Virgin signals start of telegraph pole broadband test Virgin Media is to see whether it can string up extensions to its fibre-optic network to Britain's telegraph poles in a bid to explore ways of bringing high-speed broadband to rural communities. The trial, which will kick of this month and run for a six-month period, will take place in Woolhampton, Berkshire, a village south- …
...there are three levels of cable on each pole:
top: High Voltage transmission, one wire if single phase, three if three phase.
next: local 220/120 for delivery to users.
then: telephone company messenger wire, and supported cables.
bottom: Cable company messenger wire. When COX put fiber into my house, they hung the fiber cable on the same messenger wire.
Although we would all prefer utilities underground for esthetic reasons, adding another level to existing phone/electric poles could be a real winner for Virgin.
Internet and beer, a match made in heaven.
"op: High Voltage transmission, one wire if single phase, three if three phase.
next: local 220/120 for delivery to users.
then: telephone company messenger wire, and supported cables.
bottom: Cable company messenger wire. When COX put fiber into my house, they hung the fiber cable on the same messenger wire."
ummm... that's four.
Not that I expect any difference from a yank, most of you seem to think that the first floor is the same as the ground floor. :)
...i had originally said three, forgetting the transmission at the top, then forgot to change the numbe when i added it.r.
In rural areas, there is a fourth strand, called the "static line" to bleed static charges from the ground to reduce lightning attacks. Some electric companies have special static lines made with several strands of fiber at the core.
re ground floor, we tend to even the count in taller buildings by omitting the 13th floor.
have a pint on me!
Its been a long time since I did any of this - X0+ years but...
The local distribs in the UK are ~11KV and have a three disc hanger.
The main distribution lines are 250K, 500K and 750K depending upon isolator size and oddly number of cables per run 1, 2 and 4.
A high tension tower (danger of death) carries two three phase circuits, contra rotating to reduce EMF with a single earth line along the top as a lightning trap.
It is this cable that the leccy boards used to attach their fibre to when they started offering net services - mainly because they could run a little unmanned trolley to do the job while power was still on.
At the substation level they dropped to powerline technology over the 11KV lines and bridged the 11K to 450V 3ph drop. As we all know 450 3ph == 240 single with each house getting one of the three phases.
Of course things have probably changed since the 80's :-)
"re ground floor, we tend to even the count in taller buildings by omitting the 13th floor."
No -- that doesn't even it out, it just skews it even more. Above the physical eleventh floor (which you call the twelfth floor) is the physical twelfth floor, which you are calling the fourteenth floor.
5 if you count a fanatical devotion to the Pope, but then, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition ;-)
In our village, power is underground. It's only the phone lines that are still on poles, so I'd go for it.
I believe the council is trying to get everything underground to enhance our rural environment.
Given that we're all supposed to be getting at least 2Mbps, it's either cheapish fibre on poles,
expensive fibre underground, (which can be severed by a digger, like in Hemel and Luton this week)
or high powered 3G masts.
In the school playground.
So, Virgin, where do I sign?
The whole point of putting fibre optics in the ground, I was led to believe, was to keep the fibre straight to reduce internal reflection?
When the telegraph pole lines sag in the summer time, will this reduce effective bandwidth?
Or is the effective bend radius here not a factor?
Only really small radius bends are a problem for transmission (around 30mm)
The main problem is making a cable with the tensile strength to be hung between telegraph poles.
As apparently there is a huge demand for this in Japan and S Korea, the prices for such cables have gone down (good old Wikipedia...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_fiber#Optical_fiber_cables )
I live in the Kent countryside and round these here parts there's many a road sign been sawn off to a stump by the local thieving ***** bastards; its annoying finding oneself at a rural crossroads and the direction sign is missing because it has been sold as "scrap".
At least they've stopped cutting the live power cables to Channel Tunnel trains to get the copper; but they'll prolly start doing it again once the price of this metal goes up again.
One of the big problems with OH feeds in rurual areas is that locals are prone to do a bit of pest removal with both barrels.
That and wayward trailers and tractors.
Here in the highly upmarket tech wonderland that is London - my phone line is fed via OH.
(OH - sorry, old terminology -Overhead)
But it'll only go to towns anyway so forget about the countryside retreat, miles from the meatropolis - no self-respecting ISP will be forking out to satisfy a relatively small number of subs.
'it?' as it's (as always) about money, not tech.
I would have thought that the extra stress from fibre blowing in the wind would introduce stress fractures over time, even if there was some form of support cable with it.
It is allowable to bend fibre, but there is a minimum radius for any bend dictated by the angles of reflection and refraction for the type of fibre used and the frequency of the light (can't quite remember my O level Physics). Even on a straight piece of fibre, the light does not travel straight down, it bounces from side-to-side, zigzagging down the fibre. If a bend is too severe, instead of reflecting back into the fibre, some of it is refracted out of it, causing a loss of signal. If the bend is really severe, all the light leaves the fibre leading to total signal loss. And a crack or fracture will probably have the same effect.
Rather than single point suspension, I expect to see curved supports, so the overall shape will be a wavy line (~~~) rather than a series of connected 'U's or W's (WW)
Our business site, with 100+ computers on it, is 5km up the road from our local phone exchange. ADSL peaks at about 1.1Mb/s with frequent rate caps due to line noise. Last time we asked Openreach to quote for a fibre bearer, they came back with £252,000 (£1000/m) for ducting up the main road from the end of the existing tunnel, as they won't consider installing on the existing poles...
Any chance of a trial in mid-Wales?
....that already owned all the poles and ........was already mandated to provide telephone services to all households in the UK at "reasonable" prices (with a watchdog org tracking and reviewing its performance)..
...we could just get them to run some new super-dooopa-electric-string (fibre) and make a universal super-fast broadband service for all..... better still - it could be a nationalised company with no competing commercial interests and just concentrate on providing basic (yet essential) infrastructure and services for all..... at a low cost and with no profits to hand over to investors... it could use surplus revenues to re-invest in its network/infrastructure/services and/or reduce costs
It could all be classed as "TELECOM" and be offered across the whole of Britain (i.e. to all "BRITISH" residences and businesses).
Now... we would need a good name for a company like that.... hmmmm....
Telecom Britania
British Telecommunications
Brit-tel-com
can't think up a good one.... any suggestions?
Cool
So long as this doesn't become an excuse for the government not to enact legislation making broadband over power lines legal. It would be a reality by now if vested interest groups hadn't tied up everything at the regulatory level for the last decade because of so-called interference with ham radios.
There have been trials of data-over-power grid (please note this is *NOT* the same as Homeplug). Scottish Power actually had a commercial service at one time, I believe.
It's not RF interference that killed the trials of this, it was the cost of bridging the signal from high to medium to low tension safely, the problem of combining upstream signals, and the problem of suppressing power switching noise which would cause damage of the datastream ( I was told that even medium tension switching uses sealed oil-quenched switches that arc through the oil, causing it to boil and be very dangerous - exploding substations anybody?). Not conducive to data.
My local electricity distribution company has fibre carried on its HT pylons, providing long-haul data services for trunks across the Atlantic, and has been selling bandwidth on this for over 10 years. But this is not suitable for broadband to the home, unfortunately.
By "so-called" do you mean "crippling"? "Rendering large swathes of the shortwave spectrum unusable in some places"?
Shortwave is probably the only band that can get a radio signal across the globe without satellites or internet with much reliability. To piss all over it with BPL is not only detrimental to the hobby interests of licensed amateur radio operators (who are vital to emergency communications, which is one of the reasons why governments hand out ham licenses), but to police and military communications, to commercial broadcasting, to aviation, and to maritime communications. Parts of it are even used for astronomy.
Smeagastream is old, old tech.
Yeah it works but it's really only beefed-up Private Circuits.
They prefer to sell VPN's nowadays as it takes less kit all round.
It would be cheaper to run a fatter pipe to the smaller rural exchanges and then out from there -if, that is, they have managed to upgrade the tiny sheds and find space for the BBand racks.
I've been in S. Korea for almost 2 years now and am still amazed at some of the places fiber has been connected to. I work about 15km from the nearest exchange but there is a connection to the centre I am in providing around 50Mbits/sec synchronous, the cable is mostly hung from telegraph poles, this is done by using a steel support cable then suspending the optical one plus a few others below this with supports every metre or so. In the cities and towns here there is fiber hanging everywhere and the connections are much more reliable than anything I used in the UK. I will miss 100Mbit synchronous in my flat for 15 pounds / month when I decide to leave here.
id say yes do this that way it reduces the amount of disruption of digging up roads and laying fibre that way so i say good idea virgin if this way is cheaper than other ways then id say go ahead and do it. who cares what the fibre cable looks like wether its purple red pink yellow green as long as it does its job and deliever fast speed because its about friggin time bt areas got upgraded and fast. fibre to the cabinet is not good enough as it makes no difference joining fibre onto copper because as soon as it hits the copper line it then reduces altogether. so no good and i also think its good that the conservatives are pushing for 100mb which is what everyone should have
Regarding BPL, Captain Thyratron his spot on. BPL generates huge HUGE HUUUGE swaths of noise over the whole RF spectrum, the power companies "solution" to ham radio complaints was "Oh, we'll notch out a few specific frequencies". What about the rest? No solution to that -- the power lines act as a massive transmission antenna, leaking noise all over the place.
Fiber on the pole? It works great. The local cable company has fiber-to-the-node, some parts of town it's all buried but towards downtown it's all on poles -- the fiber is on the pole along with the cable lines. The concerns about wind fatigue and such are unnecessary -- here in Iowa City, we have had in excess of 100MPH winds several times (and FREQUENT 50+MPH gusts in the summer thunderstorms), blizzards, ice storms (over 6 inches of ice a few times), and so on. Other than tornado damage snapping some poles clean off a few years ago, the above ground hardware has been quite resilient to extreme weather, and it's been up over 10 years. I don't know how this all affects fiber, but keep in mind it's not all beer and cigarettes for buried cables. Buried cables in general are susceptible to freeze/thaw cycles (ground shifts a bit), tectonic damage out west (earthquakes shift the ground) although that's not a problem here, electrochemical action (the soil will break things down over the long haul) and lightning strikes (for any copper portions remaining at least) This is anecdotal, but my parents have above-ground power and used to have above-ground cable --- no lightning problems. They have buried phone and a buried satellite dish cable -- about 15 years ago my modem got fused off-hook by a nearby lightning strike, and they had the LNB and Dish receiver burn out last year from a second lightning strike.
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