Speaking of 5G
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den2k88 wrote:
my parents can't even get a landline and a 56k connections because telephone box is at full capacity
This reminds me of an age-old story, i.e. from the 1970s when phone lines were analog and multiplexing was expensive: Bodø is a north Norway town with an airport that is essential to the entire region. When a runway was built, many years earlier, a single phone line was laid down below its surface, for communication between the tower and the main building. As traffic grew, the need for a second phone line grew. So they had two alternatives: Either dig a new ditch across the runway for a new physical cable, or use the old line and install multiplexers at each side. The cost of the alternatives were comparable(!), so they ran a project to evaluate the consequences of either. The multiplexer alternative won: They expanded from 1 to 30 phone connections (i.e. a 2 Mbps E1 digital mux, with A/D and D/A converters to adapt to the pre-WW2 standard analog phones) without digging up the runway. Around here, any old analog copper "sewing thread" wire was capable of carrying an ADSL stream of at least 4-5 Mbps (in the best case 10 Mbps) on top of the analog phone channel. The achieveable bit rate depends a lot on the distance to the local switch, but 2 Mbps E1 will work fine even at quite long distances. Today, 2 Mbps multiplexers are commodity items, the cost is magnitudes below the cost of digging up an airport runway :-). If the phone company really wanted to offer 30 times as high capacity, they could have done so - either by putting a mux on one line, like they did on the Bodø airstrip. Or they could install ADSL modems for those subscribers who wanted that, like we did here in Norway for something between half a million and one million customers. Nowadays, about 80% of Norwegian households have fiberoptic connections, so I guess that at least half a million ADSL modems were made available on the secondhand market. In any case: The years I had an ADSL connection, I didn't pay anything extra for the modem itself, so it couldn't be that expensive! Btw: In Europe, digital lines were never 56 kbps but 64 kbps. 56 kbps is a US artifact due to the "bit stealing" of the LSB every 6 byte to be used for signaling between switches. In Europe, signaling always were on a separate channel, leaving all 8 bits per byte untouched on the user channel. For use on analog and non-multiplexed phone lines, you could buy US style 56
Member 7989122 wrote:
For use on analog and non-multiplexed phone lines, you could buy US style 56 kbps modems
Which is what we were stuck with, 64k was for ISDN and private citizens were barred from having it, only companies (even o0ne person companies, but that requires a truckload of taxes to be paid).
GCS d--(d+) s-/++ a C++++ U+++ P- L+@ E-- W++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE- Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X