Leo Bicknell wrote:
If you have to reach someone 20km from the CO, the cost of running the ditch-wich down the road in a rural area is not the dominate cost over the next 20 years. It's equipment. If the copper plant takes 4 repeaters to do the job, that's 4 bits of equipment that can fail, and will need to be upgraded at some point. Running something as simple as point to point fiber they can be provided with GigE speeds today with no intermediate equipment; the cost of a 20km GBIC is far less than the cost of installing 4 repeaters.
The problem with all of these is ROI, not cost. Somewhere along the line we've decided very short ROI's are required. Do you work at a company where an ROI of over a year is laughed at? When the original rural telephone network was pushed ROI's of 50 years were talked about. There's plenty of infrastructure built every day with ROI's of 20 years.
So it would cost $2000 per home to put in fiber. The margin on the service is $5 per month. It's a 33 year ROI. That's ok with me, it's infrastructure, like a road, or a bridge. We're still using copper in the ground put in during the 60's, 70's, and 80's
Seems like a good idea to the technical side of me, but the business side sees a problem: that the employees like to eat in the 33 year span wherein the company isn't making a dime on its customers. -Paul