Some ideas of what we could do with dry copper circuits to help build out our network.

There have been some interesting stories on SlashDot talking about running DSL modems or CSU/DSU's back to back over dry copper (sometimes also called alarm circuits).

• http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/04/29/158250

• http://slashdot.org/articles/00/04/03/2147239.shtml

If you can still order alarm and/or dry copper circuits this could be a great way to fairly cheaply build out our infrastucture.

A recent article from Robert Cringely describing how he got a DSL connection to work over a "dry copper pair".

• http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010823.html

And someone who's actually done some of this ...

• http://www.odessaoffice.com/sdsl.htm

A post regarding Pacific Bell's ability and willingness to provision dry copper and/or alarm circuits.

• http://lists.personaltelco.net/pipermail/ptp/2001q3/008758.html

-- AdamShand

Thoughts?

EliabHelon writes to the MailingList ...

and did i have fun. i met a qwest installer, named andy who's been with em for like 15 years. He had alot of good info and inside info for me, and was very happy to share it.it seems like the best way to get a dry-pair if anyones interested, is to ask for an alarm-circuit, he new exactly what it was and had installed several. If they won't do that the next thing is an LXFU circuit.

Renting a pair of wires from a telco is a common way (for businesses) to run DSL from you to an ISP. It is called a LADS (Local Area Data Service) and usual cost is $50/month if both ends are serviced by the same bunker. Basically, they just jumper two wires together. Any standalone pair of DSL modems can be paired over this quite easily. The main difference between this and a T1 is the T1 line is "conditioned" in the sense is must meet certain electrical specs (usually they run new wires or pick amoung pairs until they find one that meets the spec). LADS are cheap but it is up to you (and the other end) to provide the equipment that pumps data over the wires. When my company was downtown, we connected from our building on Broadway to rain.net (later bought by verio) by this method. Cheap and reliable. -- PhilHochstetler

my story about this: in the early days of DSL, before it was offered to residences, i experimented with using this technique to connect two buildings at my company. the line was indeed very cheap, i think it was not $50 per month but $50 per YEAR, plus some install fee that was also cheap. it was a single loop from building #1 to the CO and back to building #2, and i'm sure it's still there. getting it provisioned was not such a problem, at least compared to everything else i ever asked the telco do to. =)

however, the total length (as measured by the installers) ended up over the maximum length supported by DSL. this suprised me, but if anybody at US West had been able to tell me the location of my CO, i might have been able to predict it. =)

since the DSL aggregation point is ususally close to the CO, it's possible that there are situations where you could indeed get DSL from an ISP, yet this solution would not work. but if you have two sites near the CO, i'd suggest you look into it. -- Mykle

QWest's tariffs detailing the availability of LADS lines... http://tariffs.uswest.com:8000/eldocs/TARIFFS/Oregon/ORPLT/or_plt_t_s005p101.pdf#USW-TOC000070 We should get exchange (CO) locations as nodes into whatever GIS systems all y'all using. -- Jerritt

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