-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 12:06 08.10.97 -6, Peter Trei wrote:
Ian Sparkes
Peter wrote:
[...] Putting a few optical fibers into a power line is cheap, easy, and widely done.
But much cheaper and easier is using the signalling gulleys that run along the side of the railways - no High Tension precautions, no scaling pylons. This, incidently is the reason that a number of telecomms consortia (in europe, at least) include a railway element - they provide the long-haul backbone.
It looks like we're seeing different parts of the problem. You're worried about the long-haul backbone. I'm trying to see ways to get a 10Gbps fibre into my living room.
The backbone cost is a tiny fraction of the cost of getting fiber into every house in the country.
Maybe in retrospect I was just tugging your leash a bit, for which I apologise. I agree, in principle there are few entities which are more aptly placed than the power utilities to provide a roots to leaves high- capacity network into your home. Telephone companies could do it, although the very final stage in the link (twisted copper) is a capacitive load, and therefore not very well suited to high frequencies. Power wires, on the other hand, would exhibit better properties and are universally installed. The solution, however, must be a fibre/copper hybrid. The trick will be getting the bridges between fibre/copper and copper/copper (across the step-downs) cheap and reliable enough. This is probably the breakthrough. The post from Judith Lewis seems to hint at about 0.5MB/s. Good enough for your average Joe. Sorry for the obtuseness of my reply. Ian -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP for Personal Privacy 5.0 Charset: noconv iQA/AwUBNDu6gvzOjjBJiFUeEQIewACdGPe87UKBq7aGRkFew/02fHNBwh0AnAqN eidJ2PV2IVO05Gg+ZSXD9NRI =RxdS -----END PGP SIGNATURE-----