Leo Bicknell <[email protected]> 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
