speed test

San Francico has stunning views that are usually ruined by hideous wiring. It's being undergrounded, which should be mostly done in a couple of hundred years.

It is quite simple they offer the upgrade to their customers *for an incremental price* rather than just giving it away. That is how it always works in the UK which is why plenty are stuck on lower speeds than the local lines can support.

Leaving the customers where they are is a valid option - most punters have no idea what speed they are actually getting. So long as it will stream a couple of HD channels they mostly don't care. Gamers are a bit more fussy since they like bandwidth and low latency.

You seem incapable of reading or understanding what I wrote.

The sales pitch is simple enough. Give us an extra $1/$2 a month and you can have 2x/5x the speed you have at the moment. Otherwise they get nothing more until they either ask for it or threaten to leave for a competitor. Normal SOP for skinners and trappers in sales speak.

Yes copper = POTS (with ADSL2 or VDSL). The lines are over 60 years old in my area and spend a lot of time with alkaline ground water getting into joints. Most but not quite all failures are in the junction boxes.

Overhead lines sometimes die from tree damage or stress cracking.

Not commonly. But groundwater has enough dissolved salts to corrode copper quite comprehensively. The main problem is that the cables are rather brittle with age.

Some of it is very old and combines the worst of underground and overhead so that damage by trees and rodents/water ingress are common.

They are in the process of junking the UK copper circuits entirely - that is the whole point of the fibre roll out. Officially due to be completed in 2025 (it has no chance at all of happening like that).

There were some telco installations of twisted pair aluminium into systems that were mostly copper and that is disastrous for ADSL. The oxide layer of the aluminium partially rectifies the RF and the dissimilar metals cause fast corrosion if they get slightly damp.

BT doesn't even admit to these really bad circuits existing. A neighbouring village has this problem - peer to peer microwave links for internet have pretty much taken over that area completely now.

AFAIK new power distribution is now almost entirely aluminium but it is on a plaited 3 or 4 core insulated cable with a steel hawser down the core at least for the low tension household service.

Some of our mains is on bare conductors, the old rubberised copper long since having perished and dropped off. Domestic mains voltages are vertical on the pole so it would arc and spark in the wet as pieces of wet insulation flapped about in the breeze sometimes touching another phase or neutral.

Pretty much true. Now that we are outside the EU it will be impossible to manufacture EVs for sale into the EU because the high value batteries will come from China (outside the EU). There is no way that UK made cars can avoid a massive import tariff into the EU (not enough EU content). We don't have any significant battery manufacturing capability at all :(

The right sort of dedicated battery for the fibre modem and router.

If only they had made them USB C so that any old powerbank would do it.

Sadly no. It requires two different bespoke external supplies - one for the optical modem and one for the router. Different voltages and connectors required on each one. No reason I can see why that has to be so. The official ones are rather poor too a whole ~1 hours operation...

The last big power cut in bad weather lasted 2 days...

That example is a textbook layout neat one. Ours looks like that one after you have put a fork into it and and turned it over a few times!

It seems to me a miracle that telecoms stuff actually works!

UK "village" has some ambiguity too. Modern ones can be legally up to 5k which means there are a lot of new builds with populations 4,999.

Mine is a former medieval village in the old sense (arguably now a hamlet) with about 250 people in ~5 square miles. Mostly in a linear development along the main street apart from the farms.

It was a fair bit 2-3x bigger before the black death struck it...

Is a CO what we would call a cabinet? Where the main trunk line back to the exchange is terminated and the local consumer circuits start?

If so that is what is unusual about our provision - there is no cabinet the lines go all the way back to the exchange. That is unusual here...

That in the UK would be FTTC (VDSL fibre to the cabinet) with copper circuits to the consumers. Putting these onto Digital Voice VOIP makes them incredibly useless since even if the consumer end has a UPS the powered cabinet needed for FTTC does not have any back supply.

That service is Digital in Name Only or "DINO" it combines all the worst characteristics of VOIP (fails without power) without eliminating the pesky final mile of ageing copper that carries the VDSL signals.

POTS generally continues to work even when DSL is down (except if there is a fine break small enough for RF to jump the gap capacitively). Most importantly it still works when the mains has failed (and for a decent length of time too - exchanges have largish battery backup systems).

There is no CO the lines run right back to the exchange.

That is the meaning of an exchange only line. They are a nightmare for VDSL operation because of the crosstalk they induce inside the exchange. The standard fix is that they install a new powered FTTC cabinet nearby and run anyone nearby taking the VDSL service to that.

That is about the size of our entire local exchange including its battery room. My fibre service doesn't go to that exchange at all but to a much larger exchange ~12 miles away in the county town.

The convention in the UK is horizontal mounted wires implies medium high tension 33kV or thereabouts and vertical mounted wires are consumer 240v distribution. I reckon the lowest now uninsulated hot cable is only about 2' above the telecoms line. Poles are also marked "do not climb" for other reasons of age and decrepitude.

It is a lot colder than that here so penetrating ground frosts also play a part in prizing wet crimp joints apart.

That is happening here too. In fact apart from going with BT you automatically lose your landline number if you take full fibre internet.

The naming convention is pretty silly too - they first sold FTTC as "fibre" so they now have to call true fibre services "full fibre".

UK has its own peculiar BT connector - not RJ11 although adapters are available (thought nothing like as peculiar as Belgacom's connectors).

I have wondered about that too. They do seem to know which line pair is which without having to put a trace signal on most of the time.

Our utilities, including cable/internet, are actually quite reliable. I can't explain that.

Our cable modem hangs up once in a while, but that's just the usual software bugs. A hard power cycle fixes that.

We live in Glen Park Village, roughly a square mile of houses and a canyon. The combination of hills and major streets/freeways chops SF up into distinct neighborhoods, which is cool. But that barely affects public services or utilities.

It does affect the public water supply. A number of hilltop pumped reservoirs store our drinking water for some downhill region, so a distinct area can lose water. Fortunately, that's rare.

Grass grows on top the reservoirs so once in a while the city rents goats.

Maybe you signed up for megabytes and you're measuring megabits ? 8 data

All megabits. And it's not an RS-232 interface.

I don't know how cable modems work. Some complex constellation modulation I suppose. Maybe some 8b10b in there somewhere.

When I had a cable modem in Belgium it was so reliable that I never had to look at it until it was time to move out. The PSU brick for it ran so hot that the label on the outside of it was slightly scorched! Scary!!!

My fibre modem hasn't been rebooted since installation apart from when it was unplugged for rearranging my office furniture. It is very stable.

ADSL links used to die at least every couple of months with router firmware either going unresponsive or claiming perfect signal synch but no data transfer so incrementing hard unrecoverable error seconds in realtime. I always got a few of those per day in normal operation.

Our Comcast box downloads its software from the mother ship, every time it powers up. That takes about 15 minutes. I asssme they are in the usual constant-upgrade bug manufacturing mode, as downloaded software usually is.

If it's easy to fix, it's easy to break.

Ouch! That is a royal PITA. Mine has to have its firmware updated every now and then if a vulnerability is found and/or exploited but it boots in under a minute from whatever internal SSD/memory stick it has.

It issues dire warnings about not switching it off during an update.

Too true :(

read wear? you have a single example of a flash with a limit on reads?

RAM is also more power hungry and expensive ....

only a potential issue when there is a mix of reads and writes

so if the flash is fast enough the RAM is just added cost and power consumption for no benefit

OK so our exchanges. Most here do handle one or perhaps 2 exchange codes although ISTR you can now port your phone number.

Nearby cell towers lasted about 20 hours and then stone dead. This quickly killed the remaining mobile phones that were not switched to airplane mode as they tried to contact more remote base stations.

Apart from Fax which is still used a lot in the NHS I don't think there are much if any acoustic modems in use today.

Ours are battery backed up and I think mostly diesel generators although I have seen a demo hydrogen powered one once.

My wife and I are on different mobile networks precisely because where we live you don't always have good coverage from just one.

In Belgium we found the CATV and internet was more reliable than the local mains. You just needed a UPS to keep on working.

They are everywhere in the UK. Typically one per 100 or 200 houses.

It is a bit of an issue in rural locations. Back when non-ferrous metal prices were high there were people ripping out telco lines and railway signalling lines for their scrap metal value. Basically tie it to a land rover winch snip it some way away and go.

I meant 20' x 20' building (actually its more like 20'x30'). City ones are two storey and 10x bigger.

They're hardly telcos in the US any longer. The increases in bandwidth happen as vendors improve switching gear and they can't very well throttle it.

Some of it is a side effect of cell phones and trying to offer 5G to the home.

The interface between buyers and sellers is bizarre and they keep getting faster almost on autopilot.

Yep. It's VoIP to a hybrid copper pair. Works well.

Cell usually works even if the local grid is down. There are panic button services.

There's always something wrong with the local wiring, especially after that stopped being a thing.

Strange; we found containers ( not sheet metal, something thicker - called 'em Bud boxes ) with O-ring seals and sealed connectors for a pretty reasonable price retail years ago. Like tens of dollars.

They seem rat-proof to me.

No miracle. It's the watchdog timers :)