B etween your PC and the Internet is some type of long distance communications facility. Unless you work for someone else, your connection to the Internet comes at a price. Hopefully if you are reading this, you already have some type of broadband connection. If you are still using dial-up, you have my deepest sympathy. The purpose of this page is to provide, as best I know them, the options for connecting to the Internet. Along the way, maybe this site can save you some money on your regular telephone service as well as cellular service. The lower right shows a picture of "The Old & New". The "Old" is an ancient, black, 1800 pair telephone cable capable of carrying 900 2-way analog circuits. The silver colored cable in the middle is a cable used by power utilities and is known as an Optical Primary Ground Wire (OPGW) cable. This cable serves the dual function of transporting optical fibers while also acting as a power system ground or static wire/cable. The sample shown is a fairly small cable with six fibers out of a total of 36 fibers shown on top of the white tape. As a comparison to the old, each fiber pair can carry a little under 130,000 equivalent circuits assuming you don't launch different colors down the fiber (wave division multiplexing) in which case the total fiber pair capacity will increase up to 32 times. The bigger black cable to the left contains a total of 144 fibers (72 fiber pairs). Large telephone companies typically install cables similar to the one on the left by either burying the cable directly in the ground or installing the cable in some type of plastic duct system. Power utilities will sometimes lash such a cable directly to an existing power ground conductor. Cable TV companies also install fiber cable in a manner similar to telephone companies. Installed costs for fiber typically run from $11,000 per mile for cable companies to $60,000 plus per mile for deluxe installs using plastic duct with manholes. Unless you live fairly close to a telephone central office, your telephone company provided Internet service will come from what is called a "Remote Terminal" such as the ones pictured. Remote Terminals (RTs) connect to the central office using digital circuits and act as concentrators so each and every remote subscriber pair need not be run back to the central office. To supply high speed Internet service from the RTs, typically requires that they be fed optically from the central office. The high install cost and high transmission capacity of fiber typically limits it's installation to high density urban areas. The maintenance of fiber typically requires access to an Optical Time Domain Reflectometer (OTDR) for locating fiber breaks as well as an optical splicing machine. Both are expensive to purchase and require a trained technician to operate. The lower right "Rootenna" image represents the extreme opposite in transmission costs. Coupled with a Senao radio, a multi-megabit data link, plug compatible with standard RJ-45 Ethernet connectors, can be had for under $200 per end. The link, is not exactly five nines reliable and of course, requires a line-of-sight path and will works up through 12+ miles in length. Maintenance consists of simple, inexpensive, component replacement of a defective part using simple software running on a standard laptop PC. If you want to see how a real rural telephone company gets the job done unlike the whining, silver spoon fed telcos in these parts, check out this site detailing Art Brothers telco solution to providing rural broadband. Check the links below for information on the latest WIMAX equipment which boosts both data rates and acceptable radio path distances. It will be interesting to see if the high cost of fiber facilities in rural areas can compete with the new generation of high performance radio based systems. I suspect there are going to be some very interesting opportunities for knowledgeable wireless operators in the near term. |
