# Personal Optical Cable Service?



## fantasymaker (Aug 28, 2005)

Ive recently been told the phone company has optical cable service to my farm.
The problem is its 3000 feet from the house.
Can I buy and run optical cable to my place?
Should I?
Is it economically viable?
I have plenty of equipment to ditch it in but is the cable cost prohibitive?
Or would I be better off setting some sort of terminal at the end of the farm where the optical cable and transfer it to another kind of cable?
Or is there a better solution?


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## chickenslayer (Apr 20, 2010)

Talk to the phone co to see what they would be willing to splice into, they may not be willing to hook into anything they don't put into the ground or at least they may specify what cable is acceptable to them. Then you could price the cable.


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## fantasymaker (Aug 28, 2005)

Im thinking that they will treat the connection there at the far end of the place as if it was my house.
If not I suppose I could always erect a outhouse size structure and have the service run to it.


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## Qhorseman (Jul 9, 2010)

Wouldn't the optical end at the NID? It is my understanding at this time there is no way to bring fiber optic all the way to the computer.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

Qhorseman said:


> Wouldn't the optical end at the NID? It is my understanding at this time there is no way to bring fiber optic all the way to the computer.


It should unless his telco is doing something special. But if they will use his cable to run form their pedestal to his house and terminate their NID (the fiber ones have a different name but I cannot remember it) on the side of his house the install might cost less. Of course him just digging the trench to their specifications might be the cheapest as they buy fiber in bulk. 

If none of that will work then getting them to install their NID at a small structure near their pedestal and then the OP burying his fiber to the house and getting an Ethernet to fiber transceiver for both ends of the fiber will give him the distance he will need to get the service to his house.


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## fantasymaker (Aug 28, 2005)

Am I to understand that the optical cable wouldnt normally come all the way to my puter? At some point (out by the street?) they terminate it and run copper the rest of the way?
Would I be about as well off then to run copper the last 3000 feet to my place?
What I think Im interested in is speed . Id like to watch a movie without the stops and jumps of dial up but I dont wanna spend a Million!


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

I'd go wireless if it's line of sight. 3000 ft is a piece of cake and could be done for around $100 or a little more. Certainly a lot cheaper & easier than running a cable. If there are a few trees or buildings in the way it's still doable but may require a little more in the way of antennas. It's not difficult, but you'd need to be fairly good at figuring out technical things, or be able to conscript someone who is.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

backwoodsman7 said:


> I'd go wireless if it's line of sight. 3000 ft is a piece of cake and could be done for around $100 or a little more. Certainly a lot cheaper & easier than running a cable. If there are a few trees or buildings in the way it's still doable but may require a little more in the way of antennas. It's not difficult, but you'd need to be fairly good at figuring out technical things, or be able to conscript someone who is.


I agree it might be cheaper but it will be less reliable then a piece of fiber between the locations. I am also not to sure about your cost estimate. He will need two access points (or at least one AP and a wireless card). Then he will need two directional antennas and the cable and connections to connect the antennas to the equipment. Even if he makes his own antennas the low loss cable is still an expense.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

fantasymaker said:


> Am I to understand that the optical cable wouldnt normally come all the way to my puter? At some point (out by the street?) they terminate it and run copper the rest of the way?
> Would I be about as well off then to run copper the last 3000 feet to my place?
> What I think Im interested in is speed . Id like to watch a movie without the stops and jumps of dial up but I dont wanna spend a Million!


You often seen fiber right to servers in commercial data centers, but other communication modes are a lot more handy and less expensive. In a residential environment fiber normally goes to a modem/router, then wireless or cable is used to workstations. Residential service isn't normally fast enough to exceed wireless & cable Ethernet speeds anyway, so it doesn't really matter.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

3legdonkey said:


> I agree it might be cheaper but it will be less reliable then a piece of fiber between the locations.


If you said _potentially_ more reliable, you'd be right; but my wireless links are more reliable than the DSL connection that feeds them. Buying and installing 3000ft of any kind of cable would be a huge cost for a miniscule, theoretical increase in reliability, and wouldn't be even remotely close to worth it except for a mission-critical application. I didn't get the impression that that's the OP's situation.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

fantasymaker said:


> Would I be about as well off then to run copper the last 3000 feet to my place?


That's going to be a problem with cable anyway. Ethernet cable (cat 5 or 6 twisted pair) is rated for 100 meters, or just over 300 feet.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

backwoodsman7 said:


> but my wireless links are more reliable than the DSL connection that feeds them.


Being that I used to design large carrier networks including a few DSL ones and then got to see what a mess they would make of my designs (gotta love redesigns by equipment sales engineers). I can certainly believe a well designed and implemented wireless configuration would be more reliable. Grin.

And you're right. If he just wants a reasonable level of reliability he would be a fool to try and run the fiber to his house... Buy two used APs, grab a set of directional antennas, and call it a day.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Probably the most inexpensive cable solution would be to use DSL carrier. DSL is carried over standard telephone wire, which is inexpensive. There is also direct burial telephone wire available (check eBay). DSL modems are likewise inexpensive today. Data rate is high, cable & modem cost is low; sounds like just what you are looking for.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

Nevada said:


> Probably the most inexpensive cable solution would be to use DSL carrier. DSL is carried over standard telephone wire, which is inexpensive. There is also direct burial telephone wire available (check eBay). DSL modems are likewise inexpensive today. Data rate is high, cable & modem cost is low; sounds like just what you are looking for.


The issue with DSL is that he is already 3000 feet from the road. So depending on the carrier that may only leave him 2000 feet to get to the DSLAM and still get top speed or any access for that matter. As an example, my farm is 35,000 feet from the closest CO so getting DSL is out of the question. Of course he might be able to get a lower speed DSL offering if he is within range but it will probably not be as fast as he would like.

Another issue with DSL is the over subscription rate. What this means is the subscriber may have been sold 1.5 Mbps / 512 Kbps but those numbers are max burst numbers. The network may only be able to carry 128 / 64 if everyone is on at the same time...


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

3legdonkey said:


> The issue with DSL is that he is already 3000 feet from the road. So depending on the carrier that may only leave him 2000 feet to get to the DSLAM and still get top speed or any access for that matter. As an example, my farm is 35,000 feet from the closest CO so getting DSL is out of the question. Of course he might be able to get a lower speed DSL offering if he is within range but it will probably not be as fast as he would like.
> 
> Another issue with DSL is the over subscription rate. What this means is the subscriber may have been sold 1.5 Mbps / 512 Kbps but those numbers are max burst numbers. The network may only be able to carry 128 / 64 if everyone is on at the same time...


He'll get his own DSL modems. He can get any speed modem he wants.

The distance from the CO is moot. He is only carrying DSL the 3000 feet from the street to his house.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

Nevada said:


> He'll get his own DSL modems. He can get any speed modem he wants.
> 
> The distance from the CO is moot. He is only carrying DSL the 3000 feet from the street to his house.


Unlike a modem you would use on the POTS network DSL does not work that way. 2 DSL modems cannot talk to each other. He will need a DSLAM and a DSL modem to transverse the 3000 feet and then a switch or router that can go from ATM to Ethernet. And with the cost of the DSLAM and the switch/router he might as well just buy the single mode fiber and two fiber to E-Net transceivers. Or for even less money use the two wireless APs and directional antennas like backwoodsman7 suggested...


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

3legdonkey said:


> Unlike a modem you would use on the POTS network DSL does not work that way. 2 DSL modems cannot talk to each other.


Actually they can. I was involved with a project in Arizona where two elementary school LANs were interconnected by DSL modems using copper leased from the phone company. The two elementary schools were miles apart.

I wasn't close enough to the connectivity end of the project to recall the exact brand & model of modems (the local phoneco did that), but I do recall that the DSL modems appeared to be identical on both ends. I recall being impressed at how quickly they modems completed handshaking on power-up, and how trouble-free they were.

I have a friend who still deals in T1 carrier gear in Arizona. I was a lot more familiar with T1 gear than DSL gear at the time, but DSL sure seemed a lot less complicated.


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## arabian knight (Dec 19, 2005)

deleted


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

arabian knight said:


> I would sure take a DSL line before I would even think of a T1 one.
> The only good a T1 does is the same speed up as down. But that speed is most aways at a slower rate then a nice DSL line is.
> Read that on one of those Tech sites, like PC tech, or e news tech site. One of them anyways.
> T1 does a business good because they do a lot of communicating between one another, one pant to another etc., and want that same speed Up as Down. But that is all a T1 line is really for.


When I started with data communications T1 was really the only option. That was because it was all the phone companies had to offer. It worked fine, and was extremely reliable, but as you pointed out it was a whole lot more orderly (therefore complicated) than we needed for Ethernet communications.

The purpose of the orderly communications was to segregate communications for each channel, which the phone company used for voice communications. Basically T1 carrier did the same thing as 12 ISDN lines, with 24 data channels (12 send and 12 receive) of 64K each. It worked fine for a 1.5 Mbit Ethernet transmission mode, but it was clumsy.

We were mostly selling used T1 carrier gear to ranch owners in remote Arizona. Many ranches had expanded over the years, so they outgrew their copper phone lines. Ranches usually had their employees set their own poles on ranch property, then hang their own copper during quiet times of year. These private phone lines were often ten miles or more up a private road. Rather than foot the cost of wire and labor to run additional copper lines perhaps 10 miles or more, they bought T1 carrier gear from us. They got additional analog phone service from the phone company at the property line, converted it to digital T1 carrier to send it to the ranch, then converted it back to analog phone service at the ranch.

T1 takes only two phone pairs, yet can carry up to 12 simultaneous phone conversations. That's six times what you can do with copper using no carrier at all. Used T1 was a whole lot less expensive than copper and labor.

We had less expensive carrier gear that put 2 or 4 conversations on a single copper pair, but T1 was by far the most popular product.

DSL is a much simpler technology for Ethernet data transmission. By the way, there is symmetrical DSL gear available, but it's seldom used for residential DSL service.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

Nevada said:


> Actually they can. I was involved with a project in Arizona where two elementary school LANs were interconnected by DSL modems using copper leased from the phone company. The two elementary schools were miles apart.
> 
> I wasn't close enough to the connectivity end of the project to recall the exact brand & model of modems (the local phoneco did that), but I do recall that the DSL modems appeared to be identical on both ends. I recall being impressed at how quickly they modems completed handshaking on power-up, and how trouble-free they were.
> 
> I have a friend who still deals in T1 carrier gear in Arizona. I was a lot more familiar with T1 gear than DSL gear at the time, but DSL sure seemed a lot less complicated.


Nope. The specification does not allow for it. What you saw happen was two DSL modems that were connecting to their respective DSLAMs and then a PVC was mapped between the two DSLAMs to carry the traffic.

The DSL specification and its implementation is designed to take most of the complexity out of the equation for the end user. The reason being is that most end users are not trained to deal with the complexities of internetworking.


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## 3legdonkey (Sep 18, 2011)

Nevada said:


> The purpose of the orderly communications was to segregate communications for each channel, which the phone company used for voice communications. Basically T1 carrier did the same thing as 12 ISDN lines, with 24 data channels (12 send and 12 receive) of 64K each.


Not quite. The original T1 circuits were provisioned over four copper wires with two being transmit and two being receive. But the 24 64Kbps channels were bi directional and so provided 1.536 Mbps of bi directional data transmission.



> It worked fine for a 1.5 Mbit Ethernet transmission mode, but it was clumsy.


Not quite sure what you are trying to say here as they are entirely different communication mediums and not connected.



> T1 takes only two phone pairs, yet can carry up to 12 simultaneous phone conversations.


T1 carries 24 digitized analog signals giving you the equivalent of 24 simultaneous conversations.

For more information look up the definitive guide on data communications from the mid 90's that defines the T1 systems and all related internetworking technologies called "Voice and Data Communications Handbook". The first addition is a bit dated by today's standards but still a great read but the newer version I believe has been updated to cover some of the newer technologies like DSL.


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## Qhorseman (Jul 9, 2010)

Our electric co-op is installing a fiber to home network next year. They are telling us we can expect 21Mbps. I hope this is true.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

3legdonkey said:


> Not quite sure what you are trying to say here as they are entirely different communication mediums and not connected.


T1 is extremely orderly, requiring significant overhead to maintain that order. That's not necessary for DSL.



3legdonkey said:


> T1 carries 24 digitized analog signals giving you the equivalent of 24 simultaneous conversations.


Yes, that's correct. T1 is equivalent to 12 ISDN lines, which are each capable of two simultaneous conversations. You would get 12 conversations per copper pair, not 6.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

Qhorseman said:


> Our electric co-op is installing a fiber to home network next year. They are telling us we can expect 21Mbps. I hope this is true.


That would certainly be possible. The cable service I get is capable of more like 40 mbps, but they don't give us anywhere near that.

The purpose behind running fiber to residential areas isn't necessarily to bring higher speed Internet service to customers, but to provide additional bandwidth to the neighborhood for things like digital TV service.

Over the next decade you can expect communications (telephone, Internet, cable TV) to be reduced to a single network connections. Many already have it. You can also expect your TV service to change to a demand service, where you TV interface can communicate to your cable provider to request programming when you are ready to watch it, not just when it's time for it to be on. Again, some people already have that today.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

3legdonkey said:


> Nope. The specification does not allow for it. What you saw happen was two DSL modems that were connecting to their respective DSLAMs and then a PVC was mapped between the two DSLAMs to carry the traffic.
> 
> The DSL specification and its implementation is designed to take most of the complexity out of the equation for the end user. The reason being is that most end users are not trained to deal with the complexities of internetworking.


I called the guy I did the project with. He is a lot more of a phone guy than I'll ever be, so he was a lot closer to the connectivity end of the elementary school project I told you about.

He said that the modems were Alcatel brand (long before Lucent took it over), but can't recall the model. He said that the phone switch in our town was still analog back then, so he is as sure as he can be that there was no DSLAM involved. Also, to his knowledge the remote network we setup for the school was the only DSL in town at the time, so there wouldn't have been anything else for the DSLAMs to service.

He said he is as sure as he can be that it was just the two modems and a dedicated copper pair. I don't recall the data rate, but I remember that it was impressive for the time.


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## fantasymaker (Aug 28, 2005)

Wow this seems like a lot of thought on my behalf.
Thanks.
But truthfully I dont understand most of it!


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

fantasymaker said:


> Wow this seems like a lot of thought on my behalf.
> Thanks.
> But truthfully I dont understand most of it!


In your shoes, I would ask the phone company how they will terminate the connection to you. That will decide how you will proceed. I really doubt that they will give you a direct fiber connection. Ask them and see what they say.


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## fantasymaker (Aug 28, 2005)

Good point it is all dependant on them in the end.


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