It really boggles the mind. These guys have been told time and again, that for wireless to replace fixed line infrastructure, youd need more wireless spectrum than is currently available, youd need about 5000 times more towers (power and fibre to those towers!!), and even then it would still be sub-par, and severely limited upgrade path!!

Im a telecoms engineer, I work for an equipment vendor specialising in FTTx products (point to point, and PON), and HFC products (traditional docsis 1 - 3, RFoG, DPON etc..)...so take it from me, there is honestly no contender for technology upgradability, serviceability, cost, quality, life span...etc...etc....it ticks every single box (short of direct P2P equipment, but thats a discussion for another day, I dont think it suits our geological landscape here).

Reading what comes out of their mouths on a daily basis for the past 2-3 years, and seeing peoples reactions of trust and agreement to it...it just makes me cry, honestly. They are so misleading and its all for political points.

Destroying our communications future at the cost of an election.

Similar issue in Australia, only the single entity that owned every copper cable in the country (was post master general, then renamed to telecom, then sold off privately as Telstra), owns all of the major TV rights for cable shows (discovery, nat geo etc...), still owns all of the copper lines, and the telephone exchanges, and the pits/ducts....

They have a wholesale side of the company where they are forced by law to allow other service providers access to the infrastructure to sell services on via unbundled local loop (ULL) or line sharing services (LSS).

LSS services are basically telstra renting out everything to the service provider at cost, and a small premium. So they take all the profits, and make it neigh impossible for anyone else to compete with other providers.

ULL services are telstra giving access to just the copper pairs, service providers come in with their own equipment in the headend. The other providers still must pay rent, and line rental fees to telstra.

Imagine then, how these other companies can compete at a retail service level, against the company that owns all the lines?

They can set their prices as high as the competition regulator will allow them (which in a vast majority of the access undertaking costs, is FAR above what it actually costs telstra themselves), and then sell those same services to its retail arm for less than they charge their competition....they can price match and reap way more profits, or undercut them and drive the competition out of the market!!

Competition came in the 90's in the form of an HFC rollout by Optus, but every street Optus went down with HFC, Telstra followed them, the very next week, making their rollout far less lucrative (ie. not commercially viable).

The practice was ruled anti-competitve and telstra got fined heavily for it. Doesnt matter, it stopped anyone else from wanting to roll out an HFC network ever since.

Recently it has come to a head, Telstra have been forced to vertically seperate their wholesale and retail arms, the prices they set have been capped lower on the wholesale side, they cant over-quote competitors for access over what they provide their own retail arm....but thats not enough.

Noone can run out fibre, cause telstra own all the pits and pipes.

So...the government has stepped in, in the past 4 years or so, created a government owned company called NBNco (National Broadband Network Company), to buy up all the copper lines, rip them out, and roll out fibre to 93% of homes using GPON FTTH technology.

The opposition (who will likely win the coming election) wants to tear this apart. The very same people who set up the rules and regulations and sold off telstra into private hands, and made this mess in the first place, wants to go back on relying on private industry to upgrade this - a critical service infrastructure - which has already shown to be a COMPLETE failure in the past.

I hope that whoever wins, this NBN stays....wholesale competition has never ever worked for national infrastructure. Never, in any country.

The balloon is basically vulcanised rubber, or more commonly known as latex. The lasers I work with have certain interractions with the water content in silicon fibres. Different wavelengths (colours) react differently within different fibres.

1550nm for example sits just on the absorbtion point of water in silicon, so it loses quite a lot of its energy along a fibre due to that water absorbtion in non-pure fibres. 1310nm lasers however dont have this issue, and can hold their signal for far greater distances.

Different coloured lasers, interacting differently with the exact same material.

One has its energy absorbed, one doesnt.

.....im guessing a similar principle occurs here.

(Im in telecoms if you hadnt guessed )

>> ^kymbos:

Wow, privatising health care? Some terrible ideas just don't die, do they? When this idea was pushed in the 80s here in Oz, it kept the tories out of government for another ten years.
Are the Lib Dems participating in this?


Oh yes, to a degree. Nick Clegg is in full support of it now and is urging his party to back it. 57% of the party are opposed, 32% are for and 12% don't know. One thing is for fucking certain, the amount of things the Lib Dems have done a U-turn on, they have little to no chance of ever getting into power, not for a very very long time. Foolish cunts, all they had to do is refuse the coalition government... but no, he thought he could handle it, and it turns out he's a gigantic fuckwad minus backbone or moral fibre.

Faster-than-light neutrinos could be down to bad wiring

In September 2011, the Opera experiment reported it had seen particles called neutrinos evidently travelling faster than the speed of light.

The team has now found two problems that may have affected their test in opposing ways: one in its timing gear and one in an optical fibre connection...............



So, *fail, but that how science goes.

That girl has some serious twitch-fibre muscle action going on. Impressive.

>> ^viewer_999:

I'm surprised how well the vette held up in that bump. Did they stop making them out of fiberglass?


A lot of them are using carbon fibre now. No damn idea what vette boy had in mind. Probably trying to make the off ramp you see as our videographers spin around.

I think no matter how good my broadband its always not quite good enough. ONE DROPPED PACKET OUT OF 10,000.

Really I don't care much about bandwidth, its latency and the quality and reliability of the connection I am after. I would be happy on like, 1mb if its got good routing, pings well to the rest of europe and doesn't drop packets or fluctuate wildly. Videogames don't really require that much bandwidth

I'm on BE Broadband atm, and honestly I'm super impressed with the quality considering its built on aging telecom infrastructure. Very affordable too. When I was living in student digs I forked out for fibre optic cable because the alternatives were awful and while the bandwidth was great it was extremely unreliable. Headaches of new tech or just a bad business...

>> ^conan:

woah. what was that on the map? "UK", "France" right NEXT to "Europe"? Argh, even educated and intelligent guys like him fall for the US egocentric view of the world, where everything else is just continents instead of countries. And he even got that wrong.


It was also drawn in MS Paint. Count yourself lucky that it wasn't labeled "Pussies and Communists".

Fructose is linked to heart disease, glucose is not.

This is due to the two different types of low-density lipoprotein (LDL) formed in the blood as the body metabolizes sugars. LDL formed by metabolizing glucose is large and buoyant, thus floating harmlessly through the blood. LDL formed by metabolizing fructose is smaller and denser, and more likely to get caught in the walls of the arteries, causing plaque buildup and leads to heart disease.

The only proper treatment for fructose intake is oddly the one thing abundant in all natural sources of the toxin: fibre.

http://videosift.com/video/Sugar-The-Bitter-Truth

About time, sure seems like they sucked the life and all the fibre the shows original tracks laid out.

>> ^MaxWilder:

I don't know what is going on here. Is this a move by the line owners against the independent ISPs that are leasing the bandwidth? Is this their way of getting around the regulation that forces the owners to let others share their lines?
And both sides are arguing that it's in the best interests of the end user, when they are actually concerned much more about their bottom line? That's what it seems like with my limited information.


That is EXACTLY what it is all about. Here in Canada, ISP's have been allowed to charge customers on a metered billing basis. I even preferred using the local metered billing ISP because they also consistently provided you the full speed they advertised, not the "up to speed x", but a dedicated, you can always hit speed x no matter how many users are on at the same time. You just had to be aware that if you ran that line at full speed all month you'd go over your cap. It was a tradeoff, but I much preferred a line that was going to really be high speed all the time, instead of discovering that between 4 and 11pm you can't even get half the speed advertised because the ISP had so badly oversold their capacity.

The new regulation passed here in Canada is, as you observed, extending that policy to include the lines that major providers like BELL/ATT are required to provide at cost access to for other smaller ISP's. This requirement is based on the government having spent a lot of it's money in partnership with BELL/ATT to put the cross country fibre lines in place. Before this legislation passed, smaller ISPs would be renting a line from BELL/ATT for say 100x more than a normal customer, but with no usage caps. That in turn let the smaller ISP resell to customers who would, on average, never run the line full and make a profit. With the new change, BELL/ATT are immediately using this as an opportunity to crush out the pesky competition. They are now applying a cap on the lines they are obligated to lend out to the smaller isps.

To try and summarize it, BELL/ATT are required to lease/rent/share their network access with smaller ISP's at a price fixed by the government. This new ruling doesn't let BELL/ATT change that price, but it does let them apply a usage cap on those fixed price lines. So instead of paying $10 a month to use a line for 720hrs a month, BELL/ATT can just say it still only costs $10 a month, but you can only use it for 100hrs a month now without paying a premium. BELL/ATT can and will use this to destroy the competing ISP's that depend on access to the infrastructure that the government helped BELL/ATT to build.

...500mW !? wow.
I work with communications grade lasers. Infrared, non-columnated. Hold the fibre to your hand, you can feel its heat. This is at 50mW at most. We dont produce anything higher, because its dangerous. We dont look at open fibres either, even a small 20mW laser can cause retinal damage.

500mW!!!!??? and it goes to 1000mW too!?

....wow. This thing should be classed as a weapon.

Well, in honesty, I covered the cable lay (PPC-1) for a final year project in my telecoms eng. course, so it wasn't a recent research effort

Theres a few videos of them pulling the fibre through the manholes on land, and at the manhole underwater too. A few shots of the side-scanners, and the plough, and the amplifiers, and the divers placing it on the seabed in shallow waters...just a massive ammount of content. It also covers the deployment of the datacentres that feed the fibre.

Very cool and transparent project. I was going to buy shares when they opened, but didnt have the capital at the time
They opened at something like 20c, and the company sold to an aussie ISP here for something like $3 ea. Insane stock growth over 18 months.

http://www.pipeinternational.com/index.php?option=com_myblog&Itemid=65&limitstart=290

This is the link for a recent international fibre link from Sydney Australia, to Guam. Page 30 (the first page of the blog). If you go to the bottom, you can see the page numbers. This blog details every single step of a cable lay from day 1, right up to lighting the fibre.

Pretty cool.