Period fibre-optic broadband

[Flyfisher]

I've read conflicting things about powerline 'leakage' to neighbouring houses. Some have suggested that the signals are filtered out by the supply meter while others have reported been able to connect to neighbouring devices, though that's not really any worse than wifi. Encryption should keep data private. Neighbouring houses are usually on different phases and powerline data can't jump phases, so the distance to the next house on the same phase might kill off the data strength. It's all a bit variable.

For the truly paranoid, it should be possible to add a filter to the mains cable as it enters the house to prevent the powerline signals from leaving the house wiring, or at least to attenuate them sufficiently to prevent an outside connection, but that's getting into specialist territory (and outside of mine!).

 

[Penners]

Interesting, thanks FF. Fortunately I don't think I'm close enough to our nearest neighbour for our powerline signal to get there before it runs out of puff! However, I hadn't thought of the business of different houses on different phases.

 

[Keithj]

Powerline units are normally "OK" as long as they are all on the same phase, which in most houses they will be. If you are one of the few with 3-phase mains, then you may have a problem.

Cheap powerline units can cause problems. If they don't comply with the regulations, they will probably interfere with other radio users, and will suffer interference from those. If you install a cheapo set, you may receive a visit from your local radio amateur carrying direction-finding equipment and an angry face. You may also find that your connection drops out with monotonous regularity.

The high-speed modem that goes with fibre optic broadband doesn't have to be in the same place as the router. A good friend of mine had his ADSL modem and router on the upstairs window sill (because that's where the telephone master socket was). He connected via WiFi to the study at the back of the house and to the lounge downstairs, with poor results. When he went fibre optic, he put the (new) modem still on the window sill, but with a power line adaptor: the router is now in the study fed from the other half of the powerline adaptor connection, with the desktop and printer attached to it and working well. The WiFi from the study reaches the rooms downstairs where he wants a signal, so he's happy.

I've done a lot of experimenting (in a long, thin house with a large chimney stack in the middle). At one stage, I had three wireless access points - North, Middle, and South. I've now got a single good quality (Draytek) wireless modem router in the study, fed with standard telephone extension cable from the master socket five yards away. I get full-speed coverage throughout the house and garden, and into the cart lodge and workshop.

 

[Penners]

Cheap powerline units can cause problems. If they don't comply with the regulations, they will probably interfere with other radio users, and will suffer interference from those.

Keith - I presume that, in this case, you're talking about powerline wi-fi extenders, and not the simple Ethernet senders/receivers?

 

[Keithj]

No, both: anything that uses the RF spectrum to send data down the power line.

It won't be on 2.4 GHz because that wouldn't even look at mains wiring. The ones I've seen use the MF and HF regions, with some guard bands (as laid down in the regulations). Some of the cheap ones ignore the guard bands.

Ethernet itself (not down the mains) is twisted-pair and plays well.

 

[Penners]

Itakuwa si juu ya 2.4 GHz kwa sababu kwamba bila hata kuangalia mains wiring. Ndio nimeona kutumia MF na HF mikoa, pamoja na baadhi ya bendi walinzi (kama yaliyowekwa katika kanuni). Baadhi ya wale nafuu kupuuza walinzi bendi.

Well, that's how it sounded to me.

:wink:

 

[Keithj]

Das ist ja immer das Problem mit Elektronik. Ich wünsche viel Spaß!

No, my Swahili is rubbish.

 

[Penners]

Mein Deutsch ist schlecht, aber es ist besser als mein Swahili.

 

[Feltwell]

Swahili?

You want to try sitting in a meeting with 2 IT network people, as I had to today. Apparently our fibre drive spec is fine because it's left-hand Iscuzzy and has the right number of blades, or something like that.

This gobbledegook carried on for well over half an hour - 2 people talking to each other in a language totally familiar to them (even though neither of them have English as a first language) and utterly incomprehensible to the rest of us.

Of course if it had been right-hand Iscuzzy then that would have just been plain ridiculous, obviously. Clearly in the Iscuzzy world the left-handers have risen up and taken over.

 

[Keithj]

They would indeed rise up and smite thee, and great would be the smiting thereof.

But meanwhile, I understood wot I writ. Which is more than I can say for Swahili. I can do bwana asifiwe, and let'isikia, and siyahamba and a few of that sort, but nothing to write to Tanzania about. German's OK, French is OK, Latin will do, Russian will survive, Greek and Hebrew are hard work, and anything else is reserved for eating and drinking. I can order beer in 57 languages (or could last time I tried, but the hangover was a shocker).

Anyway, iScuzzy is obsolete now. It's all that USB4 stuff, innit.

 

[Penners]

if it had been right-hand Iscuzzy then that would have just been plain ridiculous.

Well obviously. I can't believe anyone would even have considered that ridiculous possibility. :roll:

gobbledegook

Actually I somewhat sympathise with our IT brethren over the matter of geek-speech. Every specialist subject has to have its own esoteric language, in order to express concepts and describe things that are peculiar to that specialisation.

A builder talking about soldier courses or sarking boards to the average Joe would be met with blank looks. A surgeon discussing the excision of a melanocytic nevus would lose many people's interest. IT is possibly the most specialist and technical discipline of today, so it's hardly surprising that its language should be incomprehensible to the great majority of us. And yet IT specialists attract widespread derision for their "inability to speak plain English".

 

[Owain]

I was just looking forward to fibre-to-the-desktop, when desktops became redundant.

 

[Penners]

Are you talking about physical desktops or virtual, computer desktops?

 

[Flyfisher]

Anyway, iScuzzy is obsolete now. It's all that USB4 stuff, innit.

Or Thunderbolt, if you have fruity computing tastes.

 

[Penners]

Which is faster - USB4 or Thunderbolt?

And if you're transferring data from a computer to, say, an external hard drive, is it worth investing in either of these, or is the read/write speed of the HDD the limiting factor? In other words, are those two technologies aimed mainly at solid state drives?

 

[Feltwell]

I was just looking forward to fibre-to-the-desktop.

I had that just this morning for breakfast - a bowl of bran flakes whilst checking my emails.

 

[Penners]

Ho-ho-ho...!

 

[Feltwell]

I'm here all week Folks, more's the pity.

 

[Feltwell]

And yet IT specialists attract widespread derision for their "inability to speak plain English".

I *sort* of agree Penners. In a conversation with a builder though, I reckon they'd be hard pressed to make half an hour of continuously totally unintelligible statements to the average bod - some of it would be grasped.

Our IT network man though, talking in this case to an opposite number at a supplier, really came alive in this meeting - you could almost see the look in his eyes, "At last! Someone who speaks my language!" They then proceeded to have a solid half hour of effortlessly unintelligible interaction, as the rest of us sat there and quietly mouthed at each other "Do you understand a word of this?"

It's not really derision, clearly they need their tech speak, more just recognition of the fact that the conversation could have happened in Swahili and the rest of us mere mortals would have had just as much chance of understanding it!

 

[Flyfisher]

Which is faster - USB4 or Thunderbolt?

And if you're transferring data from a computer to, say, an external hard drive, is it worth investing in either of these, or is the read/write speed of the HDD the limiting factor? In other words, are those two technologies aimed mainly at solid state drives?

I must be getting old as I've not yet heard of USB4, though I'm not at all surprised. These things are subject to continuous improvement as the technology advances.

Is it worth investing in them? As ever, it depends. Most modern hard drives have something called a SATA interface and they plug directly into the PC motherboard. Like USB and Thunderbolt, it's basically a serial interface which means the cable is small, unlike those older PATA disk drives that used ribbon cables for their connection (P for 'parallel' = lots of wires, S for 'serial' = only a few wires).

So, modern disk drive performance is limited by the SATA interface, which like USB has various revisions. I can't remember the original speed but SATA2 was 3 Gbps and the current SATA3 hard drives are 6 Gbps.

In comparison, USB2 is 480 Mbps and the current USB3 is 5 Gbps, or about 10x faster.

So given that SATA3 hard drives are 6 Gbps, then USB3 is a close match and updating to USB4 is unlikely to give a noticeable speed increase (until SATA4 comes along!).

These speed figures are all 'headline' figures of course and can be hugely variable (downwards only ) depending on the nature of the data being transferred, but they are useful when trying to put together a 'matched' system and not wasting money on something that will make little difference to performance.

Having said all that, it's possible to eliminate USB with external drives altogether. Although the hard drive SATA interface is intended to plug into the PC motherboard, the nature of the interface means that the cable length can be a metre or two in length (I forget the precise specification) - long enough to be used for an 'external' hard drive with no need for time-consuming conversions to and from USB.

Obviously, it's not convenient to open up a PC to regularly access the motherboard so the answer is 'eSATA' or 'external SATA'. it sounds like another interface but is actually just a slightly different and more robust connector. There are no electronics involved. An eSATA connector is mounted in the standard PC add-on panels and a short flying lead connects to the PC motherboard. Thereafter, an external hard drive with and eSATA cable plugs into the PC eSATA connector and, effectively, directly into the PC motherboard. In this way, an external eSATA hard drive will perform exactly the same as an internal eSATA hard drive.

I hope I haven't fallen foul of Feltwell's Law of IT gibberish :wink:


As an aside, when I started working with computers (no jokes about punched cards please) parallel interfaces were the standard means to increase communication speeds, because of the limitation of serial transmission protocols and speeds, and ribbon cables were used in all manner of things but relatively recent technical advances in data transmission has made phenomenally fast serial data speeds not only possible but, more importantly, incredibly cheap. The technology we all take for granted these days (and sometimes curse!) really is truly remarkable.