RB>> Now everyone, lets write to Austel and get rid of Telstra. Give
 RB>> Optus a chance to show what they are make off.

 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.

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

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

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

Regards,
Frank


... There aren't enough days in the weekend.
--- GoldED 2.50+