Grapevine
CityWest Optic Cable / Oakley Rankin
Like many of us on Denman and Hornby I have now been connected to the CityWest optical system. I opted for the slowest speed of 30Mbps at $68 monthly, internet only; I am keeping our phone with Telus so far; we have no use for a suite of cable TV channels.
The installation was easy, direct, and quick. The first stage was a trench up our driveway to install a gray connection box on the side of our house. They easily avoided our underground power cable. Then a thin 6mm (quarter-inch) cable was run from the connection box up the outside wall and through into my heated crawl space. From there a single hole through the drywall brought the cable to the same place on my desk that the Telus modem occupied. Once the optical cable was connected to the Gigaspire Blast u6x modem and tested I simply switched all my internet cables from the Telus Actiontec T3200M—I like to wire as many devices as possible; then I went online and changed the Gigaspire passwords to match the Telus ones and, presto, all wireless devices I have now connected with no problems whatsoever.
So will it all make a difference? For me not much. I generally have only a single machine accessing the internet at any given time and I usually keep it wired rather than using WiFi. On my computer I don’t indulge in many data intensive operations but I do watch several video streaming services using an internet connection—Mhz, Britbox, France24, DW, Acorn, Kanopy, Aljazeera, CBC Gem, etc.—and my consistent Telus speed of 5 Mbps over the past decade has sufficed to handle all this without buffering. At my pace the only real difference I see is a satisfactory increase in downloading speed for the very few large files I occasionally get. The real advantage will show up is in those households with more and more people and devices all attempting to use the internet at the same time. Or those users who pass gigantic files back and forth on the internet. Or 4K broadcast TV when it becomes widespread. And gamers, of course. So why did I choose to switch? Largely because of Telus’ poor policy. A year ago Telus phased out installation of any new copper cable service but offered no plans to supply the optic replacement to folks out in the boonies. I had a Telus sales person offer me a 1000 Mbps service for $35 monthly and when I explained that this required optical cable and was impossible on our island she simply ignored me and continued to ask me to sign up for a service unavailable on Hornby. Although I have to admit that $35 for a service that CityWest charges $138 was kind of appealing!
For those of you who might be worried about being blasted with an increased dose of EMR you can take heart for optical cables do not transmit electricity and thus do not have a electromagnetic field generated around them. The light that is transmitted is a part of the overall electromagnetic spectrum but it does not share the relationship of electricity and magnetism and so does not create any EMR. So the cable coming up my driveway as well as the cable from the connection box to the modem have actually diminished the amount of EMR generated by your Telus telephone line although, if truth be told, the EMR field generated by a telephone cable is infinitesimal compared to that of the power lines passing by and into your home. The electronics in the Gigaspire modem have exactly the same current requirements that my Telus modem has—12 volts DC and 3 amps, somewhat less than an old 40 watt incandescent light bulb. WiFi is, of course, broadcast EMR and I am told by the CityWest installer that the Gigaspire has no more range than the Telus Actiontec as range is restricted by Federal Law. So if you have been running a Telus modem similar to mine the Gigaspire should be no different as to EMR radiation but the lines running into it certainly will be. And I apologize for my earlier screeds in the Grapevine for suggesting that the Gigaspire had a much greater range; I am afraid I was taken in by the hype about their modems on the manufacturer’s web site.
Another question sparking anxiety is whether CityWest telephone service be available in a power outage. And the answer is it easily can be PROVIDING you have an alternate power source for the Gigaspire modem. This could be a Universal Power Supply (UPS) as one or two of my neighbours have purchased; when the power goes out this will automatically switch to keep your modem powered for a limited time. Or a generator to keep the modem running and annoy your neighbours. Telus lines on the hydro poles are, of course, extremely strong and a mid-sized tree will usually hang on them or break itself. However if the Telus line is hit by an over-height semi-trailer, as ours was a couple of years ago, it will take Telus about 3 to 4 days to restore telephone service to you and all your neighbours—as it did. You might contrast this with the 30 hours it took CityWest to repair their cable under water!
So is CityWest prone to more outages than Telus? Probably a few more for the reason that it is a buried cable and there are a lot of backhoe operators working around doing things like culvert installation and various trenching jobs. Cutting through an optical cable is inevitable but I don’t believe it will happen sufficiently often to cause any real problems although the increasing number of folks who are on social media seconds after an outage saying the whole system is broken will take it as grist for their mill of perfection. Why does social media encourage folks to believe that a system covering a huge area of our province, involving thousands of people and thousands miles of cable, of running on banks of complicated electronic machinery, with tens of thousands of customers, is completely broken when a rare accidental event takes place? We used to know that human constructions, like humans themselves, were fallible and we accepted accidents; social media seems to feed us the fantasy that we really are, or should be, perfect. And I am not the only one who has noticed; Shosanna Zuboff of Harvard in her book Surveillance Capitalism gives an idea of why this might be. At my grandson’s graduation she encouraged him and the other 900 engineers graduating to resist the technocratic imperative and to spend adequate time with the arts and humanities. I can only say aye, aye.
