Too close
 

Two guys and a backhoe came and dug a hole in my lawn, because Verizon wants to put fiber to my curb to fight the good fight against Comcast. How close did they come to cutting into the cable that serves the house, thus cutting off the Cellar and my entire business until they can find someone competent enough to fix it?

http://cellar.org/2004/tooclose.jpg

And are there are any object lessons decaying in your yard as we speak?

That's the cable my posts are going through? Not as impressive as I would have hoped. Eh.

Mmm... FTTP. (Fiber to the Premises) Wish I could get it.

But it looks like there is packet loss on my ISP's network right now, so expect some slowness for the next little while... it's not due to the cable.

Maybe in your case UT, I think your wires should be above ground.... we just had this discussion about how only those idiots among us who dig holes in our yards without calling the "check for buried cables and pipes" hotline (guilty!) are the ones who slice and dice our wires....these people were, gulp, "professionals"??

FD

They were working for verizon? Isn't that cable they almost cut,...er,...Verizon? And they didn't know where it was(is)?? :rolleyes:

Now they have this massive ditch-digging megaweapon machine, and they've driven it right up on the neighbor's lawn, and they're cutting a ditch right under the street. Because the township won't let them dig up the street itself. I don't know whether this is better. But we are still online as I type this...

http://cellar.org/2004/ditchunder.jpg

I see they very kindly put a piece of plywood under the tank tread to save the neighbor's lawn. I'm sure there will be no trace of them once they pick up and leave.

Fall has progessed a little more in Philly than down here in D.C. Lot of bare branches there. Either that, or your little tree in front isn't doing so well.

No tree has ever lived in that location.

So when are you gonna have your fiber connection hooked up??!

Scarely matters -- they still won't sell me a better circuit than the T1 for what I need.

Eventually I think everything will be colocated in a facility... I think...

Comcast cable does what they intended - a high speed low reliability cable. If AC power goes out anywhere to their switching centers or at their DSLAM, then you are stuck dead. There switching centers only have the security of a chain link fence. Few have significant backup power. Many of their amplifiers on telephone poles can result in complete cutoff if power in that neighborhood is lost. Verizon fiber will be many times faster, be a direct fiber optic connection to their CO (which always has backup power and security), and is expected to be reliable enough to replace a POTS phone.

This, of course, was possible over ten years ago when companies such as Comcast (Suburban Cable) and Verizon (Bell Atlantic) were stifling technology by not even trying to install this stuff before 1996. Verizon and Comcast are simply doing what they should have and could have done more than a decade ago. The 1996 Federal Communication Act was required to open their eyes - to return to being product oriented.

Some housing developments with underground wires were good enough to see the future and to bury those optics (or install buried pipes) when homes were built

In the meantime, when is the best time to have cable failure - when every one else is also out and when the communicataions lines are most needed (right after the big storm), or when we have nothing better to do but complain about the local construction crews? Clearly the worst time to have a failure is one created by overhead wires. Best time to have failure (and failures that happen far less often) is the isolated failure when a construction crew happens to hit a buried wire. (Construction crews also hit overhead wires). Of course the latter failure is fixed right then and there - immediately. Massive failures created by overhead wires can take weeks to be fixed.

They are doing the right thing - as has been standard procedure for decades now. They are running cable under a street without digging up the street. Every town served by Verizon will have this installation happen from every home to the CO. Welcome to what we should have done over ten years ago.

The pictures that UT has posted of those construction crews is the best news for every Cellar lurker this month. It means innovation - not cost controls - has taken hold in the communication industry. Welcome to what has been standard procedure in places like Singapore and Korea for almost ten years now.

Ran across this public submitted photo (credit to Gloria Gordon, ok, I am legal now) on the palmbeachpost.com web page.....maybe those power lines aren't so safe underground either! :eek:

FD