OK, think about it like this. The most efficient topology to provide both coverage and resiliency is a ring with nodes (shelves) from which end
are connected. That ring (usually Gig or 10Gig Ethernet today) needs to be connected to a central location so you can interconnect to other
users providers
(your ISP customers) and/or to connect to the Internet if the city is also going to provide direct L3 services. If you instead push down a L1 path then the most expensive pieces of gear in the access network (the FTTx shelves) have to be replicated by everyone who wants to offer services.
In short, you're saying I *must* have a ring with active equipment scattered around it, and I *cannot* home run each property.
No one else is saying that, and you don't appear to justify it later in this email:
I'm not saying that you have to, but that's the most efficient and resilient (both of those are important right?) way of arranging the gear. The exact loop length from the shelves to the end users is up to you and in certain circumstances (generally really compact areas) you can simply home run everyone. Most muni networks don't look that way though because while town centers are generally compact where people (especially the better subdivisions) live is away from the center of town in the US. I can't give you a lot insight on your specific area since I don't know it, but those are the general rules.
This bad not just from the initial cost perspective but because people and companies that identify themselves as ISPs seldom know anything beyond Ethernet and IP and then only in a few manufacturers (mainly Cisco and Juniper). They are most certainly not comfortable working with Calix, Adtran, and the rest of the carrier (formerly telco) equipment manufacturers.
Well, ok, but those people who are not comfortable handling access gear like the Calix will be L2 clients, anyway, taking a groomed 802.1q handoff from my Calix/whatever core, so they won't *have* to care.
That works, so long as its an Ethernet hand off you're (usually there is some goofy gear out there) in good shape.
L1 access will be there a) cause it has to be anyway, to keep active equipment out of the outside plant, b) for people who really want PtP, and 3) for ISPs large enough to want to do it themselves, if any show up (they admittedly might not; we're only 6k households).
Keep in place, but I've worked with virtually all of the nationwide guys and most of the regional ones and they don't as a rule want anything to do with your fiber plant. Even in major metro areas selling dark fiber doesn't have a huge uptake because if you the network owner didn't light it you have no idea how good or bad the splices and runs are.
To make matters more complicated in cases of problems you don't have a good demarcation of responsibility. What do you do as
the
L1 provider when one of your ISP partners tells you one of his customers can't connect or stay connected to that ISP's gear? Whose responsible in that case?
Well that's an interesting question, but I don't see that it's not orthogonal to the issue you raised earlier.
What happens when your tech goes out with an OTDR ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_time-domain_reflectometer) meter and says the connection is fine but your ISP insists its your problem?
On an L1 connection, you mean? I'll do what people always do; I'll work the ticket; at that level, this stuff's relatively digital, no?
No, its not and I've seen several of networks fail because demarc issues. US Carrier (a statewide network here in GA) was recently sold for pennies on the dollar largely because of blurry demarcs. You can and will get sucked into scenarios you don't want to be in and will lose money on.
You're talking about what I'm calling L2 clients. If layer 2 falls over it's my fault, and believe me, I'll know about it.
What I'm telling you is that you can't reliably have L1 clients in shared model.
You're telling me that, but you're not giving me good reasons *why* you think so.
Because: 1) There won't be much interest in doing it from experienced operators so you're only going to get customers for it that are also new to the business. So your combined troubleshooting and install time will be bad for a long time until everyone in the chain kind of understand what they're doing. 2) Unless you can home run every single connection you're going to run into a lot of access related issues. You will be working for the city so they won't have a problem with you getting into their building at the water tower/sewage treatment plant/power sub station or other city owned property. Your L1 customer isn't going to have that access (not with the city manager/mayor/council's knowledge anyway) because of regulatory and liability reasons. If you do home run everything you still have an access challenge (where are you going to be able to give access to these customers economically?) but its probably more solvable since its one spot. You also increase your costs by home running each connection, but that may or may not be a deal breaker in your situation. 3) Your going to have to do a lot more work since at L1 all of the rough edges and sharp corners are there to be dealt (like someone grabbing the wrong cable from the patch panel) there is simply no inexpensive method of safeguarding L1 adds, changes, and modifies so either you do them or you let your L1 customer do them and run a risk. This is also something that the city management is going to have concerned over. 4) Physical layer troubleshooting is much harder than layer 2 and up. Having several organizations and potentially several different equipment vendors and L2 technologies will be very tough to deal with over time. 5) I've seen at least 5 muni networks try this and not succeed. If you include non-muni networks with similar characteristics (like EMCs) then I've seen it tried more than a dozen times with no success (or interest) beyond a few dark fiber set ups for point to point connections across town.
You can of course lease someone a dark fiber from point A to point B, but that's not a traditional way of partnering with ISPs and in any case will only be feasible for a small number of connections since you (probably) can't afford to home run each location in your network.
Well, I'll have to see on that, won't I? That's my next practicality checkpoint; fiber passing costs.
The long and short of it is lots of people have tried to L1 sharing and its not economical and nothing I've seen here or elsewhere changes that.
You just changed gears again, no?
I'm not trying to share L1 *drops*. I'm trying to make it possible to share *the entire L1 deployment between providers*, a drop at a time.
That's what I'm trying to tell you can't do. Its more expensive in both the initial and long term costs.
I can see 'initial', maybe, but if I reduce the utility of the field network by putting active equipment in it, then I've already raised the OPEX, substantially, as well as reducing the intrinsic value of that network.
I think you're vastly overestimating the desire that customers have for a bare fiber. Having said that, your community may be different from what I've experienced.
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA #natog +1 727 647 1274
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