telephone poles
How Dartmouth Works - Telephony
Communication has changed a bit over the last few years – just a few years ago everyone had a landline and bought the local paper and that was it. Now the world of high tech communications has brought more information into our lives than ever before and yet few of us appreciate the WAY that information is brought to us.
Dartmouth will soon see ‘Superfast’ broadband arrive, bringing the town to the forefront of the internet speed revolution. Behind the wonder of broadband, wifi and mobile communications are some fascinating and clever technology.
Traditional phone lines - ‘land lines’ as they are now known – are basically copper wires laid either under the ground or hung from telegraph poles. They have been the staple of our communications system since the days of Alexander Graham Bell but the time is coming when telecommunications will be based on different technology – fibre optic and mobile.
Copper wires were first used in telegraph communications in the middle of the Victorian age and have allowed the world to become better connected - first through the telegraph and then through telephone wires. They were then utilised for the first internet services, when ‘dial up’ saw such unimagined speeds as 56kb of information per second.
Since then, ADSL – a system which makes the most of the wire’s ability to carry information – has allowed speeds to rise to 8Megabits per second - or more than 100 times faster than dial up. ADSL – a technology, which uses the existing copper network to deliver broadband, will get a boost in Dartmouth in the spring when ADSL2+ is introduced. This will increase maximum broadband speeds in the town from up to 8Mbps to up to 20Mbps.
To prepare for this, fibre optics will be used. These use light to transmit information. They can carry vastly more than copper wires – a pair of copper wires can carry two telephone conversations whilst a pair of fibre optic ones can carry 80,000.
BT’s local network business, Openreach, is bringing super-fast broadband to Dartmouth next spring – as part of its £2.5 billion programme to roll-out the high-speed technology to two thirds of the country by the end of 2015. The new fibre optic cables will run from the telephone exchange to new roadside cabinets with the existing copper lines still being used for the final section from the cabinet to the home or business. This technology currently offers maximum download speeds of up to 40Mbps, but BT says that further improvements next year will roughly double these to up to 80 Mbps.
Jon Reynolds, BT’s regional director for the South West, said, ‘this latest investment in super-fast broadband is great news for many homes and businesses in the South West. It shows our commitment to bringing super-fast broadband to a wide variety of locations across the region.
‘Fibre broadband has the power to revolutionise the way we use the internet. It has huge implications for the way we live, learn and do business, with massive opportunities for entertainment, education and entrepreneurs. People in these communities will soon be able to experience the internet as they’ve never seen it before.’
The mobile networks in Dartmouth and its surrounding villages are simpler than many may believe. There are four transmitting masts (or base stations as they should be called) in Dartmouth itself, two run by 02, one by Vodafone and one by the ‘3’ network. Three are based on Jawbones Hill next to Waterpool Road and one on Crowthers Hill above South Ford Road.
They have been placed there to give the best reception for the most people – with Dartmouth’s hilly topography it must have been a challenge to find a site which would do this. Basically, engineers have chosen the highest point, which allows the transmitter to ‘see’ as many places in an area as possible. But it’s not an easy task and we all know the feeling of finding the one place in a house you get reception, standing on one leg trying to hear what people are saying if there’s no clear line of sight to the transmitter.
In Kingswear, there are no transmitters, although two are sited at Hillhead above the village. There are none in Stoke Fleming, Strete, Dittisham, Stoke Gabriel or Blackawton, where once again your reception will depend on ‘line of sight’ from areas further afield.
Transmitters have clever systems to make sure they don’t get overloaded and carry a maximum number of calls. They are designed to work in tandem with base stations around them to ‘share out’ calls. This works well in urban areas where there are lots of them – in Torbay, there are more than 70 – but in rural areas when there are few, calls from closer to the antenna will receive priority. This means that if you call someone and your signal suddenly dies, the base station has received a call, taking it over its capacity, from someone nearer to it. If it can’t ‘bump’ your call onto another transmitter, you will lose reception and get cut off. It’s just one of the pitfalls of living in a rural community.
You may be wondering if you’ve seen base stations in places I’ve stated there aren’t any, then what they are? – most probably because these ‘masts’ are Airwave transmitters. These are used for the Police’s Tetra communication system. These were created at a cost of billions because it was felt that the police should have their own, secure communication system – the transmitters are generally shorter than mobile masts but there are many in every town.
More and more masts go up all the time as demand for more services through ‘smartphones’ and mobile broadband increases. The landscape will be changed as they do – and we will all learn to spot them. In the same way that the National Electricity grid’s pylons became part of our landscape in the early 20th century, so mobile communication masts will in this century.
We’d better get used to them.
First Published November 2011 By The Dart
