Dave Liquorice wrote:
On Fri, 09 Jan 2009 11:53:53 +0000, The Natural Philosopher wrote:

Trouble with overhead, is that its not as simple to replace a bit of
optical fibre that a tree has crashed onto..

If jointing the fibre no, that is a skilled and time consuming process. If
the lenghts aren't particulary long it's probably easier to blow the old
ones out and new ones in.

Mind you since a fibre is currently capable of about 8Gbps*, you don't
need a lot of em.

DTH needs one fibre cable per home/end point back to a "hub".

I think we are slightly at cross purposes.

What I had in mind ws that BT would install a load of one to many fibre
repeaters/multiplexers in street cabinets fed with power from the exchange.

The a single fiber from the street cab to the home.


And probably some sort of video caching kit in each exchange. So that
downloading videos was real time.


Another way
of distributing the connections is fibre to "good site(s)" then wireless
as the final link. You can get reliable wireless stuff these days that
doesn't use 2.5GHz (WiFi and loads of other stuff) and will give speeds to
a few tens of Mbps over decent distances. Personally I'd want to put in
DTH fibre with development grant support.


wots DTH?

The real issue is taking power down to repeaters and splitters.

Find suitable places with mains, install your kit there, give the owners a
free connection as payment.

Till that mains goes..

Nope. For resilience it all has to be fed from the exchanges.

I cant see a better solution than using BT streetboxes as fibre fed
exchange powered concentrators.

Even if you still had copper to the home, you should be able to get
about 20Mbps over a 100m or so. With rewire with cat 5, 100Mbps.

That is what needs to be done realistically: Upgrade each exchange for
more bandwidth, then start pushing the fibre further towards the
customer on a case by case basis.