----- Original Message -----
From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>
In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 07:11:56PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
I believe they should be allowed to optionally provide L2 enabled services of various forms.
Could you expand on why you think this is necessary? I know you've given this some thought, and I'd like to understand.
I'll give you my answer, which may not be the same as Owen's.
The way I see it, for $100 in equipment (2x$50 optics) anyone can light 1Gbps over the fiber. The only way the muni has significantly cheaper port costs than a provider with a switch and a port per customer is to do something like GPON which allows one port to service a number of customers, but obviously imposes a huge set of limitions (bandwiths, protocols you can run over it, etc).
You're assuming there, I think, that residential customers will have mini-GBIC ports on their routers, which has not been my experience. :-) Understand that I'm not concerned with minimizing the build cost to the muni; I'm interested in *maximizing the utility of the build*, both to the end-user customers, *and* to local businesses who might/will serve them. If all that potential small ISP has to bring me is a 10GE, *backhauled over one of my own pairs from whatever space they rent*, and *I'm* responsible for all the muxing, the part of the Public Good which tries to bring businesses to the city is well served by that.
I also think the "ONT" adds unnecesary cost. They are used today primarily for a handoff test point, and to protect shared networks (like GPON) from a bad actor. With a dedicated fiber pair per customer I think they are unnecessary. I can see a future where the home gateway at the local big box has an SFP port (or even fixed 1000baseLX optics) and plugs directly into the fiber pair.
This depends on exactly how the ONT is built, and I am not as familiar with the field as I will be by the time I have to care. But the ability to deliver multiple VLANs over a single pair, and possibly terminate all 3 pairs in one ONT (or in several, for redundancy), and the handoff is Ethernet -- and possibly DOCSIS3.0 RF, depending on what the boxes already come with (I'm not interested in custom hardware at my scale) -- is quite fetching to me for all those reasons.
No ONT cost, no ONT limitations, no need to power it (UPS battery replacement, etc). It's a value subtract, not a value add.
Based also on the point Owen makes about reducing truck rolls by having netadmin controlled hardware at the customer end, I'm not at all sure I agree; I think it depends a lot on what you're trading it off *against*. I am, I admit, not all that fond of distributed power, but you make the trades you must. 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