Blown fiber vs. "real" fiber

Courtesy of http://www.networkmuseum.net/

Blown fiber was an excellent innovation - by using cheap plastic ducts (pipes), telcos could employ cheap labour to run ducts from the exchange to their valuable business customers and a second team could come along later and using their specialist equipment simply push a strand of fiber optic cable from the exchange to the customer.  The first job, including planning, obtaining wayleaves, digging up the road and making good, breaking access routes into premises and finding routes within buildings to run the duct to the cutstomer's equipment was time consuming but fairly straightforward civil engineering taking weeks.  The blowing of the fiber is the work of an afternoon, and so a two man team can do two jobs a day.

Satellite vs Copper - which is least worst?

The recent news about BT choosing the new HYLAS satellite to complement its part-taxpayer-funded broadband roll-out in Cornwall brings back memories of "satellite broadband grants" back in 2002.  Government money was given to small businesses in rural areas to install these broadband connections due to lack of alternatives.  To a lot of people they seemed to offer the ideal solution but the user experience wasn't too great.

The new purpose-built HYLAS satellite might be better than the re-purposed TV and marine telephone systems used back in the day, but the physics of radio communications hasn't changed.

Asymmetric side effect

In comments posted on an article about the FTTP project at Ashby de la Launde it was pointed out that a PC infected with malicious botnet software on a traditional broadband connection is limited to adding at most a couple of hundred kilobits/second of bot traffic to the Internet.  A botnet PC on a FTTH connection could be pumping out 100Mbps of bot traffic.  A few tens of these could do the damage that takes thousands of botnet computers inflict currently, not to mention saturate the precious Internet uplink.

Not an Internet Protocol IDS

Perhaps we need to deploy Intrusion Detection Systems at the digital village pump to catch infected subscribers and maybe apply some kind of automatic quarantine to their connections.

This is a problem that commercial ISP's don't need to worry too much about. Apart from the asymmetric bandwidth limitation, they make money selling bandwidth so the more that's used the better whereas a community network needs to take care not to squander the expensive uplink.