TV/internet (The current promo appears to be 50/25 internet with HD TV for $90/mo) over these lines and from what I hear from people is that the service itself is great...the only major concern relates to billing issues.

Verizon does have Copper and Fiber Infrastructure, and where Fiber was installed they did give customers the choice to have the Copper infrastructure removed (I'm assuming that once all copper was removed from an area, the associated copper infrastructure itself was removed/abandoned)

Google is the next major player in the Fiber/Internet world as they plan to have two cities wired with Fiber by the end of next year if memory serves me right and will be offering 5Mbps symmetric connections for free (Only pay a $300 install fee), or users can get a 1Gbps symmetric connection with HD TV for around $90/year.

Hopefully this will inspire the rest of the providers to step up to the plate (I believe this is Googles goal as well), however it seems that allot of the industry is abandoning both copper and Fiber and moving to Wireless/LTE for their deployments (Along with usage caps so they can charge overage fees)....so who knows where we will be in the future...but I'd like to see the US wired with Fiber

vangogh
10-11-2012, 02:59 AM
What Jeff said. It's mixed here. It depends where you specifically live and what companies serve your area. I'm not really sure what wires are carrying my signal. I know it's not fiber as that hasn't reached me yet. I think some people in the general area have Verizon fiber, but it's not available for me yet. That seems to be the longer term solution.

I keep wondering if the longer term solution is wireless too. I'm always seeing people report that the speed they get with Verizon LTE is often faster than their wired connection. Wireless speeds also seem to be getting faster at a quicker pace so I wonder if before long more of us will use some kind of wireless connection as our default.

MyITGuy
10-11-2012, 09:55 AM
I keep wondering if the longer term solution is wireless too. I'm always seeing people report that the speed they get with Verizon LTE is often faster than their wired connection. Wireless speeds also seem to be getting faster at a quicker pace so I wonder if before long more of us will use some kind of wireless connection as our default.

Wireless/LTE does give providers the ability to offer better speeds than they can on DSL and some cable systems which is extremely attractive to providers. Providers are asking themselves why pay hundreds/thousands of dollars to hook up a single consumer when they can just put an antennae in your area and serve hundreds/thousands of consumers for a fixed monthly fee.

The only two issues I can see with moving to Wireless only are:
Speed/Bandwidth (Hence the usage caps), however this can be solved over time as equipment matures (I don't see Wireless ever reaching the capacity of Fiber though) and providers hopefully increase the bandwidth available to their towers.

The second issue is latency...I'm currently in 3G but will test later today when I'm in a 4G area and I'm seeing latency of 175ms on average (With speeds of 0.54/0.22). If your doing something that is sensitive to latency (Gamer, Stock Trader or etc) then Wireless is not the way to go. Latency is something that will almost never go away as the signal has to travel through the air to reach the tower...the further the tower is from you the higher the latency. Providers are already finding it difficult to have new towers installed so I don't see this issue going away anytime soon.

Brian Altenhofel
10-11-2012, 01:51 PM
I live and work in a rural area where the only wire option is dialup. I'm actually on a directional 802.11g system where I get 3Mbps down and 2Mbps up with an average 20ms ping to Google. I can get 10Mbps symmetrical on Verizon's LTE here, but the ping time is 210ms on average, and plus I'm a very heavy data user.

I'd love to get fiber as I'm only a mile from a major backbone route, but that definitely ain't happening.

billbenson
10-11-2012, 05:18 PM
I'm in a grown up farm town and have two fiber to the curb options. One is Brighthouse / roadrunner, the other is Verizon. I suspect Verizon completed the deployment here as I don't see their trucks installing fiber anymore. They are pushing their fiber service called Fios heavily. They started pitching that their service is better and required a 2 year contract. Then they dropped that to 1 year. Brighthouse / roadrunner is the cable company and they don't require a contract and provide outstanding customer service so I won't switch to Verizon.

Harold Mansfield
10-11-2012, 05:24 PM
We kind of did the fiber optic roll out back in the 90's during the Clinton administration. I believe the now defunct World Com/MCI was a major benefactor of those contracts and grants.

Most major cities have high speed broadband, although I wish it was controlled by the Government and not limited to one carrier who has a monopoly on the area. Verizon doesn't offer service here, except for wireless. It's all Cox, Sprint (Century Link), and Clear which is wireless 4G WIMAX.

Here in Vegas, I get up to 50mbps down (I just did a test. I guess it's a little more than that now) but the up still sucks. And it's a little over priced.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/2236155225.png (http://www.speedtest.net)

I hear they have 100mbps in the Washington D.C./Maryland/Virginia area which is also Cox and I think Warner.

billbenson
10-11-2012, 05:47 PM
Ping: 27 ms
Download: 33.5
Upload 2.23

Of course the network will only give you a max of about 1.2Mbs or that’s what it was the last time I downloaded a several G file.