[BC] Repacking the TV band

[RichardBJohnson at comcast.net]

Wires are going away. That is the plan.

At the turn of the century, Western Electric owned lead mines in Leadville, Colorado. It had a high silver content of about five percent, but that silver was, at the time, simply an impurity that Western Electric had learned to live with when manufacturing its lead-covered, paper-insulated, intercity toll cables.

In the late '50s, Western Electric's Omaha, Nebraska plant started producing a plastic-insulated cable called "candy-cane."  This ultimately replaced all the lead-covered cable which, with its five percent silver, paid for the cost of replacing the entire system.

The next generation, replacing candy-cane, uses copper-clad, plastic-insulated, small-gauge steel wire pairs in a protective PVC outer covering. This is the cable used today. The telephone company(s) plan is to install micro-cells with fiber feeds. They hand a POTS customer a "free" phone that they plug in to a wall socket. The wire goes away, sold for its copper content which is estimated to finance the entire restructuring of the telco "plant." This replaces millions of miles of wire with thousands of miles of fiber, removing most maintenance requirements because each neighborhood will be fed from a single antenna on a pole.

I have seen these "antennas" which are really complete transceivers that have only two connections, a fiber connection and an AC power connection. Once they are connected, they self-organize into a network that, in principle, can span coast-to-coast.

Cheers,
Richard B. Johnson
Book: http://www.AbominableFirebug.com/

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Urban, Brian L <burban at kut.org> wrote:
>Not entirely correct.  What the telcos are asking is to delete the switched network in favor of packet based systems.  In other words, change from POTS connections to VOIP connections.  Wired infrastructure will not go away in the near future, how the signals are handled on the wires will change.