On Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:32:59 +0000, Peter Scott wrote:

Does fibre have to be laid in ducts?

Normally yes. You lay the duct then blow the fibre through. So each end
point needs its own duct all the way back to a fibre hub. The fibre itself
contains two optical cores and two balancing ones but is still pretty
light and feeble. "Duct" might be misleading, AIUI, it's more of a bundle
of tubes one for each end point, I believe a 24 tube duct is about 2" dia.

I know it is fragile in itself but surely the cables are robust?

Robustish you can get robust fibre cables but I doubt they come cheap
compared to stuff you blow through a duct.

Has fibre ever been installed overhead?

Attached to the outside of the terraced houses is one of the ways that
fibre might be distributed in the town. It would make sense to be able to
fly across building gaps rather than go up and down.

Putting poles in probably isn't all that cheap, 20 poles per km? Not to
mention the visual impact. Not sure BT would let you share theirs.

I can see that fibre or wireless is the way it must be done, but my
original point is there has to be some commercial imperative to get
companies to do it.

With low rural population densities it just isn't going to happen. Even
the government are baulking at the cost of a full UK wide "Next
Generation" installation, figures of £25bn being bandied about, they might
spend £10bn. The big plus is that the government are aware that commercial
companies will not cover rural areas and don't want that digital divide to
get any wider. I'm confident that money will be available for community
based enterprises to install fibre or WiMax type systems. Money won't be
available (as always) to keep such a system running, the on going cost of
the backhaul could be crippling, income streams other than the end user
subscriptions are pretty much essential.

Allowing them to charge normal rate for inferior service (and yes of
course I know there are people worse off than me) is not going to
motivate them.

And getting them to charge an even lower rate is?

--
Cheers
Dave.