Long term, fiber to the home (and the business or public facility) should be the goal. One connection at each building or area, be it a home, business, church, library, stadium, hospital, whatever, can handle all communications needs for it, be the needs voice, video, audio, data, whatever. A copper connection, even coaxial cable, just has too many disadvantages compared with fiber for handling that single connection.
Short term, wireless is a possibility. The chief problem with wireless, besides distance, is trees in the way of a line-of-sight path between antennas. The way to get over trees is towers. Some people think towers are ugly. Trenches are pretty ugly, too, as well as safety hazards, and cost. We have to have poles for street lights, we can't just hang the street lights from the sky, so why not put communications media (wire or fiber) on those poles again? Media buried underground are, in general, more secure from most hazards, except backhoes and ditch witches digging more trenches. If we do bury something underground, it should be conduit, pipes to contain wire or fiber media, not directly bury the media itself. And bury multiple conduits, so one pipe's media can be active while the media in another pipe is being replaced.
DSL (Digital Subscriber Loop) can use current twisted-pair phone wires. U S West seems antagonistic to renting wires to use for DSL, though. Perhaps too many DSL circuits in a bundle of wires will cause interference among the DSL circuits. Not with voice circuits, though.
Wireless links can be owned instead of rented. The radios are expensive, but prices are dropping. If a radio lasts long enough, both in the sense that it doesn't fail and in the sense that it stays up-to-date with the price and speed of newer models of radios, it can be cheaper than wires or fiber. Fiber, or even coaxial cable, could have higher bandwidth than wireless, though. Reliability of a wireless link can be decreased by weather or other natural phenomena, especially wind and the growth of trees. Too many wireless links in a small area can result in interference among the links.
There are a few other problems with media on poles. A phone installer tells me media on poles attract woodpeckers which make holes in the outer layer, and water gets in and disrupts the quality of signals on the media. A letter to the Monitor several weeks ago was a complaint that Adelphia has not removed CATV cables from a pole in their backyard. A letter in Tuesday's, February 8, 2000, Monitor was a complaint that there are too many towers for antennas cropping up around town, and that they're just plain ugly. I don't know why people think such things are ugly. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. They should be grateful they aren't blind, it seems to me.
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I'm counting "media" as "one thing," though that's probably cheating and I should separate it into wireless, fiber and copper, with orthogonal separations for buried and overhead, too. Combining stuff makes the posts so long, but separating stuff makes so many posts to do.
I need to strengthen my list of problems with wireless. Interference is probably a bigger problem than trees. Also, trees grow, so even if they aren't a barrier now, they might be in a year or two. People build new structures in the line of sight, too. Back to interference, yes, both radio interference and those who seem to have authority and think they have responsibility to interfere with where your antenna is located. Most other wireless problems are weather-related, such as water or ice in the wrong spot, say inside a cable, weakening or killing the signal, or sunshine heating equipment to the point where it won't work (hint: paint your outdoor boxes glossy white,) or sometimes the sunshine or a reflection of it is the radio interference.
A new problem with wireless is that when a person is walking around on the roof of a tall, or in Los Alamos, tallish like 3 or 4 stories, building, some model citizen with September 11, 2001 in mind might just call the police and report that a terrorist with a gun is loose, could they please unleash the full force of their SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) team on them??
Well, you could fall from some high spot, too. That would be a problem. You could get hurt.
New Wimax, IEEE 802.16 (Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, eye-triple-e) wireless equipment has been "real soon now" for several years, and maybe all it will do is cause an avalanche of interference problems if it ever does arrive.
The conversion of TV stations from analog to digital is supposed to release spectrum for internet, among other uses. We'll see how that goes. I predict mixed reception (yes, that is a double entendre.)
I don't think I knew about HDD (Horizontal Directional Drilling) for buried conduit eight years ago, so there's a point about which I was at least ignorant, if not just plain wrong. There are some problems with HDD, though. Mud pits for the wet dirt (or dirty water) have to be dug, usually right where there is pavement or landscaping, so it's not as non-intrusive as we would hope. There are many potential safety problems, with all the other buried utilities contributing most of the risk. Gas blows up, or infiltrates buildings so the buildings blow up or occupants get sick, or just starts fires in general. Electricity shocks people, sometimes they suffer permanent damage such as going comatose, or dying, or sparks can ignite gas or other combustibles, or voltage changes can damage equipment all over town as well as the drill itself. Water can cause holes where creatures and the vehicles they occupy can fall in, maybe later when the project was supposedly finished and cleaned up, or can flood buildings, cause ice slicks, get contaminated in the drinking water supply. Sewers may have methane gas, too, from decomposition of solid wastes, or toxic or otherwise dangerous materials, and are probably quite likely to have bacterial, viral or fungal agents that could make creatures sick or despoil vegetation. The gas line through the sewer at Diamond Drive and Orange Street was a big problem waiting to happen, but fortunately, the County dug it up and repaired it. So the real problem here, I think, is knowing what's already buried before we go poking holes through the subsurface.
I think my comment did inspire Spivak to recommend conduit, in fact, multiple conduits. And, it turns out, back when Sid Singer was a County Councilor, long before the year 2000, the Council directed the Utilities Department to add conduit for fiber to every trench they dug for their other utilities. Sometimes Utilities does that, and sometimes not, and sometimes even if they do they eventually find some purpose other than fiber for that extra pipe. I don't think they have ever placed multiple conduits, though, unless you count the BAR ones with maybe 3 pipes dedicated to 3 purposes, phone, cable TV and fiber, but maybe they put a spare electrical one along with those 3.
Maybe the woodpecker problem with overhead wires would not happen with fiber. Maybe what attracts the woodpeckers are sounds that the heating in the wires cause, or magnetic fields around the wires, neither of which happens with fiber, although I suppose there could be some sounds due to external temperature changes with the fiber.
My conclusion is still that fiber is by far the preferable medium, and that it should either be run through buried conduits or overhead on poles. The poles are cheaper than the burying, by the way. But the conduits can be used for different media in the future, probably easier and thus cheaper than re-stringing replacement or even additional media on poles. Wood poles do eventually rot, though, and they're not as strong in winds as aluminum, and they can be too strong when something hits them at the bottom, unlike aluminum poles designed to "break-away."
One thing nice about HDD is that the conduit ends up being one piece from a reel, no glued splices like short pieces put into a trench. So it's less likely to get flooded with water, ice near the ends when it's cold, dirt washed in with dirty water, sewage, whatever. Unless it gets broken underground. Work on other pipes that have to be buried, gas, water, sewer, is most likely to cause such damage, although even a seismic shift could break pipes, too. Hard rock ground, or transitions at an angle between softer and harder soils/rocks are problems for HDD, too.
Now, one of my dreams is to have a "robotic gopher" (prairie dog, whatever) that would make a tunnel for conduit without the mud holes, piles of dirt, etc. Especially if we could just go rent one at Frank's Supply for $200 a day and put conduit between our house and 2 or 3 neighbors' houses in a day or two. I'm going to post a new topic about ownership one of these days, and this will be a key element to that. So will equipment for showing what is already buried, chiefly GPR (Ground Penetrating RADAR (RAdio Detection And Ranging.))
By BAR, I think I meant BAER, which was the activity after the Cerro Grande fire of May 2000. I think it's pronounced bear, and stands for something like Burned Area Environmental Restoration. Part of the BAER activity in Los Alamos was to bury the electric lines and replace water, gas and sewer lines in some of the Western Area and much of the North Community.
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