Dave Liquorice wrote:
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?

Thanks for your useful contribution Dave. That's filled in a lot of gaps
in my knowledge about fibre. If BT were to do the cabling then they
would use their own poles of course and they are already there in most
places. Satellite is not really the answer. The relatively low speeds
and high cost and latency makes them unviable.

As you will see from my original posting I don't believe that there is
any intention of providing a remotely comparable service outside of
towns. I am encouraged that you think there will be money for community
enterprises.

I later made the point that rural areas subsidise the cities and it is
not unreasonable to expect some subsidy in the opposite direction for
such as data transmission. This might answer your valid point about
maintenance costs not being met by income. We now have a generation that
has never known other than Thatcherite 'thinking' about the infinite
'wisdom' of the market. There are areas where the market is
inappropriate and this is one of them. Don't get me wrong. I remember
the bad old days of waiting six months to get a phone line. Privatising
BT was mostly a great idea. But as enormous sums of tax revenue are
pumped into rail, a similar case can be made for money to be put into
the data system. Indeed more people use the Internet than trains.

My point about lower charges for lower speeds was not entirely serious.
However whilst suppliers can say 'well they've now got broadband so stop
whining' (not mentioning the increasing differential in speeds), the
future problems become hidden. Yes there are many inefficient web sites
that soak up bandwidth. IT was ever thus. Just take a look at
Microsoft's bloatware! Back in the 80s who would have thought that PCs
would need to store digital photos each of which would take up more than
entire hard disk of 10Mb? Why on earth do we need bus speeds higher than
1MHz? The Internet is a wonderful resource that enables business and
draws people together nationally and across the world. It must not be
throttled in its application by failure to invest.

Peter Scott