Locations with no good Internet (was ISP in Johannesburg)

[msokolov at ivan.Harhan.ORG (Michael Sokolov)]

Brandon Galbraith <brandon.galbraith at gmail.com> wrote:

> Get dry loops from the ILEC and place repeaters at strategic points?

I guess I need a little more education on how the process of ordering
dry pairs from an ILEC works.  I thought it works like this:

1. You have to be colocated in the CO to begin with.

2. You give the ILEC the address of an end site and they run a dry pair
   from your cage within their CO to that address.

3. You don't get access to any intermediate points.

As far as placing the repeaters at "strategic points", yeah, that's
exactly what I meant, but my point was that these "strategic points" are
owned by the ILEC, and I was/am wondering how to go about making it
possible for a third party to stick repeater equipment in there.

I envision the following picture:

* There is a CO in a town, and there is a Covad DSLAM in that CO,
  serving those folks who are located in the town itself.

* There is a winding mountain road going out of town into the
  countryside, and there are phone wires running alongside that road,
  several miles long.

* There gotta be a bunch of cyan-colored cross-connect boxes on the side
  of the road, manholes and other places where the ILEC has mid-span
  access to those loooong loops.  They also very likely have loading
  coils on loops like that, and although I confess that I've never seen
  one of those coils with my own eyes, I've heard that they are rather
  bulky in terms of physical dimensions, probably bigger than a repeater
  PCB.

The problem is that these mid-span access points are property of the
ILEC along with the rest of the loop plant, and although there probably
exists an ILEC-internal procedure for installing mid-span repeaters for
T1s and maybe ISDN BRI, that is most certainly done by the ILEC itself,
not by any third parties.  Making it possible for a third party to
access those intermediate points to install repeater equipment which the
ILEC won't understand (handling Covad's non-standard flavor of
SDSL/2B1Q) is the problem I'm trying to solve.

MS