Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Country V City Speeds
Country Broadband
You may have heard on ABC News earlier this morning … the Federal Opposition says the government's latest plans for internet services will leave regional areas with broadband access several times slower than that in the city.
Labor's Communications Spokesman Stephen Conroy says the latest medical and educational applications require faster broadband speeds than those being proposed by the government.
To get access to the new technologies and the new applications that are available, you need speeds of between 6 to ten megabits. And while the proposal is to deliver 6 to 10 megabits in the city … only two megabits will be delivered to rural and regional Australians.
Why the difference in city and country speeds?
Effectively, there should be no difference it purely would come down to spending on infrastructure in rural areas. In the late1980’s toi the mid 1990’s before the standards for a lot of the communications services for the internet were set in concrete Telstra was mainly concerned with voice services and data was indeed a second consideration. So they installed the most cost effective forms of voice communications by using multiplexers and pair gain systems.
Whilst these items were perfect for providing PSTN 3khz voice services they were unable to provide high-speed analogue data services via modem more than 26400.
However, as broadband services were introduced into Australia it was found that a lot of this equipment was unable to accommodate the preferred broadband options of ADSL which was almost 15 years old before Australia decided to adopt an ADSL broadband model and cable internet only rolled out into homes once a pay television infrastructure was rolled out.
The commercial decision was made by Telstra and then Australian Communications Authority for technical reasons to limit broadband services to a speed of 1.5mb.
In rural areas the communications network is a mishmash of new and old digital technologies with both fibre and copper coax networks and in some cases the country often the rural areas used to get old city based hardware that still has a few good years on the clock rolled out into the country.
What governs speed … is it the initial set-up … or the band width?
Both actually, your going to need the initial wholesale exchange or point of presence based equipment capable of providing the services, so it may well require the telecommunications companies to spend big dollars in rural areas to upgrade such equipment and improve there network. Then you need the actually bandwidth to run it, there is no point putting 8 customers on a CMUX that is only connected to a 2mbps connection into the internet when these customers want a 1.5mbps service each. For those 8 customers to have 1.5mbps each there needs to be at least a 22mbps connection running into 8 port CMUX or DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) to stop bottle necks or go slows from happening and give the customer a trouble free connection.
A speed of two megabits … how much faster is that than the old dial-up?
Its around 40 times faster than a solid 56k connection, however, not many of the phone lines in our area get a solid 56k connection. In fact on Mondays morning show we heard from people that were only lucky enough to get 26400bps. So if we take this into account a 2mbps connection would be 50 to 60 times faster.
Advantages of a network upgrade.
If according to experts in the broadband choice forums, if Telstra switched to an ATM IP based communications network between exchanges all telephone calls sent around the network as internet protocol traffic and in the cases of the Kempsey fiber vandalism it would easy to reroute most of the services quicker than what we saw over the past couple of days.
ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a network technology based on transferring data in cells or packets of a fixed size. The cell used with ATM is relatively small compared to units used with older technologies. The small, constant cell size allows ATM equipment to transmit video, audio, and computer data over the same network, and assure that no single type of data hogs the line.
You may have heard on ABC News earlier this morning … the Federal Opposition says the government's latest plans for internet services will leave regional areas with broadband access several times slower than that in the city.
Labor's Communications Spokesman Stephen Conroy says the latest medical and educational applications require faster broadband speeds than those being proposed by the government.
To get access to the new technologies and the new applications that are available, you need speeds of between 6 to ten megabits. And while the proposal is to deliver 6 to 10 megabits in the city … only two megabits will be delivered to rural and regional Australians.
Why the difference in city and country speeds?
Effectively, there should be no difference it purely would come down to spending on infrastructure in rural areas. In the late1980’s toi the mid 1990’s before the standards for a lot of the communications services for the internet were set in concrete Telstra was mainly concerned with voice services and data was indeed a second consideration. So they installed the most cost effective forms of voice communications by using multiplexers and pair gain systems.
Whilst these items were perfect for providing PSTN 3khz voice services they were unable to provide high-speed analogue data services via modem more than 26400.
However, as broadband services were introduced into Australia it was found that a lot of this equipment was unable to accommodate the preferred broadband options of ADSL which was almost 15 years old before Australia decided to adopt an ADSL broadband model and cable internet only rolled out into homes once a pay television infrastructure was rolled out.
The commercial decision was made by Telstra and then Australian Communications Authority for technical reasons to limit broadband services to a speed of 1.5mb.
In rural areas the communications network is a mishmash of new and old digital technologies with both fibre and copper coax networks and in some cases the country often the rural areas used to get old city based hardware that still has a few good years on the clock rolled out into the country.
What governs speed … is it the initial set-up … or the band width?
Both actually, your going to need the initial wholesale exchange or point of presence based equipment capable of providing the services, so it may well require the telecommunications companies to spend big dollars in rural areas to upgrade such equipment and improve there network. Then you need the actually bandwidth to run it, there is no point putting 8 customers on a CMUX that is only connected to a 2mbps connection into the internet when these customers want a 1.5mbps service each. For those 8 customers to have 1.5mbps each there needs to be at least a 22mbps connection running into 8 port CMUX or DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) to stop bottle necks or go slows from happening and give the customer a trouble free connection.
A speed of two megabits … how much faster is that than the old dial-up?
Its around 40 times faster than a solid 56k connection, however, not many of the phone lines in our area get a solid 56k connection. In fact on Mondays morning show we heard from people that were only lucky enough to get 26400bps. So if we take this into account a 2mbps connection would be 50 to 60 times faster.
Advantages of a network upgrade.
If according to experts in the broadband choice forums, if Telstra switched to an ATM IP based communications network between exchanges all telephone calls sent around the network as internet protocol traffic and in the cases of the Kempsey fiber vandalism it would easy to reroute most of the services quicker than what we saw over the past couple of days.
ATM = Asynchronous Transfer Mode, a network technology based on transferring data in cells or packets of a fixed size. The cell used with ATM is relatively small compared to units used with older technologies. The small, constant cell size allows ATM equipment to transmit video, audio, and computer data over the same network, and assure that no single type of data hogs the line.
# posted by Peter Saville - IT Consultant @ 4:20 PM 
