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Broadband options in rural Sweden?

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Skogsgurra

Electrical
Mar 31, 2003
11,815
I visited a meeting about "fibre to the peasants" yesterday evening. It was arranged by the county telecom and internet officer and community IT manager. The purpose was to make us decide to invest in fiber. And to do it before April 15th. Which is very close in time.

To do so, we were supposed to form a group and do the digging and put tubing for the fibre from our local telephone station to as many as possible of our wide-spread dwellings. Our village consists of a central "core" with something like 30 houses in a distance less than a mile from the telephone station and then a sparse collection of houses spread out over an area with three or four miles radius.

My questions are:

1. What experience do you have from similar projects?
2. What technologies are there? We do have copper wire ADSL, which is giving us anything from 3.5 to a little better than 200 kb/s. Depending on distance from the telephone station.
3. What technologies can be expected in the next five years? Radio? Satellite? Better (higher rate) copper utilization? Other?
4. Improvements in "fiber tapping" technology, so that individual houses can tap into existing long distance fibers?
5. What alternatives are there to digging ditches? Putting fiber on power lines? (telephone lines may be a bad choice if telecom companies or copper thieves decide to remove the line) Or going to cellular radio systems for short distance coverage?
6. How necessary do you think that a 100 Mb/s connection is? I am satisfied with my 100 - 200 kb/s connection. I can wait a few seconds before a document is loaded. No probs for me. But, then again, I do not watch streaming video or play games with heavy graphics.
7. Any other views and experience that you have?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Gunnar Englund
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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
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Harry - yes, Alston is 'a bit different' to say the least. Haven't had cause to visit Nenthead yet. I've paddled the Allen during flood conditions a few times, and the river wasn't as worrying as the locals. [smile]

Didn't realise you lived that far up - must be hard work in winter.

skogs,

Geordies don't eat their offspring. We're the civilised ones from down in the lowlands. Not like where Harry lives. [wink]


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If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!
 
Harry was the lucky one that wasn't eaten then...

Gunnar Englund
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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
There are wireless options but I doubt anything compares to the speed and reliability of fiber. In North America there are a number of cell data services available. Most can be reasonably fast but they often have low data caps or cost a lot. Not sure what you have there. I have fiber. It's good stuff and way faster than DSL. I do manage to download 100-200gig a month.
 
They ran fiber through our neighborhood about two summers ago.
When I upgraded from DSL to xDSL, I thought they'd run fiber to the house.
Nope. Same old copper pair.
... which must be connected to fiber not far away, but not at the house.

I used to think I understood this stuff.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
Mike; there are two schemes these days. One is "Fiber to the House" which has fiber running to the customer. These are the people with 50 or 100Mb/s to their computers. They're the guys who download the next first-person-shooter map in under 2 seconds while I wait 3 minutes with 2Mb/s.

The other scheme is "Fiber in the Street". They put fiber to coax converters out in front of your house so you just get coax in the house.

Keith Cress
kcress -
 
Nope; no coax to the house, or in it.
Telco sorta-twisted, two pairs, at least 10 years old, from the pole to the demarc box.
My own 4 pair superfine premises cable, 10-ish years old, from the demarc to the center of the house and a couple of RJ sockets.
Generic RJ zipcord to the xDSL box, which looks sort of like the DSL box, with RF and wired Ethernet outputs.
I think it might have a HDMI connector, but we're only using the broadband.
I got a Roku box for Christmas; that brings in HDMI video over the broadband and the twisted pair, with what looks like decent resolution and only occasional droputs.
Damn close to magic.




Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
Mike
Sounds like an interetsing alternative. Could you, please, read and tell what brand and type the box(es) are? Picture, perhaps?
Damn close to magic is good!

Gunnar Englund
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
AT&T calls the service "U-verse".
I defy you to get any useful technical information out of their website att.com.
Both the DSL and xDSL (U-verse) boxes were made by an outfit called 2WIRE, which sort of supports them at 2wire.com.
I'd be happy to photograph the box, were I not 1500 miles away from it until at least May.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
Fair enough Mike. I got enough to go on.
Hope you get back home eventually.

Gunnar Englund
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
The future of broadband perhaps ultimately comes down to whether it will be economically practical to maintain a minimum quality of access for all Internet users. It may become increasingly difficult for companies to compete through speed when weighed against demands for reliability and lower prices...

 
" minimum quality of access for all Internet users"

I think that's relatively easy. Something like 10% of the users use 90% of the bandwidth. Limiting that 10% of users to no more than 50% more than the typical user would keep the bandwidth from getting overloaded.


TTFN
faq731-376
7ofakss
 
Fibre is the future, everything else is a stop gap, and even wireless depends on fibre at the back end, so why not just do it and get it over with and stop pratting about with research?

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. - Henry Spencer"
Antonia Vladova. Homepage:
 
Did the installed price of fiber suffer a precipitous drop?

I hate when I miss a meeting.


Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
 
I must ask the same question. In case little25 missed it, this is about fringe zones in sparsely populated rural areas. With up to five miles of trenches, canalisation and fiber for one household and one mile on the average.

Gunnar Englund
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
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