Richard Naylor
Perhaps what's needed is assistance in building such local loop infrastructure.
No - we (NZ) just spent 10 years getting away from this.
We spent 10 (well, 15) years getting away from a state operated and regulated monopoly, where it was *illegal* to compete with the Post Office. I'm not for a moment suggesting going back to that situation. Rather I'm suggesting that the things that make telecomms hard be eased as much as possible. Digging up the road is expensive for everybody. Last time I looked (which was a while ago), you were talking $100 / metre, at least if you had to dig through the road rather than a nice soft verge, which Wellington hill suburbs are rather short on.
DON - they have been doing this for years ! remember that funny Palette based mapping system I used to run at the MED ? technology now called GIS.......
Yes, I recall very well you showing this off. But it takes a bit more than just knowing where everything is. If I come to the WCC and say I want to lay a ductline in a given street, does anyone else get told? Do I get an opportunity to utilise existing ductlines and avoid digging up a busy thoroughfare at all? Do I get told that I should lay multiple ductlines, and someone else may be along sometime later to buy them off me?
But in fact its even easier. In large parts of the US the utility reticulation is along the BACK fences. Thats where the poles are, not in the street. So what you do is run your cables along the back fences using a standard easement form for each home owner. They easy to train.
I always get into trouble generalising about US infrastructure, cos there's a lot of it and they all do stuff differently -- someone always finds a counter-example. But it's very common in N. America to have back alleys; the (*ugly*) 110/220V reticulation is down the backs of the properties rather than on the street as in NZ. It looks better than cables up the front of the street (except were it goes over cross-streets), but it does take up space -- it's not "down the back fence" per se, but on separate land.
Now you start using NID boxes like we build. They're basically a fiber media converter and an ethernet switch in a weatherproof box with psu and surge protection. Simple traditional engineering. You put boxes every 100m like good ethernet says, and you run cat-5 to the houses. If you can't do it bloody cheap you go broke. If your're real clever you even skip the fiber and just run gig copper between the boxes. THat saves you the media converter costs which are the big hurdle. And since you are running copper its about 30 cents per meter.
OK. Now run video and telephones over it. This is where it gets thornier, but would mack such an approach a hell of a lot more attractive to the punters. By "video" I mean something I can (a) plug into the TV, and (b) that I might actually watch. Saturn ended up running separate POTS and broadband cables. I get TV and Internet over the cable, but a telephone is still stuck with Dark Ages technology. -- don - To unsubscribe from nznog, send email to majordomo(a)list.waikato.ac.nz where the body of your message reads: unsubscribe nznog