Does FiOS support rotary phones? [telecom]

MoCA = Multimedia over Coax Alliance = definitely not FiOS

MoCA 2.0, which was rolled out in 2010, is capable of bitrates that are fairly imperssive, but still not what FiOS can do. FiOS gives you a QPAM digital TV stream with an effective channel bandwidth of 870 megahertz along with a 622 Mbps data channel in the downstream direction, as well as a 155 Mbps data channel in the upstrem direction. MoCA 2.0 can give a theoretical total throughput of around 800 Mbps, and was intended primarily as an HDTV delivery method.

It is possible that the marketing department at Verizon has decided to hang the FiOS moniker on all high-bitrate TV/Phone/Internet combo offerings, but if that decision was made, it wasn't announced publicly. [Or maybe I just wasn't paying attention.] I would be very interested to know what it actually says on your sister's phone bill.

Wes Leatherock wrote:

Wes, forgive me - I had my tongue planted firmly in my cheek when I spoke of the "quintessential little old lady." The truth is, I am actually a cantankerous old coot, and my own phone of choice is in fact a plain black Western Electric 500 set. The 500 was the first phone we ever had way back when, and of course as a teen-ager I did not appreciate how well made it was - I just took it for granted that it could be dropped on the floor at least once a day and still work.

In the intervening decades, there was a seemingly endless parade of cheap plastic phones that always seemed to fail at the worst possible time. I have now come full circle, and refuse to buy any phone that is not an original Western Electric. Friends and family members are quite tired of hearing me tell them to "get a real phone."

Jim Bennett

************************************************** Speaking from a secure undisclosed location.

I have FiOS. They did run fiber from the pole out front. I examined the "cable" myself. Definitely not coax.

According to info gleaned from the Internet, the Verizon techie's answer (above) that the house drop is "Moca" format instead of fiber. seems to be based on yet another "service" which has industry support through an organization. The organization known as Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA) which (according to their web site) has a diverse corporation membership which includes equipment supplier companies as: Broadcom, Cisco, Motorola, Panasonic, and Trident. Plus has end users such as: Verizon, Comcast, Cox, and Echostar.

The web site address is:

The techie stuff on the site seems to indicate that the supplier of "entertainment" services can utilize existing coax drops to the premise thus (I guess) saving costs by not having to replace the last connection drop. Since Verizon is a group member, it seems logical for them to utilize this "standard" to help cut their installed costs.

John ______________________________ John Stahl Aljon Enterprises Data and Telecom Consultants email: aljon-at-stny.rr.com

We set out two or three years ago to get another phone but gave up after we couldn't find anything even on the surface that was as robust or as easy to use as a WE phone. I finally found one in the back of a drawer that I'd forgotten about--a Trimline with the original round buttons--and put it back into use.

Wes Leatherock snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com snipped-for-privacy@aol.com

He's the confused one....not you.

I see no way that Verizontal ever puts the ONT anywhere but inside the residence, for a basic reason: what would power it out there on the pole? Further, since it's the vict^H^H^H^H subscriber's job to not just supply it power but also buy & install new batteries..who will climb the pole...?

Obviously in a MDU, where there's one multiport unit; it's slightly different. There, your unit does get POTS via existing twisted pair and TV & TCP/IP via MOCA/coax.

They do use MOCA, but the reason to do so is to save time {money} on installations. They need their Set Top Box to have both TV and TCP/IP feeds; if it does not get TCP/IP, it can't sell you pay per view.

BUT, while the ONT can supply TCP/IP out either the RJ45 jacks OR atop the coax via MOCA. it can not [do] both. And since there's {presumably} coax to the TV now, but not CAT5, they started providing routers with MOCA in, RJ45 out.

In fact, it's a screwy mess, as the router has to back-feed back to the ONT to deliver TCP/IP via MOCA to the STB's. Somewhere there's a good writeup on same.

I wonder if we're ever see a MOCA -> POTS adapter unit as well. Unlikely.

Further, the first generation of MOCA "Actiontec" routers sucked sharp rocks and brought howls. Later ones may be better; there are now pages telling you how to turn the miserable Actiontecs into a bridge where it does less damage.

As for power backup, I can't grasp why people are putting the ONT's on a UPS. A UPS takes AC and makes DC to charge a battery to later turn it back into AC again...so the ONT can make DC from it. And loses efficiency at every step.

It's my understanding that all the ONT's have a 2nd battery input, and if you feed it 13.8vdc, it runs. So go buy a big "gel cell" or if you have the space, a 50AH deep cycle marine battery; and a $5 trickle charger. THAT will keep you going when Reddy Kilowatt goes on strike.

To answer your question (at least for me):

A) It's easy. A brand new small (~500VA) UPS can be had for

***** Moderator's Note *****

DOCSIS was developed to pass data over coax used for cable TV services. As such, a single DOCSIS channel uses exactly one (analog) TV channel's worth of bandwidth. This is 6 MHz in the United States (8 MHz elsewhere in the world). DOCSIS uses QAM modulation to pass 38 Mbps of data (after error correction) downstream using one of the 100's of channels available in a typical cable systems. Typical cable systems use RF spectrum from around

100 MHz to 650 MHz, 750 MHz, 850 MHz or even 1GHz. Upstream channels are carried in the low end of the spectrum and are much slower.

DOCSIS signals pass through the cable system just like any other video signal (in fact, they are identical to digital video at the lowest OSI layers). If a cable system can pass digital video, it can pass DOCSIS.

DOCSIS 3.0 allows channels to be bonded to get data rates higher than 38 Mbps.

MoCA, on the other hand, was developed to distribute high speed data WITHIN a home. It runs over coax, based on the assumption that most homes have a coax distribution network but not cat-5 or cat-6. It operates above the frequencies used for cable channels (including DOCSIS) so as not to interfere with the TV services on the coax. I think it is centered around

1.5 GHz, but I could be wrong. I don't recall the data rate of MoCA, but I believe it is higher than DOCSIS. MoCA is designed to go backwards through coax splitters to allow most home coax topologies to be supported.

Verizon uses MoCA to communicate between the set-top boxes and the ONT. The router acts as a gateway and manager for the control communications. MoCA carries upstream commands from the set top boxes to the ONT, then the ONT sends them over the fiber back to the video head end. Video on demand can also be carried over MoCA, as the data bandwidth is sufficient for video service.

In my home, I've FiOS for data and phone - no video. I've got Ethernet from the ONT to my router. I don't use MoCA or coax. If I ever use FiOS for video, I'll have to change to coax/MoCA.

In short, DOCSIS is a WAN technology while MoCA is a LAN.

-Gary

[Moderator snip]

The way I've seen FiOS implement here is as follows:

Fiber drop to an Alcatel box. The Alcatel box puts out a coppper pair for phone service and coaxial for television and net service.

I can confirm this. I happen to have on my desk right now a Verizon FiOS wiring plan for a 300-unit multiple dwelling in New York City.

It has a separate fiber drop to every apartment and an ONT in each apartment that is subscribed to Verizon service. It has two layers of passive optical hubs and no powered components -- or, at least, no components that require building power. Whether any of the optical components are actually powered to allow remote testing, etc. I do not know but would tend to speculate likely not. I believe there is really, truly, a 300 fiber bundle running in from the street and that it's not actively multiplexed until that location. Maybe there are totally passive ways to do DWDM now so the passive "hubs" in the building actually have unpowered frequency multipliers/dividers in them -- I do not know.

But it is unquestionably the case that even in multiple dwellings (and in this case we are talking about 15 separate buildings served by a single Verizon cable entrance!) VZ does bring the fiber all the way to the ONT in the customer's home.

It's not different. This isn't how Verizon wires multiple dwellings, likely because they do not want to maintain or are (with good reason) concerned they could not get permission to install duplicative coax cable in structures already served by the local cableco.

I have looked into this a bit more; the above is not really correct in two important respects.

1) The fiber "hubs" used by Verizon appear to be passive optical beam splitters/combiners. The network is fully broadcast for downstream communications with a link layer beneath any standard Ethernet framing that emulates point-to-point Ethernet behavior (it would certainly seem that since there is a single downstream transmitter collisions really aren't possible so this should not be hard). Downstream transmissions are encrypted so that, in theory, only a specific ONT can decrypt them.

Upstream is a little funny. The upstream signal supposedly propagates only towards the head end (how this is done optically I do not know but I'm sure it's possible), so encryption is not used. I don't know how the head end handles collisions though it appears TDM in the upstream direction is used to attempt to assure they do not occur.

2) Fully passive DWDM/CWDM equipment is, in fact, available from several suppliers, but use of it in a PON deployment such as FiOS would be, at least, not something that is standardized.

So, the diagram I have that shows VZ entering the building in question with two fibers -- not 300 -- is almost certainly correct in that detail, and I was speaking whereof I knew not.

Ha! Around here they vampire the coax left in place by the predominant carrier to get the net and CATV signal into the domicile.

But not in multiple dwellings, right? That would require them to either install a duplicate network of coax feeding each "lit" unit, or for the owner of the MDU to have completely kicked the other carrier out -- they can't run MOCA over the same cable someone else is running digital cable and DOCSIS on. Or can they?

My Rotary Phones work just fine with the FIOS Service!