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From: shawn <nanoflower@notforg.m.a.i.l.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.tv
Subject: Re: [OT] Bell Canada - service vs. abuse
Date: Thu, 22 May 2025 20:26:23 -0400
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On Thu, 22 May 2025 18:31:29 -0400, Rhino
<no_offline_contact@example.com> wrote:

>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 the same problem with bridges and utilities.
>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; 

We tend to not have that problem. Mostly because we sell/give away the
older equipment and replace it with newer gear.

>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 think you fail to see the obvious answer. If your country were truly
to move away from the F-35 then there's no reason to keep them. Just
sell them to another country that is using the fighters. I'm sure
there will be many willing buyers.

>
>> 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 have about 69 channels that I get with my antenna and another 20 or
so I could get if I set up an outdoor antenna. It helps being near a
large city (Atlanta).
Whoa.. I just did an automated search for new channels. Haven't done
one in a year or so and it came up with 90 channels. Not all will come
in with a strong enough signal with my current indoor setup, but it
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