Why Fibre and Wireless?
Fibre optic cable is used in high dependency situations, it provides an excellent consistent service, and is very reliable. Wireless provides a good balance between cost and reliability.
In this situation, wireless also provides path diversity – if you have two physical connections running in parallel, and one connection is shut off for whatever reason, then the DSLAM is smart enough to route traffic over the live connection.
What about UFB?
As background; the government started the Ultra-Fast Broadband (UFB) initiative in order to improve the quality of Internet across the country. The foundation for the UFB is Fibre optic cable (the same as the foundation layer of Fibre we are recommending into the basement); and the UFB network has extended the reach among schools, residential, and businesses.
The rollout of UFB is determined by the government; the key priority was building infrastructure across all the schools in the country, followed by main residential and metro areas. In the Auckland CBD, there is a kind of no-man’s land situation – most apartment dwellers connect to the heavily congested Mayoral Drive telephone exchange, (or the Ponsonby exchange). If you’re lucky enough to be in the UFB area, then each apartment can opt for a Fibre connection.
However, this places a high workload on the apartment management, each new connection means a new installation and the cable running alone becomes complex and may cause damages to the building. The installation can be expensive in multiple dwelling premises.
The logical option is a hybrid solution; a single Fibre connection that terminates on a special designed routing computer system, and then use the existing copper infrastructure already in place. This is how an actual telephone exchange works; the exchange is the aggregation point from which multiple users are connected back to a single connection to the core network.
Popular media has an opinion that copper is evil and slow – but the reality is that when copper runs over short distances it’s perfectly adequate. If we add a Fibre connection for the longer distance, then the performance is perfectly acceptable.
We use different providers of Fibre into the apartment buildings depending on availability – this might include standard Chorus Fibre, or Vector Fibre, or even Chorus UFB if available. The raw cost of the Fibre is expensive, but the main cost is in the build into the apartment – these can run into tens of thousands of dollars, and usually that is uneconomic. UFB has a fixed build cost, and that is the main saving difference between providers.