Re: Verizon Dumping Usenet Servers


Jon Kirwan wrote:

On Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:15:31 -0400, "Michael A. Terrell"
<mike.terrell@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Jon Kirwan wrote:

I have asked them, twice since 2002, what it would cost to add cable
service for access to the internet. The price ticket is a one-time
charge of $3000. They have to run about 1500 feet of coax from the
road to where my home is at (150' rise from the road, about a 1/4 mile
back) and in this area there is 60" of rain a year so there are issues
of moisture intrusion which make installation just a tad expensive.
I'm sure that at about $2/ft laid-in, it's a bargain, but I haven't
been interested in spending that kind of money just to get access to
the internet (I don't watch broadcasts, ever.) I have better things
to do with that kind of cash.

It sounds like they are discounting the construction by more than
50%, at $2 a foot. It cost us over $18,000 a mile to build new aerial
plant in 1985. Underground construction was a lot higher, due to all the
buried rock around the Cincinnati area.

In this area, it's top quality organic soil from 6" to 24" of depth,
then red, blue, and various grades in between of clay with a few round
rocks of varying sizes from 'tiny' to maybe 5-6" diameters
interspersed. 900' elevation above sea level today, but not always
so. Trenching is easy enough... I've dug some long ones myself with
my backhoe here.

All that said, I still agree. It's probably discounted already so
that they pick up part of the cost just to get us hooked up.

The cable they use near the house itself seems to be pretty high
quality already and I have to imagine that if they put it in the
ground it will be of still higher quality if they want to keep it low
maintenence, later. We live in the middle of a forest system (my
trees here are over 100' tall, with trunk diameters well over 3') so
roots will be a significant issue in time. I would probably suggest
placing it along the paved driveway edge and down a few feet. However,
that's more than 1500' getting up to the house and they still need to
worry about root systems, rabbits, and the like.

If they didn't have to worry about crafted impedances along the way,
I'd imagine they'd want _armored_, _flooded_, and _jacketed_ coax. I
have no idea if that exists for what they need, though. Beyond my pay
grade. But it can't be cheap.


Underground construction can double the cost to install. It is
usually done in gray schedule 80 PVC conduit and requires vaults for
line extenders. A 1500 foot build would need at least one line
extender, and possibly another power transformer & UPS. There is
flooded underground cable, but it is still used with conduit. Gophers
have been known to chew holes in armored cable, and squirrels chew
through the shield of aerial cables.

I wrote software about 25 years ago to design CATV distribution
systems, but I doubt it would still load into a computer. It was
written on 5.25" floppies for a Commodore 64. It allowed you to enter
the distance, and chose the brand and type of coax, along with all
passive and active devices we used. One design I did was a two mile
run, and was under .5 dB from design to 'as built'.


--
You can't have a sense of humor, if you have no sense!
.

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