fibre optic line petition sign all

[aidanjt]

Ethernet has a limited signaling range, it deteriorates badly over 100m, thus making it impractical for wide area deployment.

Interestingly ESB, Ireland's primary electricity has run a massive bandwidth fibre ring around the country allowing government, businesses and home users alike received huge bandwidth communications on new site developments, home users can get rates of up to 40mbps, if ISPs step up to the mark.

[badass]

Think fibre is on the way folks

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/04..._redundancies/

You can get a fibre connection if you have deep pockets.

Personally I'd prefer 100 Mbps Ethernet or even better Gigabit Ethernet.

Surely that would suffice for even the most heavy users?

I might stand a chance in Counter Strike then also


No more waiting for the modem to retrain and speed going up and down like a yo-yo

Thats not fibre to the home - thats just to the exchanges. Still copper and ADSL2+ for your broadband.

[emul8]

Its got my vote whether its makes a difference or not

[pctechxp]

Fibre might be on the way folks due to an increase in copper prices
http://www.thinkbroadband.com/news/3...-increase.html

[markyp23]

Signed.

[jamin]

Another "I want more bandwidth" petition. 21CN is not aimed at the home user. Its a massive overlay targeted at BT's IP core and the way they deliver services to Business and Corporate customers.

While it is feasable to provide fibre to every home, the time it would take to achieve and the cost involved make it an impossible dream to achieve in the near future. Technologies like PON (Passive Optical Networking) mean that a number of houses could share 1 fibre by cleverly splitting it and using different light wavelengths. But these are still a long way off. When you consider the price of fibre and the cost of installing it, its just not an option.

To give an idea of cost, I just replaced a 4km section of 216f NZD (Non zero dispersion) for a carrier customer as it was damaged and the cost of the whole fix ran to nearly £35,000. Not cheap!

[peterb]

Thjere is one very good reason why at the moment fibre cannot be layed to every home - it doesn't carry power. One of the (many) regulatory requirements laid on BT is the provision for 24x7 emergency calls - even during power failure at the subscribers home. This is provided by battery and/or generator backup at the exchange which provides power to the lines, so a passive telephone (ie basic instrument) will still work - which is why cordless phones come with a warning that they should not be used as the sole instrument.

ADSL lines (copper) still provide that basic facility, however fibre requires terminatiuon equipment which needs to be mains powered or have a built in battery backup, which may not meet current regulatory requirements. Furthermore the fibre termination equipment isn't cheap!

There were experiments with TPON (Telephony over Passive Optical Netwoks) where fibre was used to connect the exchange to equipment in a roadside cabinet, with the last few hundred yards being over copper - this acually hindered broadband rollout to those customers, and this has been supplemented with copper connections to provide broadband.

AFIK, there are few countries (if any) where fibre is delivered to the domestic subscribers. In high density housing areas, such as Tokyo, blocks of flats may have fibre delivered to the building, but again the local distribution to individual premises are over copper.

Things may cuhange in the future, but I can't see any prospect of getting fibre to homes as a policy decision any time in the near future. (10 - 15 years)

[aidanjt]

http://www.electricnews.net/frontpage/news-9941600.html

If lil ole us can do it with our tiny population...

Fibre is the only way to go in the future, with higher and higher quality content coming from SPs and the Internet requires more bandwidth and better service delivery, you can only stretch copper so far, in that fibre is also much superior.

[pctechxp]

Good point about the power over copper situation, hadnt thought of that.

No doubt there's a a boffin at BT, NTT or Lucent working on it as we speak...Thin wire mesh around the outside of the fibre perhaps?

[Splash]

Personally I'd prefer 100 Mbps Ethernet or even better Gigabit Ethernet.

I have my house wired with gigabit ethernet. You know how often I actually use anywhere near a tenth of that bandwidth?


I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

[SiM]

Why petition for it? When its commercially sensible it will be implemented by the private sector anyway? I'm sure none of you people want it if it cost £500 a month!!!

Not gonna sign - can me make a petition to remove this petition? lol

[Mad-Max]

Oh how sad this petition really is

[aidanjt]

I have my house wired with gigabit ethernet. You know how often I actually use anywhere near a tenth of that bandwidth?


I'll let you draw your own conclusions.

Me too, and I rarely go over 200mbps, disk i/o is the main problem.. As I've already pointed out, ethernet isn't practical for wide area networks, or even metropolitan area networks, the signial would be degraded to nothing garbage after a linford christie.

[bliko]

The main benafits that FTTH would bring to the average home user are

a)standardised levels of quality of service...getting rid of harsh bandwidth restrictions, 'Up To...' speed ratings, frequent line drop-outs, etc... Internet connections would be alot more speedy and stable.

b) all of 'a)' will allow for delivery of richer content such as on demand hdtv, video + voice over ip communications, ability to share files more easily.

It's unlikely that people will want to pay the high initial cost for all of this, therefore it will be a long time before bt(or any other company for that matter), gets a return on their investment into fibre.

Albeit expensive, everybody + BT realises that it's going to have to be done sooner or later...as a lagging telecommunications infrastructure is no good for businesses. I think BT are just waiting for there to be sufficient demand for it to be economically viable for them.

Either way, i don't think there is any harm in signing the partition....just another thing to show how slowly it takes for some things to be done in this country. I'm sure if gordon brown was allowed to take some kind of 'fibre tax' we would all have new lines in our houses tomorrow.

[badass]

Has anyone any idea just how much FTTP to every home in the UK would cost?

I'm guessing in the region of £30,000 per home.
Only a £3000 per year hike on the phone bills for 10 years eh?

And dont assume economies of scale will magically reduce this much. Laying fibre is very labour intensive and there's only 1 way the price of labour is going.
This is typical of this country's "I want, therefore I have a right to" society we live in.
Stop being so unrealistic and be happy with what you've got, everyone. Does anyone here with anything approaching 8 Mbit even use it properly? And by properly I dont mean file sharing.

[Mossy]

It's unlikely that people will want to pay the high initial cost for all of this, therefore it will be a long time before bt(or any other company for that matter), gets a return on their investment into fibre.

Only about 6500 engineers jobs and wages not to pay a saving of around £1bn per annum.