From editor@telecom-digest.org Wed Apr 21 21:43:10 2004 Received: (from ptownson@localhost) by massis.lcs.mit.edu (8.11.6p2/8.11.3) id i3M1hAA15385; Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:43:10 -0400 (EDT) Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:43:10 -0400 (EDT) From: editor@telecom-digest.org Message-Id: <200404220143.i3M1hAA15385@massis.lcs.mit.edu> X-Authentication-Warning: massis.lcs.mit.edu: ptownson set sender to editor@telecom-digest.org using -f To: ptownson Approved: patsnewlist Subject: TELECOM Digest V23 #200 TELECOM Digest Wed, 21 Apr 2004 21:43:00 EDT Volume 23 : Issue 200 Inside This Issue: Editor: Patrick A. Townson Last Word on Digital TV (jmayson@nyx.net) Re: Heat Seems to Affect Speed (J Kelly) Re: Network Slow Down With Hot Weather (Nick Landsberg) Re: Digital Cellular, was Feds: No Analog TV by '09 (J Kelly) Re: VoIP's Broadband Bottleneck (Hank Karl) Verizon Resellers: Broadview and MetTel (John Polcari) All contents here are copyrighted by Patrick Townson and the individual writers/correspondents. Articles may be used in other journals or newsgroups, provided the writer's name and the Digest are included in the fair use quote. By using -any name or email address- included herein for -any- reason other than responding to an article herein, you agree to pay a hundred dollars to the recipients of the email. =========================== Addresses herein are not to be added to any mailing list, nor to be sold or given away without explicit written consent. Chain letters, viruses, porn, spam, and miscellaneous junk are definitely unwelcome. We must fight spam for the same reason we fight crime: not because we are naive enough to believe that we will ever stamp it out, but because we do not want the kind of world that results when no one stands against crime. Geoffrey Welsh =========================== See the bottom of this issue for subscription and archive details and the name of our lawyer; other stuff of interest. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: jmayson@nyx.net Subject: Last Word on Digital TV Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 23:28:22 GMT Organization: Road Runner High Speed Online http://www.rr.com 10 responses to this thread were posted. I have consolidated them. Sorry for the top post. >> Today I have seen black and white portable sets for as low as $14.99! >> We recently picked up some color 13" sets for under $100. There's no >> mention anywhere that these sets will be useless before the end of the >> decade. I wonder how many average consumers are aware of this? I can >> see people buying analog TVs right up until the drop dead date. > There'll still be plenty of TV's out there that are NTSC in 2009. > Whatever replaces the bandwidth currently being used will be tuned by > those sets. I've got a little 5" B&W unit with a variable tuner - I > can pick up paging systems and public safety and interestingly, some > cell traffic if I tune in just the right areas. Not exactly. Once upon a time televisions went up to channel 83 (890 MHz). I forget the year, but the FCC took away everything above channel 69 (806 MHz and above). This was reallocated to analog cellular telephone and land-mobile services (public safety & business). Early on much of the activity in this band was analog and could be tuned with an older model TV that tuned past channel 69. The current plan is to take away channels 60-69 (746 - 806 MHz) and reallocate that to land-mobile. However it will be purely digital. A quarter-century old television will not demodulate that. And per the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986 you could go to prison for tuning your television past channel 80 as that belongs to cellular telephone. It's a very poorly written law that criminalizes the mere tuning of those frequencies regardless of your intent. RF engineers who use test equipment in that range technically are breaking the law. > The other thing to keep in mind about CRT based televisions is that > over a period of about 5 years they're pretty much shot nowadays. I > can already see my 5 year old set redding out. But then it gets heavy > usage. I got a television for Christmas when I was eleven years old. I will turn 35 this year. The television still works as well as the day "Santa" brought it to me. No, they don't make TV's like they used to! > The only thing that will be really nice about HDTV is the wide aspect > ratio. But that will be for moot when Hollywood gets it's hooks in and > decided what I can watch and where I can watch it. That's a whole other issue ... ;-) > If it gets much worse I think I'm just going to toss the television > entirely. I refuse to buy CD's until the RIAA stops it's warrantless > war. If the MPAA gets any more power I just throw the finger to > television and movies too. There are still books I haven't read. :) I did this years ago, but it was because there was simply nothing on worth watching. The only TV I see is "second hand" television (my wife is an addict). > Very few people realize that there is a sunset on analog tv. Of > those, very few actually believe it will happen. Congress forgets > that the people that will be forced to buy a bunch of new tv's and > convertors are the same people that elect them to office. I have > never believed the Dec 31, 2006 sunset date for NTSC. Another issue is transmitter, antenna, and tower construction. I read somewhere that the manufacturers of these products simply can't keep up. In some areas broadcasters are having problems finding a place for their new towers. Environmental concerns, NIMBY's, etc. are preventing them from going up. Now this "news" I heard a few years ago. Perhaps the log-jam has broken, I don't know. I don't believe the deadline either. > Cellular still hasn't gone 100% digital, it seems odd to me that > analog cellular seems to be getting a longer sunset period than analog > television is getting (based on when digital cellular service first > became available vs. when DTV became available). And people have more > tv's than cellphones, I have two cellphones in my household, but have > seven televisions. Could it be because a telephone (be it land-line or cellular) is looked upon as a necessity? You should be able to call 9-1-1 from your cell phone the size of a brick? There's a company in California called SOMA Networks that has a neat product. It'll use existing 800 MHz analog cellular infrastructure to bring wireless broadband to areas without cable modems and DSL. If this takes off I wonder how it'll affect analog cell phones? > > The only way I can see this working is for the FCC to demand analog sets > > stop being sold on a certain date, then a number of years later demand > > TV stations drop their analog signals. > (I'll interpreted this as "the only way this seems acceptable" rather > than " ... this seems workable" -- and join you in "finding a hair in this > soup" getting dished out, the way it appears here ...) "Mr. and Mrs. America" has no CLUE how their TV works, much less knows anything about analog versus digital signals. If the government really wants DTV to be a reality, they have to have a plan to get DTV compatible receivers into the homes of "Mr. and Mrs. America". One way to do this is to mandate all TVs sold in the USA after a certain date be analog and digital compatible. Wait, say, 7 to 10 years. Most people would have replaced their televisions in that time frame. Then cut-over. I honestly expect people to wake up January 1, 2007 banging on their TVs wondering why they can't watch the Rose Bowl Parade. >> There's no mention anywhere that these sets will be useless before >> the end of the decade. I wonder how many average consumers are >> aware of this? > Hell no, (not to the extent that you-and-I were, at least ... and I > refuse to believe that it will go over quite like that, as seems you > do, too) I personally think the date will slide. I'm painting an picture of television Armageddon to show what a lack of planning can do. I would call it "bad planning" but I don't think there was any planning to be bad. >> I can see people buying analog TVs right up until the drop dead date. > Sure. And there will be an after-market market for gadgets to > keep'em useful, converting the digital signal arriving on cable or > over the air into an analog one ... plus there are all those VCRs > and DVDs that "talk" to those TV's also ... ;-) Yes, existing VCRs and DVD players (heck, even Beta) will talk to the analog TVs. I thought the FCC ruled that cable providers could not provide an analog signal because that would "force" people to have cable to watch over-the-air signals? It was a flimsy argument, IMHO, but it appears cable operators must be digital also. >> ...I cannot believe the FCC is allowing analog TVs to be sold today when >> their current plan to render them useless in a little over 30 months. > You want them to dictate that they be sold with some kind of sticker > attached, alerting to that fact, right? Not "disallow" it (not that they > could, I don't believe) ... > I'd been wondering about that, too, and support that idea -- but guess who > would like it *very little* ... ! :-) Receivers must be FCC accepted before they can be sold in this country. The FCC could simply say no analog-only TV may be sold. Period. This is where my libertarian political views and personal "do what's right" views collide. On one hand I say it's a "buyer beware" world and if you don't research what you're buying don't expect the government to do it for you. OTOH, if the government wants DTV, they need to make some effort to steer people towards the right receivers be it through "warning labels" or an outright ban on analog-only TVs. > After the 2009 cutoff for NTSC signals, you'll see cell providers start > cranking digital signals down in the UHF bands of the former TV plan. > Lower frequency = better propagation, less multi-path etc. The spectrum has already be reallocated and doesn't include cellular. Current analog TV signals require 6 MHz of bandwidth. DTV signals require only 1 MHz. Additionally, you cannot have adjacent analog channels in a given market due to interference. You can with digital. (Before anyone corrects me, you can have 4 & 5, 6 & 7, and 13 & 14 in one market because there is frequency separation). We had a great opportunity to free up some bandwidth, but the television broadcast lobby threw a tantrum and won their "right" to keep 6 MHz per channel. My suggestion was this. Do away with all VHF TV channels. We could expand the FM broadcast band. Add a LPFM (low-power FM band) for community broadcasters. Expand the 6 meter amateur radio band. Who knows what else. Next, in the largest markets the frequencies used by channels 14 through 20 are reserved for land-mobile. I would make this nationwide. I would also take away channels 60 through 69. In effect this would give TV broadcasting analog channels 21 through 59 (39 analog channels) BUT would've provided 6 times as many digital channels (234 digital channels). But alas, the TV industry behaved like a three year-old who didn't get enough cookies and we're wasting 5/6 of the TV band. > In the case of television, there does not seem to be bandwidth > contraints limiting new service; most markets seem to have plenty of > available UHF channels. The push seems to be coming from > non-television services which are hungrily eyeing the bandwidth > currently allocated to analog television, and expecting that digital > television will occupy much less bandwidth than analog television. If we had forced TV to 1 MHz bandwidth per channel we could've set aside some spectrum for these services. >> The other thing to remember is that NTSC has been the standard since >> the beginning of television. Even when color came around (Which is an >> odd little kludge to deliver color!) the old B&W sets still worked, >> even a set made close to 60 years ago can still pull signals out of >> the air and display moving images. > In the US, yes. But remember that in Europe they took the new color > standards as an opportunity to dump all of the old incompatible B&W > formats. It took a good while to phase them out (I remember the 405 > line stuff in the UK, and the 849 line stuff in France operating until > the 1980s), and it took a lot of trouble to broadcast in multiple > formats at once, but the change did take place. And perhaps we need > to look at the European experiences in our move to ATV. Europe has done a lot of things better than North America with regards to communications. John Mayson Austin, Texas, USA [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: Referencing your final sentence only: They certainly have. PAT] ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: Heat Seems to Affect Speed Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 18:03:29 -0500 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On 20 Apr 2004 16:34:30 -0700, littleboyblu87@yahoo.com (Mike) wrote: > I have dialup internet access and I've noticed something whenever it > gets hot outside. I noticed that when I try to get online before about > 10 or 11 PM that my speed is extremely slow. I tested it on a website > and it's like 14k. I can barely even access any webpages at all. Then > after 11PM I reconnect and my speed is back to normal again (about > 44k). I'm assuming this has something to do with my phone lines or > some phone lines somewhere. This seems to only happen on days when > it's above 85 degrees Fahrenheit. > Why would this happen? Is it most likely a problem with my home wiring > or could it be somewhere else? I have no way of testing my phone lines > and I know the phone company isn't gonna bother with it. No idea with dialup, but when I first got a cable modem the speed would come to a crawl on hot days (I was a beta tester with only about 20 others users on the entire network, so it wasn't congestion). I called the head end tech at the cable office and he said that the amplifiers on the poles would become very non-linear when it got hot outside, and they needed to do some tweaking on them to get them working right. A week or so later and things were working again. So it is possible that somewhere something is getting hot and gets of whack a bit, reducing the quality of the line. ------------------------------ From: Nick Landsberg Reply-To: hukolau@NOSPAM.att.net Subject: Re: Network Slow Down With Hot Weather Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 23:52:53 GMT Organization: AT&T Worldnet Charles B. Wilber wrote: > Continuing with the Editor's theory that the network speed reduction > is not weather-related I would suggest that it might be partially > weather related. For example, it is difficult to see how weather > temperature could have a direct effect on network speed. However, it > can have a direct effect on people and their habits. When it is very > hot it is possible that more people are inside enjoying air > conditioning when they might otherwise be outside. Since they are > inside, they could be accessing the network which they would probably > not be doing if they were outside. The additional air-conditioning > being used could also be stressing the power system, perhaps bringing > some servers down. I would look for a multi-level cause-and-effect > relationship. [SNIP] I would also look for multi-level cause and effect. When I used to work in "outside plant" the conventional wisdom (whatever that means) said that moisture condenses inside the cables as the temperature goes down. On the old pulp/paper insulated cables, this meant that the insulation between tip/ring and between adjacent pairs would not be as good and there would be "leakage." That is one reason why automated line insulation tests (ALITs) were run overnight. This is contrary to the OP's experience that connections are better after the temperature goes down. So, given the two conflicting data points, there must be some other set or sets of explanations. "It is impossible to make anything foolproof because fools are so ingenious" - A. Bloch ------------------------------ From: J Kelly Subject: Re: Digital Cellular, was Feds: No Analog TV by '09 Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 17:59:04 -0500 Organization: http://newsguy.com Reply-To: jkelly@newsguy.com On 20 Apr 2004 22:45:28 -0000, John Levine wrote: > Since HDTV runs in a different band than analog NTSC TV, > as long as anyone is still using analog TV, they can't release the > bands for other uses. As it happens, one of those uses is cellular > telephony since the top of the UHF band overlaps with some of the cell > channels. It doesn't really use a different band, each station is now using two channels, one for analog, one for (H)DTV. Some of the high UHF channels will go away when NTSC TV comes to an end. Some stations are moving from VHF to UHF for DTV, although many of those stations plan to return to their NTSC channel assignment at the end of the transition. ------------------------------ From: Hank Karl Subject: Re: VoIP's Broadband Bottleneck Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:10:42 -0400 Organization: NETPLEX Internet Services - http://www.ntplx.net/ On Tue, 20 Apr 2004 16:48:03 -0400, Fred Goldstein wrote: > Reality check time. In #191, Pat said, >> But if you cannot see that VOIP is the direction things are going, then >> I pity you. PAT > Anybody see the problem here? VoIP is "the direction things are > going", but somehow reality seems to intrude. We didn't have this > type of problem when moving from analog to TDM-digital telephony. Why > is VoIP taken for granted when the problems in getting it to work well > are understated? Both the Telecom and Datacom guys are starting to see the unique issues of VoIP, so its starting to _not_ be taken for granted anymore. There is ongoing work in the ITU and the IETF to help with voice quality. For example, RFC 3611 (RTCP-XR) specifies a number of voice quality metrics. > Yes, it's possible to make VoIP work well, though it can't quite reach > TDM performance, ever, essentially by definition. To even come close > requires careful traffic engineering, something not native to (or > required by) IP data networks. There are a lot of measures of performance. G.711 is just uLaw or A-Law, and should sound as good as the TDM network in an ideal situation. G.722 has a 7 KHz input range, and may sound better than G.711. VoIP can also use MP-3 as its codec (although I don't know anyone who does) which would give much better than TDM quality on an ideal line. So VoIP can perform better than TDM. In the real world, the biggest problems the network will add are packet loss, jitter and delay. The existing IP datacom networks are not set up to measure the kinds of jitter and loss that affect voice calls (voice is very sensitive to "bursts" of errors, data isn't as sensitive to the error distribution). The tools to measure the types of errors that affect VoIP networks are starting to appear. So we may see TDM performance on our VoIP networks soon. BTW, I've had static on my analog line (caused by water in a connector) to the point where the line was almost unusable. In this case, VoIP had significantly better performance than regular telephone service. Regular phone service (even T1s) have their own unique issues that can impair call quality, its just that the LECs have a lot of experience and Bell Labs has done years and years of research toward solving those problems. Hey, give the VoIP guys a chance, its still a new technology! :-) > Here's a quick summary of why. > That's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to make the point that > voice and data have different dynamic behavior. Mixing them > willy-nilly is risky. IF you know what you're doing, and have the > right tools, it can be made to work. But it's not automatic. > PacketCable prioritizes voice, essentially creating a TDM channel when > VoIP traffic is sent. (Of course the IP header is sometimes > vestigial, but it's needed for that Wall Street Image.) Vonage and > other parasitic (i.e., not paying for bandwidth) applications can't be > expected to work as well. The network isn't prioritizing their > packets. EVEN IF your Moto has priorities, there could be a > bottleneck upstream, say between the head end and the Internet > backbone. I think its more fair to say that "the _access_ network isn't prioritizing packets". I expect Vonage, et al, to traffic engineer their own networks. You can choose your ISP (at least if you're on DSL). And you can normally find one that handles VoIP well. > Fred Goldstein > Thanks! > [TELECOM Digest Editor's Note: My Mototola MTA adapter box arrived > yesterday, has now been installed, and the old Cicso ATA-186 returned > to Vonage. Thus far, it seems to be working better, Quality of Service > wise. Someone had said to me in email to make sure Vonage was at the > head of the line, so it could talk with ease whenever by slowing down > the other traffic. There is no way to do that with the Cisco, but with > the Motorola, you plug it directly into the modem then from the *extra* > port on the back which is labeled 'pc' you plug your network router/ > firewall. And where the NetGear firewall/router is known as > 192.168.0.1 through 192.168.0.5, the Motorola MTA now becomes like a > 'sub-net' on your LAN, known as 192.168.100.2 I of course had to diddle > up the Zone Alarm to convince them to trust each other, but the whole > procedure went pretty smoothly. The best part is it now leaves me with > an idle slot on the NetGear router (the Vonage had previous been on > 192.168.0.4) in case I wish to add some additional computer to the > setup here. PAT] ------------------------------ From: John Polcari Subject: Verizon Resellers: Broadview and MetTel Date: Wed, 21 Apr 2004 19:40:38 -0400 Organization: Your Name Here Does anybody have any comments regarding two Verizon resellers: Metropolitan Telecommunications Inc., AKA MetTel And Broadview Networks, formerly Community Networks? Any and all comments, good or bad, would be appreciated ... Thanks, John Polcari "Everything falls faster than an anvil" -9th law of Cartoon Physics ------------------------------ TELECOM Digest is an electronic journal devoted mostly but not exclusively to telecommunications topics. It is circulated anywhere there is email, in addition to various telecom forums on a variety of networks such as Compuserve and America On Line, Yahoo Groups, and other forums. It is also gatewayed to Usenet where it appears as the moderated newsgroup 'comp.dcom.telecom'. TELECOM Digest is a not-for-profit, mostly non-commercial educational service offered to the Internet by Patrick Townson. All the contents of the Digest are compilation-copyrighted. You may reprint articles in some other media on an occasional basis, but please attribute my work and that of the original author. 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