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On Sat, 1 Aug 2009, tom wrote: > As someone has pointed out overhead is soooo much cheaper than > underground and tends not to fill up with water - though I'm getting > less convinced about that side of the argument... There is absolutely no > reason why fibreoptic cant be strung overhead - in 1990 it was cheaper > than copper but privatisation has changed all that. Fibre is already strung overground in the UK - especially in the South West too! Western Power (or their current incarnation) ran lots of fibre many years ago (and are still building their network today) - they were the ones running it along the earth line that connects pylons together. There are still many of them in-place today, but what they found was that shotgun pellets were taking them out (from people doing clay pidgeon shoots, etc.) so now they undersling them below 11KV pylons in armoured cables. They have a large network in the South West and South Wales. I used them some years back to run fibre from Exeter to bits of Devon and Cornwall. 10Mb links 6 years ago... All their links were milti Gb then, probably multi 10Gb now. The problem we had (runing community Wi-Fi broadband access) was always the last mile. (and to a lesser extent, the first mile) E.g. in Devon, we had 10Mb connectivity from our base at Sowton to the mast at Marldon above Torbay, then from there we had a 5.8GHz link of some 17.5Km to a farm high up on Dartmoor, then another 5.8GHz link from there to another farm above Buckfastleigh, then from there via 2.4GHz Wi-Fi links to a series of access points in town. We had similar issues in Cornwall too (Penwith/Lands End area) Ahh the nightmare of it all... 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