×
INTELLIGENT WORK FORUMS
FOR ENGINEERING PROFESSIONALS

Log In

Come Join Us!

Are you an
Engineering professional?
Join Eng-Tips Forums!
  • Talk With Other Members
  • Be Notified Of Responses
    To Your Posts
  • Keyword Search
  • One-Click Access To Your
    Favorite Forums
  • Automated Signatures
    On Your Posts
  • Best Of All, It's Free!
  • Students Click Here

*Eng-Tips's functionality depends on members receiving e-mail. By joining you are opting in to receive e-mail.

Posting Guidelines

Promoting, selling, recruiting, coursework and thesis posting is forbidden.

Students Click Here

Jobs

Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
I visited a meeting about "fibre to the peasants" yesterday evening. It was arranged by the county telecom and internet officer and community IT manager. The purpose was to make us decide to invest in fiber. And to do it before April 15th. Which is very close in time.

To do so, we were supposed to form a group and do the digging and put tubing for the fibre from our local telephone station to as many as possible of our wide-spread dwellings. Our village consists of a central "core" with something like 30 houses in a distance less than a mile from the telephone station and then a sparse collection of houses spread out over an area with three or four miles radius.

My questions are:

1. What experience do you have from similar projects?
2. What technologies are there? We do have copper wire ADSL, which is giving us anything from 3.5 to a little better than 200 kb/s. Depending on distance from the telephone station.
3. What technologies can be expected in the next five years? Radio? Satellite? Better (higher rate) copper utilization? Other?
4. Improvements in "fiber tapping" technology, so that individual houses can tap into existing long distance fibers?
5. What alternatives are there to digging ditches? Putting fiber on power lines? (telephone lines may be a bad choice if telecom companies or copper thieves decide to remove the line) Or going to cellular radio systems for short distance coverage?
6. How necessary do you think that a 100 Mb/s connection is? I am satisfied with my 100 - 200 kb/s connection. I can wait a few seconds before a document is loaded. No probs for me. But, then again, I do not watch streaming video or play games with heavy graphics.
7. Any other views and experience that you have?

Thanks a lot in advance!

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Skogs, as far as I know you are in Sweden.
In the Scandinavian countries there is an offering for ADSL broadband using the old NMT 450 frequencies, which means longer distances are no big issue.
The company is called Net1.
http://www.net1.se/

No affiliation.

Benta.
 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Skogs, as far as I know you are in Sweden.
In the Scandinavian countries there is an offering for CDMA broadband using the old NMT 450 frequencies, which means longer distances are no big issue.
The company is called Net1.
http://www.net1.se/

No affiliation.

Benta.
 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Please ignore my first post, sorry.

Benta.
 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
Thanks! Thougt ol' NMT was buried (no pun) decades ago. Will look into it asap.

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

In rural Alberta many of us get our internet via radio. There are three competing companies in my area using towers to distribute wireless internet. We have an area almost as large as Texas and a very sparse population. Most farms may be reckoned in sections, a section being a square mile. The speed of fibre is much faster than wireless, but on a cost benefit evaluation, wireless may be attractive.

Bill
--------------------
"Why not the best?"
Jimmy Carter

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
That's interesting, Bill. Your connection seems to work quite well. I mean, you are a frequent visitor to EngTips and that wouldn't be possible if your connection didn't work.
Is this a county-wide network? Or community-wide? What about costs? What rate (kb/s) can be achieved? Is it symmetrical (same speed for upload and download)? Or is it like ADSL, with slower upload?

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

The eastern Canada province of Nova Scotia recently finished up a rural broadband project.

http://www.gov.ns.ca/econ/broadband/faq/

[Amusingly, the local telco is now rolling-out fibre to the home for all only two years later. The FTTH will provide up to 170 Mbps. I'll take it the instant it's available.]

For the "last [N] mile[s]" they used a Radio WAN technology. I believe that one of the providers uses Motorola Canopy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Canopy

Cheaper solution would be Wifi with high gain yagi antennas. You'd need to hopscotch to reach those distances. Might be a pain in the...

There are many point to point solutions for Ethernet bridging. They're only actually license-free if they're actually license-free in your jurisdiction.

 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

3. What technologies can be expected in the next five years?

LTE is supposed to make cost/bit cheaper.

Current satellite will always be sub-par due to latency, cost, usage limits. Far-future with swarms of low- or mid-orbits may be a universal communications solution.

Fibre to the Home is now feasible, simply by forcing the installation cost to be much less (now reported to be only about $500 per home).
 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

verizon is rolling out a new rural internet option in the USA using a high gain antenna. Could be an option in other locations.

The company will charge $59.99 per month for 10 gigabytes (GB) of data and an initial fee of $199.99 for installing the antenna device either on an outside wall or at the roof. Home Fusion provides download speed of 5 to 12 megabits per second and 2 to 5 megabits for upload.


http://www.zacks.com/stock/news/70991/Verizon+Unveils+Home+Broadband  

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
Thanks to all for the valuable ingormation.

I suspected that there are a lot more possibilities than fibre. And your replies confirm that.

I think there's more to learn and I will follow this thread for many weeks to come. KUTGW!

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Harry,

You mean "Fortunately, I live/work on the other side of the river from where the locals eat their offspring." lol
  

----------------------------------
  
If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!
 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Scotty, ever been up in "The Shires" (e.g. Alston / Nenthead etc?)

H

www.tynevalleyplastics.co.uk

Why be happy when you can be normal?

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
I thougt that was on Ireland - Swift, A Modest Proposal. Or is that a custom practized also by Gordies?

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Gunnar Fiber will be the future.  Eventually TV will be best served by fiber.

Using standard fiber equipment will be more serviceable and better understood by more service providers.

Look for less expensive installations.  In the USA a lot of fiber runs next to railroad tracks.  This was because some clever engineers figured out how to shove a single plow blade with a locomotive.  This got a cable dropped 2 meters underground without actually lifting and removing any dirt.  It was just a temporary wedging-apart of the dirt long enough for the cable to drop in.

Driving a tractor a few miles, albeit slowly, for 90% of your install might make good economic sense.  You'd probably only need to go down something like 800cm in your location.

 

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
Thanks a lot, Smoked.

I have been thinking along that track.

Actually, I have sketches showing a similar arrangement. But this one will be mounted on an ordinary farmer's tractor and use the tractor's power available for attachments. A plow or a "wheel with spades" followed by a device that presses the tubing into the ditch will be used to "route" an extra trench in the bottom of the ditches that go along all our dirt roads over here. A scraper will then put the mud back onto the tubing and we will probably also use a brightly coloured tape to alert "guys with a spade" I figure that we will need a 30 cm deep trace at the bottom of the ditch.

I have a very skilled blacksmith with a complete workshop only some 500 meters away. He doesn't know it yet, but he will be engaged in this work.  

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

In most cable laying plows, the cable feeds down through a passage in the plow blade.  There are a variety of configurations.  I never saw the locomotive version "smoked" mentions, but I have seen plenty of bulldozer pulled plows.  And I had personal experience as a college lad working my way through working in a dealership for the following:

http://www.ditchwitch.com/trenchers-plows/walk-behind-vibratory-plow/410sx-vibratory-plow/

The large bulldozer types just use brute force and 'pull' the blade through the ground.  The smaller residential drop models like the one in the link above use a vibratory device to make the blade 'saw' or 'knife' through the ground.

Anecdote alert:  cable was being laid (this happened to be phone) all throughout a rural community and all the water lines, gas lines, etc. (no sewers - all field lines) had been marked accordingly.  The plow was forging along a particular road and all of a sudden, the side of a nearby house just exploded and the kitchen sink started coming across the yard.  Seems that someone had tied on to the water works clandestinely (sp?) and with hard pipe so the water company hadn't known to mark it.  Oooppps.

rmw

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Go for Gunnar!  If you go that route take some pictures for us.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
I certainly hope you meant to say "Go for *it* Gunnar!"  smile

I will let you know how we progress. In the meantime, enjoy the following film from Roger's smithy. Roger is the man in read and without a cap. The guy in cap is Jorma - a real character.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uh6nj30uNtE

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Harry - yes, Alston is 'a bit different' to say the least. Haven't had cause to visit Nenthead yet. I've paddled the Allen during flood conditions a few times, and the river wasn't as worrying as the locals. smile

Didn't realise you lived that far up - must be hard work in winter.

skogs,

Geordies don't eat their offspring. We're the civilised ones from down in the lowlands. Not like where Harry lives. wink
  

----------------------------------
  
If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!
 

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
Harry was the lucky one that wasn't eaten then...

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

There are wireless options but I doubt anything compares to the speed and reliability of fiber. In North America there are a number of cell data services available. Most can be reasonably fast but they often have low data caps or cost a lot. Not sure what you have there. I have fiber. It's good stuff and way faster than DSL. I do manage to download 100-200gig a month.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

They ran fiber through our neighborhood about two summers ago.
When I upgraded from DSL to xDSL, I thought they'd run fiber to the house.
Nope.  Same old copper pair.  
... which must be connected to fiber not far away, but not at the house.

I used to think I understood this stuff.
 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Mike; there are two schemes these days.  One is "Fiber to the House" which has fiber running to the customer.  These are the people with 50 or 100Mb/s to their computers.  They're the guys who download the next first-person-shooter map in under 2 seconds while I wait 3 minutes with 2Mb/s.

The other scheme is "Fiber in the Street".  They put fiber to coax converters out in front of your house so you just get coax in the house.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Nope; no coax to the house, or in it.
Telco sorta-twisted, two pairs, at least 10 years old, from the pole to the demarc box.   
My own 4 pair superfine premises cable, 10-ish years old, from the demarc to the center of the house and a couple of RJ sockets.
Generic RJ zipcord to the xDSL box, which looks sort of like the DSL box, with RF and wired Ethernet outputs.
I think it might have a HDMI connector, but we're only using the broadband.
I got a Roku box for Christmas; that brings in HDMI video over the broadband and the twisted pair, with what looks like decent resolution and only occasional droputs.  
Damn close to magic.


 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
Mike
Sounds like an interetsing alternative. Could you, please, read and tell what brand and type the box(es) are? Picture, perhaps?
Damn close to magic is good!

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

AT&T calls the service "U-verse".  
I defy you to get any useful technical information out of their website att.com.
Both the DSL and xDSL (U-verse) boxes were made by an outfit called 2WIRE, which sort of supports them at 2wire.com.
I'd be happy to photograph the box, were I not 1500 miles away from it until at least May.
 

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
Fair enough Mike. I got enough to go on.
Hope you get back home eventually.

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

The future of broadband perhaps ultimately comes down to whether it will be economically practical to maintain a minimum quality of access for all Internet users. It may become increasingly difficult for companies to compete through speed when weighed against demands for reliability and lower prices...

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

" minimum quality of access for all Internet users"

I think that's relatively easy. Something like 10% of the users use 90% of the bandwidth. Limiting that 10% of users to no more than 50% more than the typical user would keep the bandwidth from getting overloaded.

TTFN
FAQ731-376: Eng-Tips.com Forum Policies

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Fibre is the future, everything else is a stop gap, and even wireless depends on fibre at the back end, so why not just do it and get it over with and stop pratting about with research?

"Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly. - Henry Spencer"
Antonia Vladova. Homepage: http://freesatellitetv.me

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

Did the installed price of fiber suffer a precipitous drop?

I hate when I miss a meeting.

Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA

RE: Broadband options in rural Sweden?

(OP)
I must ask the same question. In case little25 missed it, this is about fringe zones in sparsely populated rural areas. With up to five miles of trenches, canalisation and fiber for one household and one mile on the average.

Gunnar Englund
www.gke.org
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.

Red Flag This Post

Please let us know here why this post is inappropriate. Reasons such as off-topic, duplicates, flames, illegal, vulgar, or students posting their homework.

Red Flag Submitted

Thank you for helping keep Eng-Tips Forums free from inappropriate posts.
The Eng-Tips staff will check this out and take appropriate action.

Reply To This Thread

Posting in the Eng-Tips forums is a member-only feature.

Click Here to join Eng-Tips and talk with other members!


Resources