Internet Finale

[The cable into the house itself is interesting (to me, anyway). It consists of a bundle of four glass fibers, each with a differently-colored sheath. The glass plus sheath is about the size of a thick hair! These four are encased in another white sheath, which is then bordered by two fiberglass rods, each about 2mm across, plus an orange string (used to strip the outer sheath), all encased in a black plastic outer sheath. This entire assembly is quite stiff and can be pushed through conduit easily. In the photo, the four glass fibers appear together as one.]A couple of weeks passed with no word and no action. So this morning, as I was driving near the Kit Carson Telecom (part of my electric cooperative) I decided to stop by and ask. There were three other people in similar states. All the workers were busy, so I was asked to wait. While waiting another neighbor came in to inquire.

Soon (sooner that I had thought) someone came and brought me to a desk in back, where a man was talking on the phone with another customer. After finishing that conversation, he asked me what I wanted. After a short explanation he got on the phone and asked Mike to stop my house by this afternoon. I was pleasantly surprised, but not overly hopeful.

I went home and rested from a busy morning (finishing the catalog of 2500 works in our community chorus music library), when I heard a knock on the door. Yes, it was Mike, here to install my internet. He was pleasantly surprised to learn that the installation would be in my garage, because he had been driven out of Arroyo Hondo by rain.

After splicing (with a very fancy machine) a connector onto the end of the cable that terminates in my garage, he started to test the connection back to the central office, and soon realized that no splice had been made at the street end of the cable.

Being curious, I passed tools to Mike, held the power supply box while he screwed it to my wall, and generally watched the whole operation. The glass fiber is (in a bundle of four fibers into my house) protected by a small sheath, then a bigger sheath, then flanked by two stiff fiberglass rods, and all that encased in black plastic.

In my garage is an electronic modem unit that converts the optical signal coming in on the glass fiber to an electrical signal that goes out over copper Ethernet wire. This is powered by a special battery-backed supply. (I have a separate battery backup for my wireless router.) That glass fiber is spliced, but otherwise continuous, all the way back to the Telecom office with no intervening switch or router.

As soon as my modem was activated at the central office and rebooted, I was able to test the speed (using SpeedTest.NET) and got 30 Mbps both up and down.