What did it cost to add ADSL capability to the Coop's system, and to convert subscribers to ADSL?

It cost the Coop a lot of time and money to switch over to ADSL, but Qwest's tripling of its price for the dedicated loops left the Coop no choice in the matter.

The Coop had to purchase two G.Lite ADSL cards (a service card and a spare), at about $250 each.

Then a subtle problem presented itself -- our Copper Mountain CE-150 would not power up with an ADSL card in place. As it turns out, the CE-150 power supply comes in two versions, and only one of the two versions will power the ADSL card. You can read about the two types of power supply. Copper Mountain does not sell the "better" power supply any more, and its distributors don't carry it any more. They never turn up on eBay. It was good luck for the Coop that not one but two private individuals who had heard of our plight (the Qwest tripling of its price for dedicated loops) made such power supplies available to us. We now have a working power supply and a spare, which cost us $250.

The Coop had to determine which ADSL modems to buy. The Copper Mountain web site provides a listing of modems said to be compatible with the G.Lite card so we purchased one of each modem listed, for testing. As it turned out we were only able to get one model (the Alcatel Speed Touch Home) to work with the G.Lite card. So we purchased a quantity of Speed Touch Home ADSL modems. Most of these were obtained on eBay for $50-70 each.

The Coop had to obtain a central office splitter. These are made for chassis mounting in central offices. They are expensive and are made for mounting only in chassis that are much too large to fit in our limited space. One retail source quoted $524 for each 16-port splitter module, of which we would need two for our 24 ports. Some Internet searching found an individual who was selling 16-port modules for an Automatic Electric central office rack for $20 each. We used some angle brackets to mount them and they work fine.

The Coop had to buy protectors to protect the ADSL card from any lightning surges which might come in on the buried telephone cables. And it had to buy "66" punchdown blocks to splice the various cables and equipment together.

The Coop had to obtain splitters for use at subscribers' homes. These were found on eBay for about $5 each.

These were hardware costs, all required as a matter of engineering necessity. But then Qwest sprang upon us another cost, quite unnecessary and unjustified. Qwest announced that before we could use our Field Connection Point for shared subloops we would be required to pay a $627 "reclassification fee". This "reclassification" process involves receiving our check for $627, making a note in Qwest's records that some of the pairs of our FCP would henceforth be used for shared subloops, and putting a label in the crossbox near our FCP.

Then there were labor costs. The Coop had to install the splitters at the DSLAM location. The Coop had to install a splitter at each subscriber location. The Coop's monitoring systems had to be programmed to monitor the 24 new ports. When the time came to cut over service, the Coop had to swap out the old SDSL modem for the new ADSL modem for each subscriber, and had to revise the routing table in the DSLAM. This took dozens of hours, all told, from Coop volunteers.

By now most of the Coop's subscribers have been converted over to shared subloops.