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[meritez]

Is this the disaster that was TPON?

[licquorice]

Is this the disaster that was TPON?

As posited earlier in the thread.

[Weaver]

Did we have the technical wherewithal to make it all happen in say 1987? I understand that there is so much associated technology in  deploying fibre, blowing it, installing it, and in distribution-related devices. 1980s hardware, the Intel 386/486 era would be challenged in routers and so forth running protocols at gigabit speeds without serious ASIC implementation?

[licquorice]

Don't know what was happening in the local loop then, but certainly fibre was starting to be introduced in the trunk network. Early Multimode 850nm 140Mb systems were being trialled, but they had pretty poor performance and needed regenerators every 10Km. Things improved vastly with 1300nm singlemode fibre systems soon after.

[Weaver]

I’m thinking that some 1980s kit would have been really thrashed trying to do gigabit. In the mid 1980s we already had ethernet and IPv4 and TCP, no IPv6 for another ten-fifteen years. But maybe with dedicated ASICs everywhere and no software in the critical path it could have been achieved.

[burakkucat]

I seem to recall that the TPON providing the telephony service, in the Milton Keynes area, worked well but had to be overlaid with a metallic pathway to provide Internet access. 

[licquorice]

Yep, exactly the same in the Hampton township of Peterborough.

[Reformed]

I’m thinking that some 1980s kit would have been really thrashed trying to do gigabit. In the mid 1980s we already had ethernet and IPv4 and TCP, no IPv6 for another ten-fifteen years. But maybe with dedicated ASICs everywhere and no software in the critical path it could have been achieved.

Gigabit wasn't a thing in the 80s. Fast Ethernet wasn't standardised until the mid-90s. PDH was still within backbones until early 2000s when the move to SDH was complete.

In the very early 2000s the fastest router could push 160 Gbit/s (Juniper M160). These were BSD systems with tons of ASIC underneath.

[Weaver]

Agreed. I remember when the ethernet 1G copper standard was introduced. I was working in the early 1980s; I’m quite old. I didn’t mean over the literal modern copper standard and should have been more accurate and less lazy in my writing.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Both my secondary school and training centre after that were rocking blistering 10BASE2 LANs in the mid to late 90s.

That was naturally where I started at home as setting up that kind of network was cheap and old COAX cabling was readily available, as I did work experience at a computer recycler. (well technically an arts project which later when on to setup a public Internet access space which is now a maker space)  It was the latter that introduced me to Linux.

I felt like a genius rocking NAT on 33.6K dialup (actually started on 14.4K as that was a skip raided modem) and a NAS for sharing my games collection across multiple PCs.  Back when you had to install Slackware Linux from double-digits of floppies and getting any kind of GUI was witchcraft.  Gigabit FTTP is peanuts compared to my phone bills back then, especially if you consider inflation.

I guess that's kinda why I'm rocking top-end hardware now as I started at the bottom.  It does make me appreciate what we have now in a way I doubt most people do.

[tonygibbs16]

Hi all,

I worked at BT Labs in the early 1990s, and the technology did exist with blown fibre and jointing tools to do all the rollout. I also worked for Dr Cochrane.

BT was doing fibre local loop trials as well.

Whether it was TPON then and GPON now is not quite the point, because the single mode fibre has TeraHertz of bandwidth available in the 1300 and 1550nm windows.

This means that once you have put the fibres in the ground, especially with a Passive Optical Network (PON), you can get speed increases just by changing the terminal equipment and adding more wavelengths.

So the UK under the Duopoly Review in 1990 see https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/181991 and trying have competition meant that the UK missed out in having fibre in the ground early.

We could have invented Openreach in the 1990s I think to share the fibres in the local loop between ISPs, but we didn't.

Cheers,
     Tony

[Weaver]

Thanks for that important post and a very warm welcome to the forum, Tony.

[Alex Atkin UK]

Always good to hear first-hand confirmation of these stories, thanks.

[tonygibbs16]

Thanks for that important post and a very warm welcome to the forum, Tony.

Thanks Weaver. 

[tonygibbs16]

Always good to hear first-hand confirmation of these stories, thanks.

Thanks Alex