Path: news.ccsf.jp!tomockey.ddo.jp!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!postnews.google.com!b4g2000pra.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Medgya Newsgroups: fj.life.in-japan Subject: Re: Strange Cable Television Requirements Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2010 23:08:18 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Lines: 28 Message-ID: References: <786b6c3e-4d39-4c55-8639-8f043b83f9c4@w37g2000prc.googlegroups.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 211.132.33.180 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 X-Trace: posting.google.com 1279865299 10378 127.0.0.1 (23 Jul 2010 06:08:19 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 23 Jul 2010 06:08:19 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: b4g2000pra.googlegroups.com; posting-host=211.132.33.180; posting-account=Dc63sQoAAADxsPFCa-WOzJj1jv2cuN9Q User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1.10) Gecko/20100622 Fedora/3.5.10-1.fc12 Firefox/3.5.10,gzip(gfe) Xref: news.ccsf.jp fj.life.in-japan:169379 Thanks for your reply. It does seem awfully quiet around here these days. Essentially the situation is that out in inaka-ville nobody offers fiber service. We had to get hundreds of people together to sign multi-year contracts just to convince NTT to put in a few ADSL multiplexers a few years back. Fiber? They just laughed. But what's happened is that the national government is apparently offering grants to various cities for improvements in communication infrastructure, so then the cable company sales guys come along and with a package offering as little as possible for exactly the amount of the grants. From the bureaucrats' point of view it's a no-lose situation: something for nothing, so they just accept whatever the cable companies offer. But of course it's tax money, and we'll be paying for it soon enough. As for the speaker unit, it turns out it's made by NEC and is part of a system for just this purpose. From a security and privacy point of view, it's a nightmare. The box is apparently administered by the city government, and the idea is that all of the voice and data traffic in and out of your home goes through it, so in principle (not sure what kind of interface they're given -- it's not disclosed) they would have access to everything. So... no. But we probably will go along with the fiber because, once people start cancelling their ADSL contracts to move to fiber-based Internet services, there's a risk that NTT will cancel ADSL services. So we figure we'll put the fiber in, but leave it dark for now. M