Thanks to the Dish Network Uplink Center

I'm not off by that much.

1 mile == 5280 feet. 10 x 500 ft box of cable == 5000 ft. 10.5 is a better approximation, but it's the scale of the number that we are interested in.

Circumference of the Earth is literally just under 25,000 miles either around the poles or around the equator. The earth is slightly oblate, so it's a hundred or 200 miles difference between the two. For easy math I used 25,000 miles.

6 x 25,000 miles (per trip around) is 150,000 miles.

10 boxes per mile is 1.5 million boxes.

This is about the scale of the number, not an exact count on boxes.

Ahh.. I missed the 500 ft box of cable you were using.
 
They probably are using Cat5e, you're right. What else are they using for all their computers to connect?
John was probably thinking of the video cabling, not just the PC cabling. I have no idea what that would be. Low-loss coax such as RJ11? Waveguides for microwave frequencies?
 
Way Cool Scott......
I was thinking that you might want to start a "Report It To Dish" forum just for outage and picture quality reports. On the other hand, the "real" reports might get clogged with individual repair issues and general reports of dispair (whining).

It would be interested to see how it worked.... especially if you could get the Dish folks to report back on major issues in real-time.

If you haven't done-so already, you might pitch it to the Dish folks and see if they want to go for a trial period (90 days?)...... just thinkin.

In my wildest dreams I could see a post "audio down on Channel xxx" and a Dish reply a few minutes later "audio back up on xxxx, please confirm," followed by a reply by the poster.
 
They probably are using Cat5e, you're right. What else are they using for all their computers to connect?

From what I could tell, the yellow cabling in that pic wasn't Category cable. Could be that that was just a wiring sleeve, but it didn't have that appearance to me.

5e? Depends. I'd expect a mixture of 5e and 6. I don't know that anyone is wiring Cat7 at that scale.

Cheers,
 
No problem believing it

Scott sez:



That's 150,000 miles give or take a few hundred. I don't believe the claim.
Bet you've never wired a master control operations. I have and have no problems in believing that from the Dishes to the output to uplink plus all the CAT 6 for the place that they have that much cable.
 
Bet you've never wired a master control operations. I have and have no problems in believing that from the Dishes to the output to uplink plus all the CAT 6 for the place that they have that much cable.

No, I just worry about the systems at the end points of the cable plants. I still have problems believing the number unless they're doing things like counting runs of Cat5 at 4x the physical length.

150,000 miles > 3/4 of a billion feet. Let's say that the average run is 15 meters / 50 feet. That means they have to have > 15 million 15 meter runs.

You can believe it, but I am actually paying attention to the scale of the number.
 
I too would think that 6x around the globe is not correct. The only way I can see them reaching this figure is if they are also counting all the fiber runs from the PoPs around the country back to the uplinks.

If you look at it another way, Dish has about 2300 channels (some are counted 3-4x). If you assume 150,000 miles that would be 65 miles of wire for each station carried. What could they possibly be doing with 65 miles of wire for one station?

More likely they are counting the runs to all the reception points. Then it would make much more sense.
 
No, I just worry about the systems at the end points of the cable plants. I still have problems believing the number unless they're doing things like counting runs of Cat5 at 4x the physical length.

150,000 miles > 3/4 of a billion feet. Let's say that the average run is 15 meters / 50 feet. That means they have to have > 15 million 15 meter runs.

You can believe it, but I am actually paying attention to the scale of the number.

From the size of the facility.. I would guess each run is more in the neighborhood of a few hundred feet.. with bundles of a hundred or so each.. it is pretty easy to conceive the numbers they are talking about. this place is a little bigger than your basement..
 

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