When I lived in Remuera in the 90's we where First Media customers (while it lasted), and it worked great, but then they canned it and went we ADSL. Which was also fun and games, it took the guy 2 days to get it installed correctly and back then they didn't put filters on the line and the phones buzzed all the time.
I heard at one time that in Pakuranga there was a TV network running over part of the fibre network.
For what its worth, I understand quite large parts of eastern Auckland where cabled. They used a 'mole' machine to dig under driveways etc, and caused problems cause they kept hitting power lines, water pipes etc.
I think it is a real shame it is no longer used as even FTTN with coax to the house is going to be faster than DSL ever will be. Of course as mentioned, houses with no decent cabling wouldn't benefit, but it doesn't mean the option shouldn't be there. I would have thought it wouldn't cost that much to 'light up' the fibre with an Internet connection. Doesn't it all go back to the Mayoral Drive exchange anyway?
It would be incredibly expensive to "light it up". So many problems with doing so:
- It's old fibre and coax, in unknown condition. Probably very very broken in many places - It'd require running coax into the houses anyway (expensive and if you're going to do it may as well run fibre) - Telecom has no HFC skills or expertise - The market for HFC skills and expertise in NZ is extremely limited - It means deviating from their target technologies (xDSL and xPON) for areas where this is available, which drives cost into the product because it's now a 'one off' - Lack of product consistency (move house and you're back to xDSL) - It was likely built to old standards which would require significant technology refresh and visiting every pillar and plinth to ensure it'd be compatible with today's HFC technology (DOCSIS 3.0) - Incidentally I'm not sure I'd agree DOCSIS is "faster than DSL ever will be". DOCSIS has a number of inherent technology problems that make it, quite frankly, a pain to work with and deliver services like VoIP over. Also, the shared spectrum for upstream is a pain.
- Depending on the topology the cable was installed in, most likely new splits would be required to get the number of connections per upstream/downstream frequency to an acceptable level for internet services. - You now need to support cable modems since existing CPE won't work
In short, it's really not worth using it - it'd be cheaper and easier to restart from scratch, at which point you may as well go FTTH.
FTTH is different from FTTD? I just know they have a fibre box mounted on the house, probably GPON or GEPON passive fibre. Probably cheaper to install passive fibre than phone wiring with the prices of copper going up and xPON equipment getting cheaper all the time. Probably also cheaper to maintain until some bright spark chops a cable while digging holes for fence posts. Some of the new cabinet-based DSLAMS (more like a multi-service access node) can take GPON cards instead of ADSL/SHDSL so you wouldn't have to upgrade a whole area of existing subscribers just to provision a few new lines of fibre.
Auckland City Council blocked the more recent Telstra fibre proposal because people had complained it would be ugly, cant think how it could be more ugly than existing lines they were going to share the power poles with. Pakuranga and Glenfield had Telecom cable underground as a trial several years earlier, which effectively made it uneconomic for Clear to put Cable TV into Auckland. Telstra seem to only buy residential lines from Telecom now.
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