Christopher Sawtell wrote:
Hybrid. Coax to big green box (not the smaller green boxes outside
your houses) then fibre from there.
Data and TV are imposed on to coax in the big plastic box that sits next
to the bit 19" rack cabinets.
Everything is sent from town on fibre. The telephone is put on UTP in
the 19" cabinet box.
Each of those cables, running from the Green box on the road, has 2 pair
of UTP (which is currently carrying the POTS phone service).
The coax is a shared resource within the node in your street. This
means that it's great value if you're the only one on it or everyone on
it only uses it for light browsing and email.
If you get a node with a bunch of heavy users then it can quickly turn
to custard on you. However, all that has to be done to fix the problem
is break the node in two and put a new fibre feed in to it.
The benefit of DSL is that you can arrogate alot more data into an area
close to the dslam than you can with cable. 10 pairs going to 10 houses
can deliver up to 240mbits of capacity (assuming a short run on ADSL2+).
You would only get 10mbits shared to those same 10 homes with the
current cable configuration.
The interesting things about the Telstra Clear network are:
aa. All the cables have been put in conduit. This means that it's not
going to be very hard to blow fibre through to every home later on if
desired.
bb. The cable running from the street in to your home has 2 UTP pairs.
This means that running 500mbit in to each home over ethernet won't be
hard to do.
cc. Housings have been put in place outside every other home on the
underground network. This means that they have a place to put passive
repeaters for fibre without having to do any further work.
dd. The way the coax is set up means that it could be used to supply
power to new equipment installed in the green boxes.
ee. The way the UTP is set up also means that you could use it to
deliver power to equipment housed in the little green boxes.
Bottom line, some very smart thinking and planning went in to the
$100mil that was spent. I personally suspect that somethings just
weren't said when the planning was done.
If I was a Telecom share holder I would be concerned about Wellington
and Christchurch.
Telecom will still be digging while Telstra are blowing fibre in to homes.
The cost to Telstra to deliver fibre will make it uneconomic for Telecom
to compete with.
Cheers Don
