Iowa ISP Providing Digital Cable Over Twisted Pair

djweis writes: "An Iowa ISP is existing copper phone lines to provide digital cable and DSL access. More info is available here." If this catches on in other places too isolated for conventional broadband, it would sure make the map of telecommuting territory a lot larger.

Wow

Okay, raise your hand if you thought that this technology was vaoprware every time it popped into media focus every 6 months or so for the last 3 years.

Color me impressed.

SPELLING!

An Iowa ISP is existing copper phone lines to provide digital cable and DSL access.

C'mon. If this sentence makes any sense, please tell me 'cause I've missed something.

If /. wants credibility, its editors should at least consider proofreading their stories. Yeah, I know, you need a brain for that ;)

/RANT

/max

Glass Overrated?

No, glass isn't overrated, but often overnecessary. We ran a backbone for at a college on copper and were already going what some consutant told us we could only do on fiber.

A friend from HS has worked for a number of companies on products to get the most out of copper and another friend works for Pacbell and says, basically, the closer you live to the switch, the faster you can go. Not good news for rural folk, but copper is actually already pretty fast with the technology that can squeeze more out of it without the massive expense of running glass into everyone's house.

6 tenths of a mile from neighborhood DSLAM?

That's about 3100 feet by my math. I think the need for so many "washing-machine sized boxes" may make the economics of this somewhat prohibitive in truly rural areas or even McMansion-style suburbs where you may only have 2-3 people within a 3100' radius.

Anyone know what the topology requirements are like for CATV+Cablemodem schemes? I'd presume more restrictive than vanilla analog with periodic amplifiers, but is it as tough as a 3100' radius?

Distance limitation?

To receive the service, homes must be no farther than sixth-tenths of a mile from the neighborhood box.

That's not very far.

I live in town (Southlake, TX) and can't get DSL, can't get a modem to work at more than 28.8. Too far from the phone switch. The only consolation is the cable company, now if they could only define customer service.

Yeah, and...?

Well the TV part is fairly uninteresting. It's easier just to get satellite. And broadband internet over copper lines - isn't that what my adsl is using right now?

Old news

New Brunswick, Canada, has a phone company, nbtel (www.nbtel.nb.ca) that has offered digital cable television over twisted copper pair for a couple years now. (They call it Vibe Vision, an extension of Vibe, their DSL service) The biggest drawback to the deployment of this technology in Canada is the retroactive laws and regulations of the CRTC (Canadian Radio and Telecommunications Commission) which is, to say the least, behind the times. Nevertheless, this is as much news from a technological perspective as USB, unless you're confined to an American analysis.

(Not to sound inflammitory, but 'tis true.)

Say what you want about the midwest...

and Iowa in particular, but I am consistently amazed by the technology that one can find in various parts of that state. You think (or at least I tend to think) of that region as being relatively podunk and booney-ish, but you get stuff like this and it really strikes me as incongruous with the image of the midwest as being "just farms and stuff."

For example, Cedar Falls did something along the lines of running fiber around the entire city, installing various access points, and providing dsl (or maybe it was cable) as a municipal service. Then there was that old slashdot story about using grain silos as wireless repeaters and such. Furthermore, I just discovered that my home town of Readlyn, Iowa (population ~900 (yes, nine hundred)) now seems to have 640k/640k dsl for $50/month!

Personally, I think it's fantastic that this state seems to have this very forward-thinking attitude to technology, in general.

Go Iowa!

Suburban technology - only 0.6 mile is copper

The system used by Clear Lake and Iowa Network requires high-capacity fiber optic cable to get the cable TV signal to Clear Lake, where it's sent to more than 80 washing-machine size boxes in neighborhoods.
...
To receive the service, homes must be no farther than sixth-tenths of a mile from the neighborhood box.

This sounds like a "fibre to the hub" scheme. There have been a number of systems like this proposed, but the technology hasn't been popular because you have to install those "washing-machine boxes" all over the place, then rewire the whole outside plant to connect to them. DSL is an easier retrofit from a telco perspective.

It's not at all clear what the best way to architect the outside plant of the future is? Copper from the CO to the home? Fibre from the CO to the home? Fibre from the CO to neighborhood routers, then coax to the home? Fibre from the CO to neighborhood routers, then fibre to the home? Fibre from the CO to neighborhood routers, then twisted pair to the home? All of those have been tried.

And remember, all that outside stuff has to work under all weather conditions, during commercial power failures, and stay working for decades.

Video on demand?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this exactly the technology needed to support video-on-demand? The only addition the phone companies would need is 50,000 VCRs (or more likely a digital equivalent).

dsl

Maybe I didn't get enough sleep last night...

But DSL is just a twisted pair using already existing copper wire, on old telephone infastructure, so this is nothing new.

Maybe the digital cable part is new, but not the DSL part.

Hmm

I knew someone who lived out in an outlying community who could get excellent connect speeds on his 56k modem due to mostly-copper wiring between him and the phone company. Myself, who lived in town, couldn't even get 28.8kbps most of the time due to the numerous conversions that the data was forced to go through due to sloppy design by USWest/Qwest. I'm so glad I'm spoiled by a shared T1 nowadays, or else I might still be pulling my hair out (my brother, who still lives there, finally got cable modem from AT&T, who bought out our local cable company a few years back - ironically giving us the choice between Phone Company A for DSL and Phone Company B for Cable!)

How is this different than DSL?

I admit I don't know everything about datacom, but how is this different from DSL?

Is the video compressed to MPG and then uncompressed by the cable box?

I thought there was a limit to the amount of traffic on copper due to attenuation and cross talk?

And what is the effective bandwidth of the connection?

I guess I'm looking for a more technical description of the how and what. Can anyone provide?

Re:How is this different than DSL?

Yes, our ISP here in NB Canada has been running digital TV over DSL for 2 years now. You use a digital set top box, simmilar to cable. I worked there for a time and this is how it works. The TV streams are encoded into MPEG-2 at the head end of the ISP, and sent over DSL to your set top box, where they are decoded and displayed. One channel uses around 2.5 - 4Mbps, which is well within the 6-7 Mbps limit for a 2 km DSL loop. The channels are multicasted over the TCP network to minimize bandwidth needs throughout the city. When you change channels, the set top sends a IGMP join request to join the multicast stream for that particular channel, so you only recieve one MPEG stream at a time. The downside is, because you only have 6-7 Mbps to work with, you can only have a maximum of two set tops in your house at the moment, though they are working on new compression technologies and DSL technologies ot get this up to three.

The real reason

According to PacBell, this was the reason that DSL was created in the first place. Interesting that it took this long to be used for what is was intended...

Have I seen this already?

Well being able to pay my phone, broadband internet access and cable services on one bill already exists and it's called "AT&T". Just a reminder of what may turns wrong.

Fix the real problem.

I know TELUS in Alberta tried providing cable service. They even had given prototype boxes out to a test group of subscribers (including the internet help desk, that's how I know.) It was a great picture, but they had so many problems and lack of interest that the shut it down.

Plus, I don't think this would expand the telecommunication territory. The Digital Cable add-on to the DSL line does not help the fact that if you are too far away from the central office, you still can't get a strong enough signal for DLS to be useful. I would suggest they fix that first before tackling digital cable, because frankly cable companies are kicking ass over both issues.

The future control of television lies here..

Bye bye Tivo...

If the cable provider stores every show, every movie, and all that on their end, and only streams into everyone's bandwidth whatever end users are requesting, you won't really need much at your end, not even a scheduled guide.

That's how VOD will end up working. Targeted ads, the ability to queue up a movie in 1/2 hour or less, and allow others to watch it... Even download entire movies to a Tivo like receiver at your end.

The upside of this is smaller shows that don't have a wide audience DO have the capacity to keep living if enough of an audience is willing to "pay-per-view" the show. I know a few shows I would love to have paid $5 or so a month for to keep alive, but because of bandwidth limitations, they would never have stayed on the air. Ideas like this will lead to a better programming structure I hope...

"map of telecommuting territory"

Uh, well, the map of telecommuting territory also requires a boss and/or company that understands one can manage software projects without physically watching people - sadly, too many managers come from the school of packers, and there are far too few mappers out there...software is not an assembly line.

I have had broadband access for 2.5 years now, and I have yet to have a manager that would allow me to work from home. One manager at the last company (a complete dolt) came just shy of firing someone who said they would be working from home while their house was getting painted...the boss claimed that only hours worked at the office can count for any hours on a timesheet. Another time I was at a client where all the project managers consistently worked from home (laughable - they were all terribly incompetent, incompetency ran rampant at this client like no one's business - if I didn't witness some of the things I saw myself, there's no way I'd believe it if someone else told me it happened at a place they worked) and very rarely, in bad weather, would let their FTE's work from home - but NEVER, EVER their consultants. Needless to say, both of these companies are struggling to just keep their doors open right now, so maybe there is something to old assembly-line type management techniques vs. management that software is best done in - I think Peopleware should be required reading for anyone doing any software management at all.

DSL and cable tv

DSL is intended to run over our normal (existing) copper telephone lines (when the telcos roll it out in a big way).

Optical fibre to the home is overkill. Copper can provide enough bandwidth for services like VoD and voice calls running simultaneously.

So these people have cable tv and telephone service from 1 copper line? At least someone is using available tech to its maximum potential.

New Brunswick, Canada has had this for a while

NBTel has offered this service (called VibeVision) with their DSL service for quite some time now.

Please see the following sites for more information:
NBTel VibeVision [nbtel.nb.ca]
iMagic TV, the company that developed the technology to do this [imagictv.com]

Old news ??

Almost all DSL (actually ADSL) in the UK, is used over twisted pair (ie conventional) copper wiring.
I've never even heard of anyone getting this over optic fibre, and alwats assumed it was the same in America (I guess I was wrong).
I'm writing this over a BT (British Telecommunications (http://www.btopenworld.com/broadband/) ADSL line which gives 512Kbits/sec download and (on average) about 150Kb/sec upload (This is the 'A' in ADSL - assymetric), this costs me about £40/month (not cheap) - that's about $70.
For more cash I can get download speed of 2Mbits/sec (!!) over the same old copper wire.
Only prerequisites are:
1) Your local exchange must be a modern digital exchange (rather than analogue) 2) You must be within 2 miles of the exchange (or was it 3?)
All the engineer had to do when it was installed was to rewire from the front door (where the line comes in) to where the computer is (and this is only because the ADSL modem has a different shaped connector I believe) - then phone the exchange to get the techy there to flick a switch.
This has been available for at least a couple of years now, and is pretty much mainstream.
So this article isn't really news I'm afraid.

Dry Copper Pair

Well isn't this what Robert X. Cringely [pbs.org] was talking about in this [pbs.org] article?

Clear Lake Independent Telephone Company?

I'm tempted to call them up, just to see if the receptionist either rattles off that mouthful or has the balls to say "Thank you for calling CLITCO, how may I direct your call?"

'normal' phone wire is NOT necessarily twisted pai

The title of the story needs to be changed. Most phone wire is straight, not twisted. Twisted pair wire can handle much more data than non-twisted. (remember physics?)

Not that I'm a network engineer persay, but if you don't believe me, pull off your phone jack cover.

I wonder if this is what I have?

I've had cable over phone lines for about a year and a half.

The 'box' has an incoming DSL line, an ethernet port, and 3 RF tv outputs to feed the TVs (plus SVideo and SPDIF for the 'main' tv). There are three UHF remotes that can be used anywhere in the house.

The system is made by Next Level Communications for Qwest. It's ok, but a little sensitive to signal quality (read: any large electrical applicance in the house causes a small mpeg blip on the tv)

The internet service is 256kbs or 1Mbs if you pay more. You don't get a choice of ISP.... it's Qwest or the highway.

I wish I owned the box and could get info on the DSL protocols so that I could make my own PVR. The MPEG streams to the box are of good quality. The RF outputs quality is less than stellar. I guess that's just wishfull hacking ;)

ILECs Will Kill This Too!

SBC and the rest will effectively thwart this type of product on any large scale deployment.

Fact remains, Judge Green *gave* the infrastructure to the 9 baby bells in 1984. They have combined into 3 incestuous bells and two waiting to be consumed. They won't sell cooper, period!

Until the politicians are removed from soft money contributions, the former-baby-bells-now-big-bells will be able to stop competition and access to the local infrastructure.

Des Moinse Register

Somebody tell the fucking-DMR that not everybody runs their fucking-browser at fucking-640 x fucking-480. FUCK!! Scroll, scroll, scroll scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, if they'd just let the text flow, it'd wrap to my window size. FUCK!! I hate that.

Nothing new there...

The tail end of the article mentions that subscribers can't be any more than six-tenths of a mile from the "box", which I take to mean a remote terminal of some sort. In that sense, what Clear Lake is doing is not that different from the remote terminal initiatives of the telcos. And, really, if you are only working with 3K feet of clean (i.e., no BTs or load coils) copper, a DSL connection could get pretty close to its theoretical max of 8Mbps, which is probably just enough to carry voice, data, and compressed video. I won't vouch for the quality of the video, though. :)

This will trip you out...

in 1992 I was working in Arlington, Virginia just outside of Washington, D.C. Anyway MCI was having a test in my neighborhod so I signed up. Hey I wanted the free T-shirt. Anyway for one month I had a new telephone socket installed and a new type of "cable box". For one month I had over 400 channels of cable TV and normal phone service (although it had so cool features that are commonplace today).

I only got to keep if for 30 days and then they stopped the test. This was before the whole cable/phone companies legal battles. At that time I guess they were allowed to test but then they sent a letter ending the test and explaining that they would not be offering the service in the near future.

Anyway I cannot believe that the technology is finally getting to see the light of day.

P.S.: Back in '92 NO INTERNET was offered.

The reality of telecommuting

This technology won't affect telecommuting much. High speed internet access has had _some_ effect, but not nearly as much as you might think. Basically, it seems to get chopped down like this:

1) Consider the number of people whose jobs can effectively be done remotely.
2) Take the subset of those people who (a) want to telecommute, and (b) honestly know (or believe) that they can effectively work from home.
3) Take from that group, the further subset who have managers which will _let_ them work from home.

There are not nearly as many people who fall into category (1) as we're led to believe. Most of us need some sort of day to day interaction to get our jobs done. The number of people who meet all three criteria are remarkably small. If technology triples the number of people who have the potential to work from home, it's not going to make a substantial increase in the percentage of people who actually do so. It's more of a societal and work-structure cause, rather than a technological limitation.

Woot!

I drive through Clear Lake every day on my way to work, funny to see that it made it onto /. Now.. the funny part is, this is just like Iowa news. "We've got the LATEST tech-toys out there", "State of the art", and "Brand new technology", well, they left out the part that Iowa is ghetto, and the only thing that makes it new is that its new to Iowa! Dur.. Anyways, enough bashing my home. Its funny though, I've watched mediacom bust their butts all winter to drop fiber into the ground, and now they get some real competition.

Fibre...

My usual standpoint: Fibre optics is the only way to go!

another band-aid technology....

Why, oh why, is another band-aid technology being deployed over copper? It's everywhere, and it's cheap....so what. It's outdated and unreliable. Look at twisted pair in older cities...the same stuff that Bell himself laid...are you going to trust packetized data over that?

Yes, fiber is expensive, but that's because the economies of scale haven't kicked in...remember how prohibitively expensive satellite dish technology was? Someone decided to rework the technology so it could scale (price) and become affordable for the masses.

Fiber is the only long term solution for on-demand video, communications and IP services. Why don't struggling telecommunications companies start to develop lower cost, large scale light based systems? That's the technology that will revitialize the almost dead broadband sector:

Content and communications companies read my lips:
I want high-speed internet, on-demand video, and voice service all over one gigabit fiber digital pipe and i'd be willing to spend $150-$200/mo for it!

It's a huge mountain to climb, but the results would be worth it.

-ted

Coming to a DSL line near you!

The news about Clear Lake is exciting but certainly not new.

The company I work for Myrio [myrio.com] has been delivering digital TV and VOD over xDSL for about 4 years.

We develop the software for the telephone company to manage all the various aspects of digital video deployment.

Much of that software has roots in open source [myrio.com]. We have contributed several enhancements and patches to the Linux kernel and updated and improved several drivers.

There are deployments at many Independent telephone operators throughout the US. The ones I am most familiar with are:

Livingston Telephone -- Livingston, Texas [livingston.net]
CC Communications -- Fallon, Nevada [cccomm.net]
CT Communications -- Champaign, Ohio [ctc.net] [ptsi.net]
PTSI -- Guymon, Oklahoma

If you are fortunate to live in one of these towns, you now have a choice for broadband services.

The largest deployment is in Phoenix operated by Qwest. Very successful.

The video technology is very similar to cable or satellite--MPEG-2. Depending on the aceess vendor and headend encoder supplier, the video is either MPEG-2/AAL5 or MPEG-2/AAL5/UDP/IP. This is a full-rate ADSL or VDSL application. Streaming MPEG-2 video over less than 2-3Mbps links, does not provide a cable quality experience--yet.

There are some excellent [videotele.com]
white papers at Videotele.com's website.

Yes this all works just ask the subscribers.

Old news....

Halstad Telephone [halstadtel.com] has been offering this service for a couple of years now. Basicially it is a DSL line providing streaming video. Not much different than each DSL subscriber running a Streaming Video player (such as Real Player)

Iowa Network Services is not an ISP!

This always confuses people. There are three closely related companies in Iowa: Iowa Network Services, NetINS, and Iowa Wireless. NetINS is the ISP, Iowa Wireless is GSM cellphones, Iowa Network Services (INS) is everything else.
(Their webpage is www.iowanetworkservices.com,
the ISP is www.netins.net).

Also, this installation in Clear Lake is using VDSL (very high speed DSL) on the order of 25Mbps. It can handle three MPEG channels at once. Source: my dad (one of the high-ups at INS).

in NW iowa = Wireless TV for 2+ years now

just what the topic says.. Ive seen the wireless TV+ internet service over the same equipment for more than a year.. is pretty sweet and price in line with regular cable.

Yeah, Where?

As an Iowa resident, I have yet to see this, and I stay pretty current with what's going on around me. Heck, I'm smack dab in the middle of Iowa.

Of course, none of this really matters since the wiring in our apartment building is too old and the original contractors just looped the extra wire causing way too much induction across the coil. Now I'm stuck with crappy Mediacom Digital Cable who's upload speeds (which I actually use) suck!

No News Here- This is called VDSL.

After noticing the distance limitation, it became obvious to me that this is simply VDSL with some marketing hype. It's quite simple- if you can limit the distance between the DSLAM and the home to about 3000 feet and under, it is very easy to achieve 52m down/26m up or 26m symmetric over plain old copper.

The issue is the cost of bringing fiber to the local DSLAM concentrators in a neighborhood, and the large number of concentrators and their associated costs as a result. If they can bring fiber to the neighborhood, why not go all the the way and do fiber to the home or 100baseT ethernet to the home from the same concentrators? I know- capital investment cost.

I know I am late...

Still...

Is fiber expensive or cheap to run to the house? I think it could be VERY cheap - if they use plastic rather than glass fiber optic lines.

Think of that last 500-1000 feet - plastic fiber optic cable would be very cheap to install, and you would probably still get good bandwidth - no, you wouldn't be able to do a multi-mode, etc setup - but you don't need to - you only need a simple communication setup, and plastic fiber could give that.

I am thinking you could probably get 10-50 Mbps over a plastic line - more than enough for broadband and cable, plus phone service.

Am I missing something? I might be - this isn't an area I have any real expertise in - but it sounds like something that would work - what's to stop it?

Go Wireless!!!

With a Pringles can [nwfusion.com] and some 802.11b equipment, you could throw the signals about 10 miles line of sight. It'd be kind of funny to see a washing machine mounted on a telephone pole with 50 pringles cans attached to it though.

Re:hard to believe

I *do* se digital cable over twisted pair. Every time I visit my parents in Clear Lake.
whoo!