"Craig Whitmore" <lennon@orcon.net.nz> wrote:
>The question is.... What _CAN_ someone buy from Telecom to run xDSL over? a
>"MegaLink"? (its the same as a A1 but its tested for Errors?). But thats
>only rated at 2M??
Megalink is an E1 circuit. You get a G.703 interface at each end, and a
little box of magic to drive the signal over a couple of pairs (possibly
with regenerators along the way), or even fibre. The stuff at the
interface and the stuff down the wires is different, and it's 2M or
nothing. Mostly it was intended for linking PABXs together, but if you
stick G.703 interfaces in your routers to you can use it for data too.
It was much cheaper than Wideband DDS (which gave you a V.35 or X.21
plug, and an extra box, although it too used an E1 circuit), but it was
still very much a traditional telco product, and priced accordingly.
Handing dry copper or dark fibres to customers is very much against the
NZ telcos' mentality.
Story time. In the mid 80s, the Government Printing Office needed a
link from its building in Mulgrave St to Parliament Buildings to
facilitate access to the GPO's legislative databases. Somehow, probably
through the time-honoured Public Service game of "my Minister is bigger
than your Minister", the Post Office was persuaded to allow a multimode
fibre cable to be run down an NZPO ductline to the old Parliament
building, ethernet repeaters were put at each end, and everybody was
happy.
Years passed, and the old Parliament building was to be refurbished.
This involved moving everything out of the building and into Bowen
House, over the road. For the comms, it would have been sufficient to
get the fibre to the Beehive basement, and run a cable through the
tunnel under Bowen St from there. Post Office Telecomms was now
Telecom, so we asked if they could move the fibre.
"What fibre?" they asked.
We explained.
"We don't do dark fibre." "Well you did for us." "We sell services,
not fibre. How can you have dark fibre?"
We explained.
"So this is running at 10 Mbps?" "Yes." "But our fastest service is
Megalink, at 2Mbps."
A bill for back rental of five Megalink circuits turned up, totaling
one and a half million dollars.
We went around this a few more times with them, but eventually replaced
the fibre with a 10 Mbps microwave system. Suffice to say, the $1.5M
bill was not paid.
-- don
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Received on Sun Aug 26 23:05:08 2001