Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

Fri Sep 17 17:44:15 UTC 2010

Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:

> Part of the reason for this is "U-Verse" is FTTN, Fiber to the Node.
> AT&T has run fiber to my neighborhood, I believe the node in my
> case is about 1000 feet away (I drive past it on the way out).  The
> electronics sit there, so the old model of colocating in the CO and
> getting the dry pair is no longer possible, the copper stops at the
> node and it's a largeish (6' wide, 3' deep, 5' tall) cabinet, so
> there's no colo.

We have that exact same stuff in my area too: I've actually talked to
the AT&T tech who was setting that cabinet up on one of our streets.

The explanation he gave me was that even though they want everyone to go
to this new-fangled fiber thing, they still have to maintain a small
number of copper pairs running all the way to the real CO like it used
to be.  The reason is that if some kooky customer like me wants a
service like ISDN that's only available from the real Class 5 switch and
not from the "U-Verse" remote terminal, they are still required to
provide that as a regulated telco.

Ditto with CLECs like Covad-now-MegaPath: even though they don't get
access to the FTTN infrastructure, no telco is evicting their legacy CO
presence.  Therefore, if a kooky customer like me wishes to forego fiber
speeds and prefers the slower all-copper solution, I can still get SDSL
from the CLEC, and the ILEC (AT&T) will be required to provide a direct
copper pair from that CLEC's cage inside the CO to the customer premise,
no matter how much they wish for these copper pairs to die.

Long live copper!

MS