Dark Copper

[skyking]

A potential client has an office 1/2 mile from his home. Do you think it is possible to lease some dark copper from the telco for a cisco LRE hookup? He wants his tape backup at the house. If we can get a clean pair routed through, that would give him a 2Mbps+ private network connection.
Have you guys ever done this?

 

[JRock]

Never done it but an interesting concept... What may I ask is the reason for the tape backup being at his house? If its so he can change tape when they fill I don't see a point as jobs large enough to even fill and 40/80 DLT would take overnight to get anywhere near complete (at 2Mbps).

Why not just administer remotely? A 1/2 mile drive is a lot cheaper then what he is trying to do. All backups would run much quicker then he could store tapes "off-site: at his house.

Please explain why he wants to do this so I can get a better idea and perhaps be of more assistance.

 

[skyking]

I presume his reasoning goes like this: Automatic off-site backup is just that: Automatic.
Once it is set up, you don't have the human factor to contend with. Additionally, he can have a workstation there with a true secure connection.

 

[JRock]

I am assuming you have hardware quotes already so I was wondering what the approx cost of this long-reach ethernet solution is...

 

[skyking]

8 port 2950 switch can be had for less than $2000, and the modems are cheap enough.
The alternative? Price out a 2Mbps uplink out of the office, I would guess more than $200 a month. The home cable connection would serve for sufficient download speed.

 

[cmetz]

skyking, the 1/2 mile between the office and the house is almost definitely irrelevant. What is the distance between the house and its CO, what is the distance between the office and its CO, and are the two COs the same? And are you certain that those entire paths are copper?

The telco network is typically a heirarchy, rooted at the CO. The UNE rules deal with getting a loop from the customer presence to the CO as far as I know, and there are no requirements to do "subloop unbundling" - that is, there is no requirement to provide a copper loop from the customer presence to any other point than the CO. And most telco networks are really not designed to allow customer site to customer site connections. Even if it's physically possible, telco OSSs are brittle and unlikely to support such a setup.

And then there's the problem of telcos not being at all cooperative with UNE users. If you're not a CLEC yourself, you may just be SOL. Oh, and BTW, you can't just run anything over their copper you want to, it must meet certain emissions criteria for that cable plant. LRE probably is not approved for public network trunk bundles - you'll probably have to get an ATU-R and ATU-T.

 

[skyking]

My old telco friend says it is possible, but totally dependent on the provider. The two locations would have to share the CO for this to work, I would think.

 

[Malak]

Originally posted by: skyking
My old telco friend says it is possible, but totally dependent on the provider. The two locations would have to share the CO for this to work, I would think.

Right, so if the CO is the opposite direction of his house it might not work.

As someone else noted, backing up over 2mbps is rather slow. Just because it's at the office doesn't mean it can't be automatic backup. I still don't see why he doesn't backup at the office instead...

 

[bgroff]

This is no different than the folks who have done SDSL over "dry copper". Apparently the easiest way to get this provisioned is to get a alarm monitoring circuit between the two sites. Then get your own SDSL modems and away you go... What you should google for is "homebrew sdsl".

 

[JRock]

Why not just throw some high gain antenna's on both roofs... 54Mbps in line of sight (depending on the equipment you?re using

Note: Comment above was a product of 2 hours sleep after drinking all night and now being at my desk w/o and coffee...

On a side note I have had success with this between my house and a friends house a little more then 1/4 mile away.