[LINK] Re: ACCC competition notice to Telstra

[Glen Turner]

On Tue, 2004-03-23 at 14:52, Howard Lowndes wrote:

> But the telcos run in to stratas, the utilities run into stratas, so
> where's the problem?

The large turning radius of coaxial cable.  For all
copper and fiber cables the smaller the radius the
greater the loss and ingress of interference.  This
is particularly pronounced for coaxial cables, which
you would expect if you think of them as a coarse
waveguide.

Cabling apartment blocks has lots of cable turns of
small radius.  Twisted pair or fiber would be a
better technical choice, but at more expense, since
that would require active equipment at the cable
technology transition.

It looks to me that the carriers decided to avoid
the risks to the service's reputation which might
come from installations which allow the ingress
of interference and also that the carriers decided
that they would not get enough income from apartment
blocks to justify the cost of the additional technology
during the initial rollout (and, of course, no further
rollout occurred because the service bombed).

I'd caution you against comparing the technologies of
electricity utilities and communications utilities.
Although the copper cables might look similar their
usage differs enough that the technical issues are
quite different.  For example, electricity utilities
spend a lot of thought on "separation" -- making
sure the cable is far enough from other conductors,
including other electricity utility components -- a
minor issue for the design of communications
installations.

Cheers,
Glen