The Last Mile

[SlayeTech]

I was wondering if the last mile shared an OC line for all of the comcast cable customers in the my neighborhood.

 

[bill001g]

Not sure what you mean by "OC line". There is always a large shared infrastructure in cable tv in the last mile. They have gotten better at not over selling as much as they have before but if you could see the data coming into you cable modem it is actually receiving all the data for everyone you are sharing with. The modem filters this via its mac and it is also encrypted to prevent you from doing bad things.

Now in some cases there are multiple levels of this sharing. They may terminate multiple groups of houses into the same cabinet and share the connection back to the main office.

In general because you only need a tiny fraction of the 322m or whatever for most application you seldom see issues....unless of course they oversold it.

 

[SlayeTech]

What I mean by OC line is Optical carrier line. It is sort of like the older T1 or T3 lines that if you had the money you could get and you would have a unshared connection to the internet. OC lines are vastly faster private lines that you could get. I was wondering if the last Mile for my Comcast Cable coax network was an OC line that was shared by a bunch of people.

 

[bill001g]

I would assume at some level they are shared but I doubt it is a bottleneck. It is common now days to run fiber at 10g rates or higher. In most cases ISP lease dark pairs of fiber so they can run it at what ever speed they like...just the cost of the equipment which has come down a lot. This is how many cable isp increased their rates so much they replaced they just upgraded the fiber equipment.

The last mile problem almost always is in the coax part of the network mostly because of how much slower it is.

 

[SlayeTech]

ty for the response =)