🚀 go-pugleaf

On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:30:51 +1100, David Clayton
<dcstar@NOSPAM.myrealbox.com> wrote:

>On Tue, 02 Nov 2010 11:05:37 +1100, Real Clear wrote:
> .........
>> Once upon a time, when the world was simple and Telstra was a telephone
>> company, the telephone system was entirely analog, and the whole system
>> ran over copper.
>> 
>Actually, when "Telstra" came into being a hell of a lot of their
>infrastructure was already digital.
>
>> Then optical fibre was used to link exchanges, and this left Telstra
>> with large bundles of redundant inter-exchange copper wire.
>> 
>Yep, a lot of digital inter-exchange trunks over copper were replaced with
>digital trunks over fibre. Long before that time the individual analogue
>circuits between exchanges were replaced with digital links multiplexing
>many voice channels over a single copper pair, so there were already lots
>of "redundant inter-exchange copper wire" which came in quite handy for
>the various early data networks.

I did a two day course on such PCM systems.
They ran at 2 Mbs and had 30 channels.
Before that the open wire systems used FDM at around 100 Khz.

>> Over the years, mainly through bad record-keeping, Telstra lost trace of
>> how much it had in the ground, and in a 1997 memo, Frank Blount
>> chastised his staff claiming that up to half of Telstra's $3 billion in
>> copper assets were unrecorded and effectively 'lost' to the system.
>> Through "concentrated efforts", he said, the company had been
>> rediscovering this cable at a rate of about $200 million in value a
>> year.
>.........
>Guess what, the "value" quoted for those assets was in the revenue that
>they generate for Telstra in the services they carry, not the "value" in
>the cost of the copper.
>
>Anyone who tries to like the "value" Telstra quote in relation to the
>value of the recovered scrap is just demonstrating ignorance - just like
>the ridiculous claim about some sort of conspiracy in putting in the NBN
>to somehow cash in on the copper currently in the ground.
>
>As far as conduits go, the NBN needs access to put their (tiny) fibre
>cables through, as it is currently done only when the conduit has
>insufficient space for new cabling is the old stuff removed - because it
>is far more cost-effective to just leave it there.
>
>-- 
>Regards, David.