Re: [OT] Bell Canada - service vs. abuse

Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

. . .

That *is* a bit surprising! When I did DSL support for Verizon, some of
our customers were in New York and New Jersey and they often had REALLY
old infrastructure, meaning telephone lines that had been installed in
the 1930s and never upgraded since. This often meant their DSL was
really crappy due to the ancient lines and switches. I had the
impression then that Verizon never upgraded anything more than they
absolutely had to. I felt sorry for the customers that were stuck in
that situation. I'm guessing that Verizon simply couldn't be bothered to
upgrade wires and switching stations because it would have been too
expensive; they were probably anticipating that newer technology, like
fiber optic, would eventually replace all that old copper wire based
service.

Public utlities in that part of the country were notorious for failure
to keep up with post WWII population increases. The old infrastructure
was truly high quality when first installed, but was never intended to
serve subsequent population growth.

I'm going to rant here. There is lots of bandwidth in a twisted-pair
(the twist mitigates against antenuation) copper pair. After all, PRI
ISDN used a single copper pair, 23 B channels and one D channel. It was
set up with evenly-divided channels, 64 Kbps each. A B channel could be
used for voice or data; the D channel was for signalling. In typical
installations, it was either for voice or data. BRI ISDN was another
option. Genuine T1 was also done with a single copper pair.

Except for businesses with PBXs, we didn't use ISDN for residential.
It's too bad because the sound quality was superior to analog but the
technology was in wider-spread use in Europe and Japan than here.

We would have had widespread residential data connection much earlier
with easier implementation and no voice modems. ISDN was switched
technology, which meant it used the telephone network AND the telephone
network switch at the phone company central office. *DSL, which
attempted to use channels within the telephone lines without
interferring with the voice signal (sometimes unsuccessful without using
a separate pair), was unswitched. There was a separate piece of
equipment at the central office and, because signal distance was
limited, there had to be nodes set up in the field in order to serve the
entire polygon wired to a particular central office.

Fiber optic was installed as a SEPARATE network because it got around
regulatory rules that court decisions had forced wholesale rates onto
the monopoly telephone network so there could be competition for *DSL
from companies that couldn't possibly afford to build out their own
networks for the last mile connection. Most network interchange actually
takes place at central offices.

Cable was almost always built out as a separate network based on coax.
CableLABs has done amazing engineering over the years of squeezing out
fantastic amounts of bandwidth from the concept of coax.

There's nothing wrong with old infrastructure and, furthermore, there
never should have been separate copper and fiber-optic networks. Copper
should have been replaced as needed.

You know what we are doing in this country? Telephone repair personnel
have been ordered to leave covers off pedestals. You see this all over
the place. The covers were designed to eliminate water infiltration. But
the network isn't deteriorating quickly enough to make the business case
to the regulators that it must be abandoned, so the telephone companies
are helping things along with self sabotage. It's outrateous.

. . .

 

I haven't seen an outdoor antenna - or heard of anyone using one - in
this country in a REALLY long time, probably since the 70s. I knew one
woman who had been given a TV by her son but she couldn't afford cable
or satellite so she watched only the one local channel that she could
get. Then the station changed to a digital signal and she lost even
that, making her TV an over-sized paperweight....

In the United States, the broadcast signal uses a significantly wider
bandwidth than what's distributed by cable. I don't know how adequate
broadcast is where you live. I sure have never understood reluctance to
use an antenna if that's an option. Yes, I am aware of signals being
blocked by natural features and tall buildings.

. . .

One of my friends switched back and forth between Bell and Rogers
internet regularly for years; maybe she still does. Both services had
crappy quality, mostly because the wiring within her apartment building
was in really horrid shape and the owners wouldn't upgrade it and Bell
and Rogers couldn't or wouldn't. She arranged a number of service calls
but they always hit the problem with the buildings wiring and could
never get past that. But I guess the service was sufficiently passable
most of the time that it wasn't sufficiently bad to get them to move.

That was a regulatory issue in the United States to break the telephone
monopoly. The neighborhood service line and the drop remained the
property of the phone company. The point of demarcation was the outside
wall of the building.

Inside the building, there can be multiple owners. If it's a
multi-tenant building, the building owns the wire, but the portion of
the wire unique to a tenant space belongs to the tenant. Who fixes what
is a game of finger-pointing.

I supervised the telephone installation in the last office the School
had. We could only get *DSL from the phone company. Cable hadn't lit lit
the building and we were required to sign CONTRACTS with the cable
company for them to survey, before deciding to light the block, even
though they had no intention of lighting the block for years. No
contract? They wouldn't conduct a site survey. Since they had no
intention of providing service, what the hell was I signing a contract
for?

The phone company scheduled a four-hour appointment for us, which I
couldn't understand. Well, soon, I found out. It took hours for him to
find the copper pair in the office. Nothing in the wiring closet was
adequately labeled. I pointed to an outlet but it turned out that that
outlet was merely daisy chained from another part of the office. We
moved furniture and boxes and finally spotted another outlet that was
also the terminating point of the copper pair. With a buzzer, he
identified it at the wiring closet and then connected it to an unused
pair in the building wiring. Fortunately no new wiring was needed but
the time it took to identify the wiring path was the reason the
appointment window was so long.

Before the installer arrived, someone in the back office called me all
concerned that the wrong suite number was on the account's service
address. I told him that I didn't want to deal with it before
installation for fear that they'd disconnect the circuit that had to be
live during installation. They assured me that it wouldn't be. They
lied. Fortunately, the installer knew whom to call to get it turned back
on. The circuit merely had to be live to the building's basement.
Everything else was just making physical connections within the
building.

That was quite painful.

Even though we moved a block away, we crossed a magic boundary and
couldn't keep the old phone number. The office admnistrator wanted
magicJack and failed to follow through with them to get the old phone
number ported (which could have happened prior to its disconnection at
the previous office). So the temporary phone number magicJack gave us
was our permanent phone number for five years.

magicJack was a terrible company. It was incredibly difficult finding
anybody who understood what they had to do on their end for networking.
I ended up getting the old phone number restored and then porting it to
a new service, then porting out the "temporary" magicJack number to a
new service after an incredibly painful process that required to file
a complaint with FCC. In the meantime, because magicJack had failed to
mark the number as ported out, they assigned it to a new subscriber who
found he couldn't receive any phone calls! That took a great deal of
correspondence to fix as well.