Scott: While we less than ten thousand FTTH subs, our OSP operational costs are much less with fiber than copper. Our maintenance costs, in order of greatest to least, have been locating, cable moves (i.e. bridge project), monitoring digs, and damage to fiber (rodents and vehicles that hit peds). We have had many more ONT issues than fiber issues, and most fiber issues can be resolved by cleaning both sides of the fiber (customer and head end). And we've had to replace the 50' patch cable between the OLTG and optical splitter a two of three times. While finger-pointing is always a risk when multiple players are involved in delivering any service, I don't perceive that as being as much of a problem as you think it will be. With the right fiber testing gear, any suspected problems can pretty quickly be identified. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Scott Helms [mailto:khelms@zcorum.com] Sent: Sunday, February 03, 2013 2:55 PM To: Jay Ashworth Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: Rollup: Small City Municipal Broadband On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Scott Helms" <khelms@zcorum.com>
Basically when the customer (typically the service provider, but not always) orders a loop to a customer the muni provider would OTDR shoot it from the handoff point to the service provider to the prem. They would be responsible for insuring a reasonable performance of the fiber between those two end points.
Been tried multiple times and I've never seen it work in the US, Canada, Europe, or Latin America. That's not to say it can't work, but there lots of reasons why it doesn't and I don't think anyone has suggested anything here that I haven't already seen fail.
So let me be clear, here, because I'm semi-married to this idea...
You're asserting that it is not practical to offer L1 optical per-sub handoffs to L2/3 ISPs, because
I'm saying you can't build a working business model off of layer 1 connections as your primary offering in almost all cases for a muni network. I am hedging my bet here because I don't know your city's topology, density, growth, goals or a hundred other factors that might make you the 1 exception to the rule.
a) the circuits can't be built reliably, b) the circuits won't run reliably over the long run, c) if something *does break*, it's hard or expensive to determine where,
or
d) each side will say it's the other side's fault, and things won't get fixed?
Let me see if I can explain it, since clearly I'm not getting my thoughts down in my emails well enough.
a) You WILL have physical layer issues. Some of these issues will be related to the initial construction of the fiber. b) Other problems will because of changes that occur over time. These could be weather related (especially for aerial cable), but also vehicle hits to fiber cabinets, and occasionally fires. Depending on your location earthquakes, flooding, and other extreme "weather" may also be a factor. c) No, WHEN something breaks it is hard and expensive to figure out where. This is true even if you're the layer 2 provider but it gets you out of the problem of it works $A_provider_gear but not $B_provider_gear. You're going to drive yourself nuts troubleshooting connections IF you do sign up several partners especially if they choose different technologies. d) No, it will always be your fault until you can prove its not. If you don't know how to troubleshoot the technology your L2 partners are using how can you ever do anything but accept their word that they have everything set up correctly?
I can't see any difference between building it for their L2 access box and my own. I simply don't believe (b). (c) seems questionable as well, so I assume you have to mean (d).
There are lots of differences, especially related to troubleshooting. Remember, all of these devices are doing phase modulation (QAM, QPSK, etc) so a simple OTDR test (which is similar to checking SNR on a RF system) doesn't show many of the problems that prevent data connectivity on high speed connections.
Dry pairs are impossible to order these days for a reason.
Certainly: because you have to get them from incumbents, who don't want you to use a cheap service to provide yourself something they could charge you a lot more money for.
You assert a technical reason?
Most of this is because the ILECs have gotten the regulations changed but they successfully used some legitimate technical reasons (and other less legitimate arguments) to get those rules changed.
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
-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------