On Nov 29, 1996 at 09:26 hrs, Frank Filippone of 3:632/107.103 wrote to John Clarke:

Hello Frank,

JC>> Which will achieve exactly nothing.  Optus will have similar
JC>> guidelines regarding local loop lengths (i.e. loss) - in fact while
JC>> they are setting up they will likely be worse than Telstra.  One
JC>> exchange serving all of Melbourne, as was reported here in the last
JC>> week or so, doesn't set the conditions for short local loops.

 FF> The Optus system is totally different to a standard PSTN system, so 
 FF> the above does not hold true.

 FF> The "local loop" in an Optus connection is the length of
cable from 
 FF> the back of your phone/modem to the little encoder/decoder box 
 FF> sitting against the front wall of your house. From there, the 
 FF> analogue signal is converted to a 64kbps data stream, which is sent 
 FF> off down the coax cable, which is then put on to a fibre cable, which 
 FF> then can send it anywhere without any signal loss, hence one big 
 FF> exchange can cover huge geographical areas.

 FF> To any modem, the local loop is only several metres in length, as 
 FF> opposed to hundreds or even thousands of metres in Telstra's case.

I stand corrected.

This arrangement sounds ideal, especially for modems.  Almost zero local
loop loss.  Conversion to ISDN 2B+D service should be relatively easy.  I
wonder if this means that an ISDN service will cost little more than the
standard analogue service?

At long last, but only just, I can see a point to those ugly cables.

Regards ... John
@EOT:

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