Disqus - Latest Comments for Wayne Robinson

Re: Power Rangers where are they now: on murder charges and cutting their manhood with a razor

Wayne Robinson — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 05:05:38 -0000

Umm... Skyler Deleon was just an extra in the Power Rangers movie. I think that CNN and the Inquisitr are both sensationalising this a little more than necessary.

Re: iFail: Will Apple be forced to recall the iPhone 3G?

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 21:34:29 -0000

I am also using Optus and appear to be suffering similar issues, at least with data connectivity. It's a little disappointing and making me wish I chose Telstra (unless of course the phone is having similar issues with Telstra).

The 2100MHz spectrum Optus uses for 3G actually bounces around a lot more than the 850-900MHz (can't remember which) Telstra uses.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 22:58:25 -0000

You realise that cable-based technologies use shared, bus-based connectivity for each ring around a node. When first introduced, this was about 40Mbps (it is significantly more now, but I'm not sure of the limitations of the current network). So, if you have 200 people on your ring all accessing the net, you are essentially sharing that 40Mbps bus. Cable technology works a lot like the 10Base2 networks of old (you know, the coax ones with terminators... I'm only 27 and I feel old for remembering that).

VDSL holds more promise, but that 500Mbps is only possible within about 500 metres of the DSLAM/exchange/enabled-RIM. VDSL breaks down to essentially ADSL speeds very quickly as you move further away.

Fiber has the capacity for very long runs. The residential stuff they use for FTTH installations is, however, a plastic-based very cheap to install derivative. This is only good for reasonably short runs also because of the high attenuation. Coupled with the up to 128x half-duplex multiplexing that is used for residential installations, you start to run into significant limitations for providing any more than the 100Mbps proposed bandwidth. If you wanted to provide more, it would require a physical upgrade of optics at both the customer and the exchange end of each single piece of fiber (actually per Point-to-Point connection... multiplexing only works with optical frequencies, even if you are multiplexing 128 channels across a single piece of fiber, you need 128x optic couplers at each end to read/write).

Not that 100Mbps is to be sneezed at. You have to remember that it is possible to deliver this symmetrically (the VDSL mentioned above is asynchronous meaning the upstream bandwidth is significantly lower than the downstream). A lot of interesting things can be done with 100Mbps of symmetric bandwidth, especially with cloud-computing and mesh-style delivery of content.

Even without interesting use of everyone being connected with 100Mbps of symmetric bandwidth, 100Mbps is still good for 2-3x 1080p streams, phone and high-speed Internet. This opens a world of possibilities (of course, this would all have to be delivered relatively close to each home because providing backbone infrastructure to deal with 10 million homes requiring a 100Mbps connection to the USA would be significant - 1Pbs (or about 500x bigger than any inter-country backbone in existence today).

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 03:44:10 -0000

Completely different technology than fiber? Highly unlikely. There aren't any potential replacements to fiber. A wireless HSPDA solution would be cheaper to roll out but doesn't have anywhere near the amount of bandwidth as glass.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 04:38:54 -0000

With any luck they'll roll this out with an 'outward-in' approach. I can currently only get ADSL2 through Telstra, and I'm in a reasonably newly developed 'planned community'.

If I was a government organisation, I would put high-speed infrastructure in places like this first (reasonably high density with few options) and save the well-serviced (for competitive ADSL2) inner-city areas for last.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 05:48:34 -0000

Nodes, customer premises equipment and backbone infrastructure will all require upgrading to support higher speeds. And that's assuming that the higher bandwidth can be multiplexed as high as 100Mbps (which there is equipment out there to run 128x multiplexed streams across a single half-duplex cable). 1 and 10Gbps can currently only be multiplexed up to 32x over a pair of fiber.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:34:03 -0000

If you are in a metro area on the south-eastern seaboard of Australia you can get a 100Mbps connection from PIPE for around $3,000/month with 1.5TB of data.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 06:35:00 -0000

Alternatively, if you can get ADSL2 Extreme from Internode, you can get a 40Mbps symmetric connection (unlimited - that's about 13TB) for $4,000 per month.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 11:20:19 -0000

This is what I have researched in the past about Verizon's FiOS network. Again, there are always other potential solutions out there, and obviously some are better than others.

32 to 128-way is possible with DWDM and TDMA and is used for FTTP (in fact 32,768-way splits are theoretically possible with EPON).

From my understanding of most FTTP installations, a single strand of fiber is installed to each CPE (not a pair), which is what I was getting at with half-duplex. There is a single piece of fiber used for both directions, instead of one for up and one for down (which is how most fiber is installed). This also makes the provision of symmetric speeds more complicated (and potentially less likely) as it requires the OLT to allocate upstream bandwidth to the ONT to prevent collisions. If a network wants to get more bang for their fiber buck, they can allocate more bandwidth downstream than upstream and run more multiplexed connections.

I wasn't aware that PONs only had a single optical connection at the ISP end of the fiber (which obviously makes upgrading simpler) however, it would still take an upgrade of all the optics at the customer (and still, the provider end) to increase capacity past whatever optics are installed to begin with (which seems like it will be 100Mbps)

In regards to VDSL, I was referring to it holding more promise than cable-based technology because it is P2P between the end-user and the DSLAM. Not that it holds more promise than FTTP which is dramatically better for obvious reasons.

Re: Australia commits AU$43 billion to broadband network that will be redundant before its finished

Wayne Robinson — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 21:27:25 -0000

Well, given that 100Gbps optics already exist for fiber. And this has increased from about 100Mbps over the last 10 years, another 10 years should give us significantly greater bandwidth (100Tbps??)

Of course, I'm yet to see a way to use all this bandwidth. Is 1080p high definition TV used by anyone right now (30Mbps)? Is there even anything else being created to replace/extend 1080p TV? Is there any other consumer application for > 100Mbps? Maybe live content streaming for games (of course, what's the point, wouldn't it be easier to just install 100GB, 1TB, 10TB of textures locally)? How long will take consumers to even upgrade past 100Mbps home networks (or worse, 802.11g running at < 20Mbps)?

Re: Britney Spears unplugged: hear what she really sounds like on stage

Wayne Robinson — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 08:52:04 -0000

I guess they might use encrypted channels from now on, lol.

Having said that, she knew she wasn't going to be live, so why would you try too hard?