foxton internet - does it have dsl or just dialup.

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#1163707 28-Oct-2014 16:30

DarthKermit: Cheers Ray. Elsthorpe is a pretty place. Never been there yet.

It has a school, a couple of houses, and a shed which used to be a service station. Nothing special. I wouldnt bother making a trip to see it.

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#1163739 28-Oct-2014 16:49

raytaylor:
DarthKermit: ^^^

Not to mention that phone lines don't always travel in a direct line from the exchange/cabinet to your particular house.

Funny thing is that in rural areas, the phone lines often do take a much more direct path.
I know a few places around here where they follow what would be considered an old bullock track. Or you find some farmer has a PCM repeater in a weird place on their property.

Here is an example where there is a pcm repeater in a paddock and I *think* the trunk cable between the pcm cabinet and the exchange follows a much more direct line as the pcm repeater spacing is approx 1.8 - 2kms from the pcm cabinet if we go direct rather than follow the road.

https://i.imgur.com/fXCn8mT.png

What exactly are you referring to by PCM, google digs up posts that mentions it but doesn't actually clarify what we are talking about.

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#1163794 28-Oct-2014 17:18

PCM was a post office engineer's wet dream back in the 80's.

When you have a bunch of new houses pop up in an area, but only a 12 pair cable - with not enough copper pairs to support the number of houses, you could install a PCM system.
At the local exchange, a PCM system would take the existing analog lines - digitise them into 64 kbps audio streams, and send the data down 4 copper wires at 1.5mbits. Thats enough for 24 telephone lines.

Every ~2kms they would have a repeater which extended the PCM signal another 2kms.

Then at some point, they could install a PCM distribution cabinet.

So you have a cable in the ground with eg. 12 copper pairs.
You suddenly need to connect up a 9th house, which means your in limited supply before you need to replace that cable with more copper pairs. Digging cables is very expensive.
So allocate 4 of those copper pairs to a PCM service, install repeaters along the cable every 2kms, and then install a PCM cabinet at the far end - then hook the house up to the cabinet.
Up to 24 houses can then be connected to the cabinet but only need to share the 4 pairs going back to the exchange.

The end result is that no dsl service can be provided to those houses, unless a new cable was dug with fibre + dslam or ATM-over-copper + conklin service was installed into the remote PCM cabinet. the houses along the way using the existing copper non-pcm pairs that connect them back to the exchange could be served with dsl.

Another result is worse than crap dialup speed.

There are other benefits, like louder voice from shorter copper line lengths as the longer the analog portion of the line is = more you are subject to electric fence noise, resistance, and other issues.

I find the technology facinating and at the time it was awesome for the end user because it allowed huge numbers of party lines to be converted to private lines without huge expense.

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#1163809 28-Oct-2014 17:31

Fascinating indeed, i can see why it would be done.

Clearly data connectivity is not a priority when considering it though.

in your map you note no dsl but can get 25mbit broadband, in this case are you referring to a wireless server to supplement the lack of dsl?

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#1163818 28-Oct-2014 17:39

hio77: Fascinating indeed, i can see why it would be done.

Clearly data connectivity is not a priority when considering it though.

in your map you note no dsl but can get 25mbit broadband, in this case are you referring to a wireless server to supplement the lack of dsl?

Yup - we provide the area with 25mbit broadband. There is a conklin in the exchange at elsthorpe.

The PCM cabinets were installed before data was considered - fax machines were just coming onto the scene and they only need ~20kbits.

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#1163824 28-Oct-2014 17:46

raytaylor:
hio77: Fascinating indeed, i can see why it would be done.

Clearly data connectivity is not a priority when considering it though.

in your map you note no dsl but can get 25mbit broadband, in this case are you referring to a wireless server to supplement the lack of dsl?

Yup - we provide the area with 25mbit broadband. There is a conklin in the exchange at elsthorpe.

The PCM cabinets were installed before data was considered - fax machines were just coming onto the scene and they only need ~20kbits.

Alright! this makes far more sense then!

I suppose loading coils come into the same sense but more of a 1:1 copper pair relationship?

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#1163833 28-Oct-2014 18:07

Loading coils are used to extend a single line, rather than fit more lines down a shared copper pair.
So as the signal passes down a cable, resistance in the copper converts that electrical current to heat, and the volume goes down at the other end.
But by using a loading coil, they filter out everything except a portion of the frequencies that medium quality speech uses - no super low sounds, no super high sounds.
Less low and high sound going down the copper means that there is less resistance and the mid tones can travel further and be louder at the far end.

A telephone line can be extended beyond 10kms with loading coils.

The problem is that DSL uses sound frequencies higher than voice - thats how you can talk and use the internet at the same time.
But a loading coil will filter out those DSL frequencies while doing its job of extending the voice capabilities of the line.

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#1163836 28-Oct-2014 18:10

raytaylor: Loading coils are used to extend a single line, rather than fit more lines down a shared copper pair.
So as the signal passes down a cable, resistance in the copper converts that electrical current to heat, and the volume goes down at the other end.
But by using a loading coil, they filter out everything except a portion of the frequencies that medium quality speech uses - no super low sounds, no super high sounds.
Less low and high sound going down the copper means that there is less resistance and the mid tones can travel further and be louder at the far end.

A telephone line can be extended beyond 10kms with loading coils.

The problem is that DSL uses sound frequencies higher than voice - thats how you can talk and use the internet at the same time.
But a loading coil will filter out those DSL frequencies while doing its job of extending the voice capabilities of the line.

cant say i noticed any noticeable change in audio quality when the loading coil here was removed.

the 64/64 dsl that we managed over it sure saw the improvements though!

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#1163869 28-Oct-2014 19:02

I remember being connected to a party line while growing up on the Coast. Short-long-short was our "ringtone", from memory.
Probably on a PCM now.
The end result is that ADSL on that line is absolutely rubbish - barely 0.5kb/s (this is about 7kms from the exchange - I'm surprised it even works!)

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#1163881 28-Oct-2014 19:12

People on PCM cabinets don't realise how lucky they really are. Other people have to pay lots of money to get ISDN!

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#1163898 28-Oct-2014 19:27

PCM was a post office engineer's wet dream back in the 80's.

Now they absolutely sh1t bricks when they get a PCM fault and the feeder's pairs are faulty. But yea it is a great idea. And sbiddle.... lol! I guess they do have ISDN lol.

Now it's all about DTLM over fibre.

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#1163899 28-Oct-2014 19:28

ISDN is still better than dialup tho, right?

Cbfd

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#1163919 28-Oct-2014 19:48

raytaylor: PCM was a post office engineer's wet dream back in the 80's.

When you have a bunch of new houses pop up in an area, but only a 12 pair cable - with not enough copper pairs to support the number of houses, you could install a PCM system.
At the local exchange, a PCM system would take the existing analog lines - digitise them into 64 kbps audio streams, and send the data down 4 copper wires at 1.5mbits. Thats enough for 24 telephone lines.

Every ~2kms they would have a repeater which extended the PCM signal another 2kms.

Then at some point, they could install a PCM distribution cabinet.

So you have a cable in the ground with eg. 12 copper pairs.
You suddenly need to connect up a 9th house, which means your in limited supply before you need to replace that cable with more copper pairs. Digging cables is very expensive.
So allocate 4 of those copper pairs to a PCM service, install repeaters along the cable every 2kms, and then install a PCM cabinet at the far end - then hook the house up to the cabinet.
Up to 24 houses can then be connected to the cabinet but only need to share the 4 pairs going back to the exchange.

The end result is that no dsl service can be provided to those houses, unless a new cable was dug with fibre + dslam or ATM-over-copper + conklin service was installed into the remote PCM cabinet. the houses along the way using the existing copper non-pcm pairs that connect them back to the exchange could be served with dsl.

Another result is worse than crap dialup speed.

There are other benefits, like louder voice from shorter copper line lengths as the longer the analog portion of the line is = more you are subject to electric fence noise, resistance, and other issues.

I find the technology facinating and at the time it was awesome for the end user because it allowed huge numbers of party lines to be converted to private lines without huge expense.

@ raytaylor need to clear up some of this misinformation here

When PCM cables where installed back in the Late 1970s to early 90s there were always 2 cables laid together (usually either 2x15 pair cables or 2x7 pair cables) one cable was a "go" cable with the other being a "return" cable.

PCM systems run 32x64kbs voice channels with channel 16 and channel 32 being timing channels (to keep the signals flowing right)

PCM regenerators are installed 1500-1800m apart with the first one from the exchange roughly at 900m

Most regens that where installed had capacity to run up to 10 pcm systems thus giving up to 300 working lines over 2x15 pair cables - which none of them ever run at full capacity - maybe 3-4 pcm systems (120 customers)

Conklins were run over the spare PCM systems in the regen - Usually either 1-2 links per conklins in exchanges or cabinets (1 link = 2mbit stream) which were plenty when adsl1 first came out but no good now

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#1163920 28-Oct-2014 19:53

quickymart: ISDN is still better than dialup tho, right?

Yes, but these people don't get ISDN to their house - it's (for all intent purposes) just a digital connection between their cabinet/exchange and the nearest cabinet/exchange which is similar technology to ISDN. My comment wasn't a serious one!

As part of the BT involvement with Telecom in the early 90s they were actually looking to roll out ISDN to every home in the country, but that got shelved.

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#1163927 28-Oct-2014 20:13

Cbfd:

Conklins were run over the spare PCM systems in the regen - Usually either 1-2 links per conklins in exchanges or cabinets (1 link = 2mbit stream) which were plenty when adsl1 first came out but no good now

is this why in some rural areas, theres two cabinets side by side? one to handle voice (PCM) and a conklin for data?

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