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On Sat, 19 Dec 2009, Kai Hendry wrote:
I went on to ask him about the future on connections in Cornwall. He said we could expect a "21CN" roll out in which symmetrical 5 meg lines will be offered to even properties like my parents. He said this is funded by some project or other and I could find more information on the Internet about it. I've done some candid searches, though I can't find any good sources to track this roll out. Can you?
Offhand no... However cornwall, being a third world County, is an objective-one area, and does get shed-loads of money thrown at it for ICT companies to bid for and BT being realistically the only company who can do stuff (and the one with the biggest lobbying power) tends to get most of that money....
See http://www.objectiveone.com/This happened some years back when they decided to ADSL enable all the exchanges in Cornwall, even though most of them never reached their trigger levels (although they eventually did the whole country - Cornwall got a head-start) The cynic in me said that it was to force the Wi-Fi broadband company I was working with to go out of business, but who knows... (I was running 10Mb lines from Exeter to Cornwall at the time - some 8 years ago)
The next big push is fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) and that will be a fore-runner to FTTP (Fibre to the Premises). FTTC will enable things like 5Mb SDSL to then be delivered - again, depending on distance from the cabinet - and in most urban areas you're usually no more than 1-200m from your nearest cabinet - how this will work in the backwaters of beyond is anyones guess. One hurdle is getting power to the cabinet to power the fibre convertors and DSLAMs, but the cable companies have been doing this for years. (even if they then never replace their cabinet UPS batteries...)
BT is already deploying FTTC in some areas, and if Cornwall is on the cards, then hurrah for Cornwall...
I'm not sure how they're going to handle FTTP here, although many years back when doing the Wi-Fi thing, in conversations with BT, etc. they big carriers actually wanted to do it as it would then put the onus on the end-user to power the equipment and telephones, as opposed to BT doing it. BT's power bill is quite large, AIUI, as they have to power every phone connected to every exchange...
In the US where they are running FTTP, you get a battery backed-up box with a wall-wart to power it, so you still have emergency coverage when the power goes out. I imagine we'll eventually see something like that here - black box with the fibre going into it, a phone socket and an Ethernet socket and a mains adapter to power it all... And as long as it's BT Wholesale, and access is still allowed for the independant ISPs, I'd be happy with that.
Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html