REWIRED: Chorus' Service Delivery Point or SDP (above and below), is designed to be a cheaper alternative to spending $2000 to rewire your house. The Telecom network division says many homes have bung wiring, which puts a handbrake on broadband.
Telecom’s networking division, Chorus, has long tried to educate home-owners that old wiring, or ineptly installed wiring, can badly slow down your broadband - no matter how close your home is to the nearest phone exchange or fibre cabinet, how fast your DSL plan is on paper.
The “Service Delivery Point” is a widget conceived and designed by Chorus, then refined with help from Palmerston North’s Remote Monitoring Services (RMS), which has also organised the mass manufacture of the device.
Chorus is jumping into the home wiring business - via its partner ISPs (who include Telecom Broadband, Vodafone, TelstraClear, Orcon and CallPlus/Slingshot) - because its near billion-dollar, multi-year project to upgrade Telecom’s fibre network, and local exchanges and cabinets, is often thwarted at the curb as state-of-the-art broadband meets clapped out, jerry-rigged home wiring.
Cheaper than rewiring your home
Chorus General Manager of Product Management Brent Matthews explains: “Traditionally, the wiring in New Zealand homes has been connected in a daisy chain, running from jackpoint to jackpoint, and this in combination with older wiring slows down the user’s internet performance.”
The Service Delivery Point becomes the first network connection point in the home for high bandwidth equipment and only requires good quality wiring back to the point where the phone network enters the home, Mr Matthews said.
Rather than homeowners having to replace the rest of their wiring - which can cost up to $2000 or more - the existing wiring is then connected into the device so that traditional services such as phones, faxes and monitored alarms continue to work.
Chorus currently has the first patch of around 1500 Service Delivery Points in production, with another 4000 to follow.
The device will be sold through internet service providers. A spokesman said it would cost in the region of “several hundred dollars”, and be priced to compete with installing line splitters or filters - the traditional ways of trying to patch a poor wiring job.
Not 50 times faster, but a “marked improvement”
Some over-excited early coverage had the Service Delivery Point boosting a home’s broadband speed by a magical 50 times (later downgraded by its author to a more modest 50%).
Chorus spokesman Robin Kelly said his company was not putting any official number on the broadband gain that home-owners could expect.
At every home, or premise, it would depend on the condition of the wiring, how it was configured, and how many devices were hanging off the network.
But everybody could expect “a marked improvement”.
One problem, Mr Kelly said, was that New Zealand simply had no wiring standards connecting phones, modems and other telecommunications gear (although the Telecommunications Carriers Forum is trying to promote its own at TCF.org.nz).
Upgradable for a fibre world
Although its first generation is aimed at homes with copper wiring running from the curb, the Service Delivery Point would be upgradeable to support a fibre optic connection, Mr Kelly said.
The next generation would include a battery, so that a device running on a fibre connection - such as, say, a VoIP phone - could potentially maintain a connection through a power cut.
Chris Keall
Tue, 24 Aug 2010