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Broadband options in rural Sweden?

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Skogsgurra

Skogsgurra

Electrical
Mar 31, 2003
11,815
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
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Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
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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.

No affiliation.

Benta.
 
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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.

No affiliation.

Benta.
 
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Please ignore my first post, sorry.

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

Gunnar Englund
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
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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
 
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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
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
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The eastern Canada province of Nova Scotia recently finished up a rural broadband project.


[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" they used a Radio WAN technology. I believe that one of the providers uses 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.
 
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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).
 
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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.


 
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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
--------------------------------------
Half full - Half empty? I don't mind. It's what in it that counts.
 
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Harry,

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


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image.php

If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!
 
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I thougt that was on Ireland - Swift, A Modest Proposal. Or is that a custom practized also by Gordies?

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


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
 
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I certainly hope you meant to say "Go for *it* Gunnar!" :)

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.


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