Juha Saarinen: Copper withdrawal syndrome kicks in for NZ

Copper is on its way out. Photo / 123RF

OPINION:

The end of the era of pushing binary data over copper wires is coming to an end, very gently and considerably I hope. If you can swap out your creaky old landline and Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connection for fibre, which is what the Copper Withdrawal Code says will happen, run, don't walk and get it done.

There are landline alternatives running over fibre that provide massively improved audio quality, and they're easy to use; or you can continue to use your old phone, but really, the switch for a better service is undramatic, but it hasn't been communicated well to non-techie customers.

For broadband, DSL has served us excellently but what I recall most vividly about the broadband over copper tech is how finicky it is. With UFB fibre, there's not much to worry about: just plug in your network gear, wired or wireless and It Just Works.

Decent DSL service on the other hand depends on so many factors like how far you were from a phone exchange. If you were too far away, and your broadband sucked. To fix that, roadside cabinets with fibre links to exchanges were introduced.

These shortened the length of the copper line going to customers, which meant the power drop off was less and you got a cleaner signal, for faster connections.

I had VDSL2 (that's very high bitrate, version 2, folks; the first version of VDSL didn't catch on much) 700 metres from the cabinet. This wasn't supposed to work but it was okay. Think my line pair had been "groomed" for ISDN service which helped with the DSL.

The cabinets were a clever way for our Beloved Telco Incumbent to defeat the unbundling of phone exchanges, which meant competitors could put their access gear into them. Customers got faster speeds, and it wasn't viable for competing providers to put their gear into the cabinets. A win-win.

Inside your house, a splitter was a good idea. This separates the low frequency voice frequency band for phones from the higher frequencies used for data transmission, which were managed in 4 KHz "bins" to deal with line noise.

A noisy line also meant you couldn't have interleaving turned off, another noise management technique that was popular in New Zealand and Australia. Interleaving required data packets to be sent together which was good for error correction, but added delay or latency that ruined your chances to become a Low Ping Bastard for gaming.

Getting rid of the DSL complexity and worrying about how to distribute gigabit and faster network speeds at your place did seem like a breath of fresh air. I don't think anyone who's on UFB thinks about it, until the very rare moments when there's a fault and you have to hotspot with what seems like glacially slow 4G and 5G wireless.

I asked Chorus what they would do with the copper wires in the network. Maybe it could be sold for scrap, given that copper prices are high and the metal is difficult to dig up? After all, people still steal phone cables to make a quick buck.

That's not going to happen, and the wires will be left wherever they are apparently. This is understandable, as I don't think anyone just a few decades ago imagined we could be recycling the copper.

Similarly, there are still remnants of Telecom's hybrid fibre-coaxial (HFC) First Media broadband network in the ground in Auckland. First Media was killed off by Telecom in favour of DSL, but it could be a fun hacking project to work out what's still connected and to where, and engineer a guerilla Cockroach.net on the quiet.

You could probably do the same with the old phone copper network, which would be viewed alternatively as very clever or utterly subversive. Not saying it would work, but I've come across enough engineer madness to think it might.

That brings us to areas that are unlikely to get fibre any time soon, or ever. Will they have copper networks forever, which have to be maintained by Chorus contractors familiar with Old Tech called out of retirement? Could they even be upgraded?

If you turn up the signal amplifiers to 11 and power copper connections at both ends, DSL could in theory provide 300/100 megabit per second with the new VPlus standard by adding a greater frequency range and clever error correction.

That's hi-def video streaming capable, but only up to 250 metres.

UFB fibre can go 40-50 kilometres in comparison, an internet provider techie told me, but I haven't tested and verified that myself.

There's SpaceX's pricey Starlink service now, but satellite broadband from above isn't easy to set up. The enemies here are the hills and trees. At my place, I could in theory climb up the 40 something metre Norfolk pine and mount Dishy the satellite transceiver there for a better view of the skies above. My mate Liam has hacked up a boosted Power over Ethernet adapter so the cable can be long and the whole thing feels like a safe endeavour.

Maybe the idea is that the Rural Broadband Initiative (RBI) will replace copper in areas that are difficult to reach, and have low subscriber densities? The RBI connections I've tried work great when there are just a few subscribers on them.

During busy times like school holidays, RBI on 700 MHz might reach the users, but being narrowband (relatively speaking), the cell sites become overloaded. Working with browser-based apps and voice messaging with 700 milliseconds or more delay is… difficult.

Also, RBI sites need fibre connections to the internet. In that case you'd be forgiven for wondering why providers wouldn't go the whole hog instead, and extend the laser light fantastic network that's upgradable for the foreseeable future, all the way to remote businesses and homes?