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From: Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com>
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Subject: Re: [OT] Bell Canada - service vs. abuse
Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 18:31:29 -0400
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On 2025-05-22 4:39 PM, Adam H. Kerman wrote:
> Rhino <no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:
> 
>>> . . .
> 
>> That *is* a bit surprising! When I did DSL support for Verizon, some of
>> our customers were in New York and New Jersey and they often had REALLY
>> old infrastructure, meaning telephone lines that had been installed in
>> the 1930s and never upgraded since. This often meant their DSL was
>> really crappy due to the ancient lines and switches. I had the
>> impression then that Verizon never upgraded anything more than they
>> absolutely had to. I felt sorry for the customers that were stuck in
>> that situation. I'm guessing that Verizon simply couldn't be bothered to
>> upgrade wires and switching stations because it would have been too
>> expensive; they were probably anticipating that newer technology, like
>> fiber optic, would eventually replace all that old copper wire based
>> service.
> 
> Public utlities in that part of the country were notorious for failure
> to keep up with post WWII population increases. The old infrastructure
> was truly high quality when first installed, but was never intended to
> serve subsequent population growth.
> 
It's far from the first time that something that was intended to work 
for x years was used for MUCH longer than intended without spending 
money on maintenance....

I shudder to think how many roads and bridges we have that are past 
their best before date. We have an especially bad problem with that in 
our country's military. We've been running helicopters from the 1950s 
for decades past their intended life; I *think* they are gradually 
getting replaced but I'm not positive. We recently agreed to replace the 
pistols that were available to our soldiers: they were made in the 
1930s!! The need for newer pistols was blindingly obvious a LONG time 
ago but our government (regardless of which party was in power) ALWAYS 
finds money for the military last (if they find money at all). Our 
current jet fighters are F-18s which are 40 years old and they're being 
held together (figuratively) with spit and bailer twine. The 
Conservatives, when they were last in power, agreed to buy a bunch of 
F-35s but as soon as the Liberals got in, they decided to revisit the 
decision, then spend almost 10 fucking years hemming and hawing before 
finally deciding to buy F-35s anyway. Now Carney is talking about 
pausing that order after all and going with a European fighter, just 
because Trump. (We've committed to buying a handful of F-35s but they're 
talking about taking the rest of the order away from the US and giving 
it to the Eurofighter people which would be extra, extra stupid because 
then we'd have a handful of F-35s and then a bunch of the Eurofighters 
causing all kinds of complications in terms of basing, maintenance, 
training, etc. etc. But the Liberals are nothing if not stupid so I'm 
ready for anything.) But I digress....


> I'm going to rant here. There is lots of bandwidth in a twisted-pair
> (the twist mitigates against antenuation) copper pair. After all, PRI
> ISDN used a single copper pair, 23 B channels and one D channel. It was
> set up with evenly-divided channels, 64 Kbps each. A B channel could be
> used for voice or data; the D channel was for signalling. In typical
> installations, it was either for voice or data. BRI ISDN was another
> option. Genuine T1 was also done with a single copper pair.
> 
> Except for businesses with PBXs, we didn't use ISDN for residential.
> It's too bad because the sound quality was superior to analog but the
> technology was in wider-spread use in Europe and Japan than here.
> 
> We would have had widespread residential data connection much earlier
> with easier implementation and no voice modems. ISDN was switched
> technology, which meant it used the telephone network AND the telephone
> network switch at the phone company central office. *DSL, which
> attempted to use channels within the telephone lines without
> interferring with the voice signal (sometimes unsuccessful without using
> a separate pair), was unswitched. There was a separate piece of
> equipment at the central office and, because signal distance was
> limited, there had to be nodes set up in the field in order to serve the
> entire polygon wired to a particular central office.
> 
One of my friends built a house back when the internet was in its 
infancy and he installed ISDN. But I seem to recall that when he showed 
it to me, it was rather limited in speed to 128 MB, only twice as fast 
as the typical dialup modem in those days. If that's the best you can do 
with ISDN - and perhaps it's not - I'm underwhelmed even if it has other 
strengths.

> Fiber optic was installed as a SEPARATE network because it got around
> regulatory rules that court decisions had forced wholesale rates onto
> the monopoly telephone network so there could be competition for *DSL
> from companies that couldn't possibly afford to build out their own
> networks for the last mile connection. Most network interchange actually
> takes place at central offices.
> 
There's a claim - I suspect it's a myth but I could be wrong - that 
every street in this country has fibre optic cable down the middle. More 
likely, every new street constructed after a certain point in time - 
probably in the 1970s - has fibre as a matter of course. I don't see 
them ripping up every existing street across this vast country to 
install fibre.

> Cable was almost always built out as a separate network based on coax.
> CableLABs has done amazing engineering over the years of squeezing out
> fantastic amounts of bandwidth from the concept of coax.
>
I remember going to a friend's place when most people (including me) 
still had dialup modems. He had a cable modem and was getting 1 GB of 
speed; he could download a huge file in a couple of minutes. Meanwhile, 
I had to download updates to my compiler, put them on floppy disk, and 
the files were so numerous that I had to spend an entire weekend (48 
hours) downloading the damned things on my dialup modem. That really 
opened my eyes to the capabilities of cable modems. But, in those early 
days, I also learned that if you had a cable modem, you shared your 
bandwidth with your whole neighbourhood; when you tried to download in 
prime time (after everyone was home for work and before bedtime) speeds 
dropped back down to almost dialup speeds. I know they've done a lot to 
get around those initial issues though; when I had a cable modem about 
10 years back, I got very decent speed and didn't find it slowing down 
in prime time.

> There's nothing wrong with old infrastructure 

Then why were there so many problems in New York and New Jersey?

> and, furthermore, there
> never should have been separate copper and fiber-optic networks. Copper
> should have been replaced as needed.
> 

> You know what we are doing in this country? Telephone repair personnel
> have been ordered to leave covers off pedestals. You see this all over
> the place. The covers were designed to eliminate water infiltration. But
> the network isn't deteriorating quickly enough to make the business case
> to the regulators that it must be abandoned, so the telephone companies
> are helping things along with self sabotage. It's outrateous.
> 
I've seen that here too and was puzzled by it. It never occurred to me 
that it was a deliberate act by the telcos. That is some shameful shit!

>> . . .
>   
>> I haven't seen an outdoor antenna - or heard of anyone using one - in
>> this country in a REALLY long time, probably since the 70s. I knew one
>> woman who had been given a TV by her son but she couldn't afford cable
>> or satellite so she watched only the one local channel that she could
>> get. Then the station changed to a digital signal and she lost even
>> that, making her TV an over-sized paperweight....
> 
> In the United States, the broadcast signal uses a significantly wider
> bandwidth than what's distributed by cable. I don't know how adequate
> broadcast is where you live. 

I truly don't know. We certainly don't have nearly as many TV stations 
as you do! It's quite common for major cities there to have all kinds of 
stations serving them. Here, many cities in our top 20 cities limped 
along with a single station for many many years and the station from the 
next major city was often poor if you could get it at all. I think 
that's why we invented cable TV - or so we claim - and why that shaped 
our broadcasting for a long time. Even today, my home town still has 
only 1 TV station but with cable or satellite, you can get a lot more. 
When I was a kid, before we got cable, we could only get our local 
channel and the Hamilton channel reliably; the London channel was hit or 
miss and we couldn't get the Toronto channel except perhaps in rare 
circumstances.

> I sure have never understood reluctance to
> use an antenna if that's an option. Yes, I am aware of signals being
> blocked by natural features and tall buildings.
> 

I can think of a few issues with antennas:
- they can be a challenge to mount if you do it yourself
- if you get a tower for your antenna, it can be pretty expensive
- antennas can be lightning magnets which is a real issue if it's 
mounted on your roof

>>> . . .
> 
>> One of my friends switched back and forth between Bell and Rogers
>> internet regularly for years; maybe she still does. Both services had
>> crappy quality, mostly because the wiring within her apartment building
>> was in really horrid shape and the owners wouldn't upgrade it and Bell
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