It is always possible that you are being served directly from the CO where you are. However, 7.5 miles is an awfully long way to go on a copper line that is not amplified somewhere along the way by some means. Normal telco engineering standards are to limit the wire center (Central Office) to 18,000 feet radius (about 6.5 miles in diameter) from the CO although I have seen several instances of old wire centers being more than 21,000 feet in radius. So it is possible you are not being served by a DLC. If you are chummy with the telco engineer for your neighborhood, he/she is the best source for this info since I can only guess, based on standard engineering guidelines.
Yes, money does talk, especially for ILECs these days. They have sophisticated short and long term computerized planning tools that will tell them quickly where the demand is for what services, how much it will cost to implement the services, and the ROI over how many years.
Unfortunately, the $30K figure I stated was for the base DLC alone. It did not include the ADSL interface cards or the DSLAM, or the network infrastructure to support ADSL back at the CO. All that must be taken into consideration. The ADSL cards for the DLC itself would be very high -- I don't have the figures in front of me, maybe someone else on the thread knows the price of the cards. I could look it up in a few days if you remind me.
Interesting the telco engineer's use of the term "PairGain box". Because there is a DLC made by the company PairGain, but the generic term for any type of DLC made by anyone was a pair gain device long ago. It was called that because you gained pairs out of the CO by using one. What used to take 96 twisted pairs to serve 96 lines, by using a pair gain device (or DLC now), you could serve using only 4 twisted pair. |
