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The downside of fibre

The UFB has been hyped up by government and telcos almost as if it were the second coming.

Ultra-fast speed, video on demand, voice over IP, in fact, every digital service you could imagine will be delivered to your house by a tiny strand of light-conduit.

What could possibly go wrong?

Well if reports are to be believed, canvasing more than a few Orcon customers would provide you with plenty of sob-stories about UFB.

According to news reports, "Orcon customers around wellington and Upper Hutt have been without internet for more than 24 hours as the network continues to battle an outage".

Read the comments on this story and you'll find that there are others who've also encountered UFB problems around the country.

Of course with any new service it's only natural that there will be teething problems -- although the cause of Orcon's present woes seems to be a faulty Radius server, something that isn't specific to fibre.

The real issue here isn't that the UFB is susceptible to breakages -- it's the effect those breakages can have.

Those of us still using ADSL will from time to time find that our internet connectivity fails but that still leaves us with the good old analog phone service. Once you've gone UFB, any failure of the digital link takes out everything, including your voice service.

Part of the UFB installation is the decommissioning of your copper -- which means there's no way to fall back to POTS (plain old telephone system) even if the digital outage is a protracted one.

Of course it could be argued that in the day of the cellphone, we're no longer as dependent on our "home phone" as we once were so this is a minor downside.

However, one can't help but wonder how all this fibre and VOIP will hold up in the event of a major civil disaster that perhaps takes out the mobile network.

The old POTS was a surprisingly resilient service that could suffer pretty major insult to swathes of its network without crashing the whole damned thing. Even a widespread power failure left the good old hardwired "home phone" operating, thanks to fairly hefty batteries built into most telephone exchanges.

Does the UFB termination gear attached to your house have any form of useful battery backup?

Mind you, all things considered, I think I'd rather have 100Mbps of digital communications over POTS any time -- even if it did increase the risk of being "out of touch" due to gear failure or natural disaster.

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(Sorry, forums are stuffed at present)

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