RE: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
I think the big push to get the fcc to define broadband is highly based on the rus/ntia setting definitions of what broadband is. If any anyone has been fallowing the rus/ntia they are the one handing out all the stimulus infrastructure grant loan money. So there are a lot of political reasons to make the definition of broadband a bit slower than one would think. I guess it doesn't hurt that the larger lec's with the older infrastructure are shelling out the money to lobby to make sure the definition stays as low as can be. They don't want to see the gov funding there competition. Just my 2 cents. -carlos -----Original Message----- From: Ted Fischer [mailto:ted@fred.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:50 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband Paul Timmins wrote:
Fred Baker wrote:
On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:
What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be
going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.
Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and broadband was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the
term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM. of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video)
That's my humble opinion. Let them use a new term, like "High Speed Internet".
Seconded
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy - infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it. On Aug 26, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Carlos Alcantar wrote:
I think the big push to get the fcc to define broadband is highly based on the rus/ntia setting definitions of what broadband is. If any anyone has been fallowing the rus/ntia they are the one handing out all the stimulus infrastructure grant loan money. So there are a lot of political reasons to make the definition of broadband a bit slower than one would think. I guess it doesn't hurt that the larger lec's with the older infrastructure are shelling out the money to lobby to make sure the definition stays as low as can be. They don't want to see the gov funding there competition. Just my 2 cents.
-carlos
-----Original Message----- From: Ted Fischer [mailto:ted@fred.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:50 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
Paul Timmins wrote:
Fred Baker wrote:
On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:
What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be
going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.
Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and broadband was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the
term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM. of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video)
That's my humble opinion. Let them use a new term, like "High Speed Internet".
Seconded
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish. On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Fred Baker<fred@cisco.com> wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy - infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it.
On Aug 26, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Carlos Alcantar wrote:
I think the big push to get the fcc to define broadband is highly based on the rus/ntia setting definitions of what broadband is. If any anyone has been fallowing the rus/ntia they are the one handing out all the stimulus infrastructure grant loan money. So there are a lot of political reasons to make the definition of broadband a bit slower than one would think. I guess it doesn't hurt that the larger lec's with the older infrastructure are shelling out the money to lobby to make sure the definition stays as low as can be. They don't want to see the gov funding there competition. Just my 2 cents.
-carlos
-----Original Message----- From: Ted Fischer [mailto:ted@fred.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:50 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
Paul Timmins wrote:
Fred Baker wrote:
On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:
What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be
going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.
Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and
broadband
was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the
term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM.
of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals
(as
for voice or data or video)
That's my humble opinion. Let them use a new term, like "High Speed Internet".
Seconded
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit. Pro's for copper from curb: 1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey. Jack
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jack Bates<jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
I have fiber to the home. I can't imagine going back to "cable modems" now. eww..
Joel Esler wrote:
I have fiber to the home. I can't imagine going back to "cable modems" now. eww..
I couldn't imagine leaving my VDSL2. I've seen broadband sent to the house via fiber, coax, and copper. I've seen them all done well, and I've seen them all done poorly. All are capable of hitting >50mb/s. I personally like copper for the splice and cost on drops as well as cost of NID/CPE. Coax has a lot of bandwidth, but requires you to get as close as you would with copper to do it right and has other issues. Fiber is the fastest and can run off fewer remote systems, but it has higher costs and maintenance issues. I would probably run fiber in a densely populated area. In rural America, I would stick with copper off 1.5 mile short loop remotes. A lot depends on what the bandwidth is for. Most of the telco's I work with rarely have a corporate customer paying for more than 10mb/s. Jack
Joel Esler wrote:
On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 3:06 PM, Jack Bates<jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
I have fiber to the home. I can't imagine going back to "cable modems" now. eww..
The problem that the FCC faces is making a realistic definition that can apply to the whole US and not just cities. How does fiber (home or curb) figure in the rural sections of the country?
Roy wrote:
The problem that the FCC faces is making a realistic definition that can apply to the whole US and not just cities. How does fiber (home or curb) figure in the rural sections of the country?
It figures in nicely, thank you. Of course, our definition of curb might be 1.5 miles further than your definition. ;) 2 miles is the cutoff for > 10mb/s reliability, but to deal with future stuff, most of my telco customers have dropped it down to 1.5 miles. This also suited them for handling smaller remote systems with 48 ports and shifting from gr303 to SIP/MGCP, some with gr303 translators at the home office. Our highest supported circuits currently top at 100/50, but customers don't need them, and the telco's aren't pushing video down them. We honestly hope Internet video will continue to grow and we'll just shift into higher Internet bandwidth and stick with transport. We're good at transport. Jack
Jack Bates wrote:
Roy wrote:
The problem that the FCC faces is making a realistic definition that can apply to the whole US and not just cities.
If I'm reading this question right, the issue is that Congress appropriated some pork for "rural broadband" and now it's up to the FCC to guess what Congress intended that to mean so they can determine which applicants will be allowed to feed at the public trough. I'd say that most laymen currently consider "broadband" to be an always-on service at 1Mb/s or faster, regardless of the particular technology used. FTTH sounds attractive, but there's just not enough pork to actually do it for a non-trivial number of rural homes; it's barely feasible for (sub)urban homes. FTTC is the only realistic option, with the last mile being either existing copper or existing coax. The "curb" has a slightly different meaning in a rural area, of course, but that doesn't need to be specified in the definition anyway.
How does fiber (home or curb) figure in the rural sections of the country?
It figures in nicely, thank you. Of course, our definition of curb might be 1.5 miles further than your definition. ;)
2 miles is the cutoff for > 10mb/s reliability, but to deal with future stuff, most of my telco customers have dropped it down to 1.5 miles.
My ILEC's techs claim they can run VDSL2 several miles but lose about 1Mb/s per 1000ft from the head end. Luckily I'm about 1500ft from mine, and my line tested out at ~58Mb/s -- though they'll only sell me 10Mb/s of that for data and 25Mb/s of it for TV. It's amazing how far we've come in the last two decades since I got my first 2400bps modem. If VDSL2 can't go far enough for rural areas and/or would require more remote units than is feasible, I'd say that ADSL is fast enough that it should also qualify. Supporting triple-play should not be a requirement, IMHO, as customers can always use DBS for TV and most people who claim to have "broadband" today don't have or can't get triple-play. I wouldn't go as far as accepting ISDN/IDSL, though, if anyone is even still selling that junk. S -- Stephen Sprunk "God does not play dice." --Albert Einstein CCIE #3723 "God is an inveterate gambler, and He throws the K5SSS dice at every possible opportunity." --Stephen Hawking
CON: active devices in the OSP. On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's; different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the way back to the office. Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or draw too much power. Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul redundancy on fiber rings Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID Jack Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
CON: active devices in the OSP.
On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build; the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the "cost of the NID" or anything like that. Nobody cares whether you saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project. One of the cool things about the infrastructure that is now in place (copper pairs) is that it turned out to be relatively future-proof - lots of 50 and 70 year old OSP still in use. In order to get similarly long life out of newly installed fiber assets, the only real solution is home runs to either existing or newly constructed concentration points (not just a box at the side of the road, that's not what I'm talking about here). Distributed splitter designs force forklift upgrades when the Next Big Thing comes along, rather than upgrading the service only for folks who are willing to pay for it. The Next Big Thing is always coming, and 2.4 Gbit/sec down per port GPON is gonna look awfully slow 10 years hence when everyone's demanding gigabit ethernet to the desktop, not to mention 20 years from now with IPv6 multicast of 2000 channels of 4320p pr0n. I used to believe in the FTTC (fiber to the curb) model too - it's the "obvious" solution. That was before I started cranking the numbers myself, playing with some of the new splicing solutions that are out there that require *far* less finesse than the cam-splice stuff I was using 10 years ago. Now I believe in the "other" FTTC (fiber to the couch). Get it as far out into the field as you possibly can, right up to, or even inside, the house. -r Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> writes:
heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's; different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the way back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or draw too much power.
Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul redundancy on fiber rings
Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID
Jack
Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
CON: active devices in the OSP. On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
Rob, well put. -jim Sent from my BlackBerry device on the Rogers Wireless Network -----Original Message----- From: "Robert E. Seastrom" <rs@seastrom.com> Date: Fri, 28 Aug 2009 09:29:58 To: Jack Bates<jbates@brightok.net> Cc: Robert Enger - NANOG<nanog@enger.us>; <nanog@nanog.org> Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build; the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the "cost of the NID" or anything like that. Nobody cares whether you saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project. One of the cool things about the infrastructure that is now in place (copper pairs) is that it turned out to be relatively future-proof - lots of 50 and 70 year old OSP still in use. In order to get similarly long life out of newly installed fiber assets, the only real solution is home runs to either existing or newly constructed concentration points (not just a box at the side of the road, that's not what I'm talking about here). Distributed splitter designs force forklift upgrades when the Next Big Thing comes along, rather than upgrading the service only for folks who are willing to pay for it. The Next Big Thing is always coming, and 2.4 Gbit/sec down per port GPON is gonna look awfully slow 10 years hence when everyone's demanding gigabit ethernet to the desktop, not to mention 20 years from now with IPv6 multicast of 2000 channels of 4320p pr0n. I used to believe in the FTTC (fiber to the curb) model too - it's the "obvious" solution. That was before I started cranking the numbers myself, playing with some of the new splicing solutions that are out there that require *far* less finesse than the cam-splice stuff I was using 10 years ago. Now I believe in the "other" FTTC (fiber to the couch). Get it as far out into the field as you possibly can, right up to, or even inside, the house. -r Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> writes:
heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's; different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the way back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or draw too much power.
Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul redundancy on fiber rings
Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID
Jack
Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
CON: active devices in the OSP. On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build; the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the "cost of the NID" or anything like that. Nobody cares whether you saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project.
Errr, I've yet to meet a rural ILEC that doesn't take the cost of the NID splitter vs inline splitters into account. ILECs will argue over a single $1/customer, and rightfully so. The cost of the FTTH NID adds considerably to the price per customer. In addition, it generates additional maintenance costs maintaining batteries. I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages. Batteries have shelf lives, and maintaining one per household is definitely more costly than maintaining the batteries to power the remotes. Getting rid of costs, FTTH uses more power, and most of the people I've talked to said we can't feed it from the remotes even via copper mixed with the fiber. This creates issues when we need to provide service. Everyone always badmouth's the whole emergency phone thing, but we take it seriously in the rural areas where power outages are not uncommon, natural disasters are expected, and we are the ONLY utility that continues to function. Jack
One of the cool things about the infrastructure that is now in place (copper pairs) is that it turned out to be relatively future-proof - lots of 50 and 70 year old OSP still in use. In order to get similarly long life out of newly installed fiber assets, the only real solution is home runs to either existing or newly constructed concentration points (not just a box at the side of the road, that's not what I'm talking about here). Distributed splitter designs force forklift upgrades when the Next Big Thing comes along, rather than upgrading the service only for folks who are willing to pay for it. The Next Big Thing is always coming, and 2.4 Gbit/sec down per port GPON is gonna look awfully slow 10 years hence when everyone's demanding gigabit ethernet to the desktop, not to mention 20 years from now with IPv6 multicast of 2000 channels of 4320p pr0n.
I used to believe in the FTTC (fiber to the curb) model too - it's the "obvious" solution. That was before I started cranking the numbers myself, playing with some of the new splicing solutions that are out there that require *far* less finesse than the cam-splice stuff I was using 10 years ago. Now I believe in the "other" FTTC (fiber to the couch). Get it as far out into the field as you possibly can, right up to, or even inside, the house.
-r
Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> writes:
heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's; different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the way back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or draw too much power.
Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul redundancy on fiber rings
Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID
Jack
Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
CON: active devices in the OSP. On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish. I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
Perhaps the most practical service for both broadband and ALWAYS-on voice service is one pair of copper (POTS) and one pair of fiber everything-else per house. Does anyone have a ballpark guess on the incremental cost of a strand-mile (assuming the ditch is going to be dug and the cable put in it, how much does the per-mile cost of the cable go up for each additional strand in it) ? If the fiber pair goes all the way from some reasonably concentrated location to the house, then excessive locations with batteries should not be required. -Dorn On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build; the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the "cost of the NID" or anything like that. Nobody cares whether you saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project.
Errr, I've yet to meet a rural ILEC that doesn't take the cost of the NID splitter vs inline splitters into account. ILECs will argue over a single $1/customer, and rightfully so. The cost of the FTTH NID adds considerably to the price per customer. In addition, it generates additional maintenance costs maintaining batteries. I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages. Batteries have shelf lives, and maintaining one per household is definitely more costly than maintaining the batteries to power the remotes.
Getting rid of costs, FTTH uses more power, and most of the people I've talked to said we can't feed it from the remotes even via copper mixed with the fiber. This creates issues when we need to provide service. Everyone always badmouth's the whole emergency phone thing, but we take it seriously in the rural areas where power outages are not uncommon, natural disasters are expected, and we are the ONLY utility that continues to function.
Jack
One of the cool things about the infrastructure that is now in place
(copper pairs) is that it turned out to be relatively future-proof - lots of 50 and 70 year old OSP still in use. In order to get similarly long life out of newly installed fiber assets, the only real solution is home runs to either existing or newly constructed concentration points (not just a box at the side of the road, that's not what I'm talking about here). Distributed splitter designs force forklift upgrades when the Next Big Thing comes along, rather than upgrading the service only for folks who are willing to pay for it. The Next Big Thing is always coming, and 2.4 Gbit/sec down per port GPON is gonna look awfully slow 10 years hence when everyone's demanding gigabit ethernet to the desktop, not to mention 20 years from now with IPv6 multicast of 2000 channels of 4320p pr0n.
I used to believe in the FTTC (fiber to the curb) model too - it's the "obvious" solution. That was before I started cranking the numbers myself, playing with some of the new splicing solutions that are out there that require *far* less finesse than the cam-splice stuff I was using 10 years ago. Now I believe in the "other" FTTC (fiber to the couch). Get it as far out into the field as you possibly can, right up to, or even inside, the house.
-r
Jack Bates <jbates@brightok.net> writes:
heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's;
different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the way back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or draw too much power.
Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul redundancy on fiber rings
Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID
Jack
Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
CON: active devices in the OSP. On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
On Aug 28, 2009, at 9:47 AM, Jack Bates wrote:
Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build; the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the "cost of the NID" or anything like that. Nobody cares whether you saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project.
Errr, I've yet to meet a rural ILEC that doesn't take the cost of the NID splitter vs inline splitters into account. ILECs will argue over a single $1/customer, and rightfully so. The cost of the FTTH NID adds considerably to the price per customer. In addition, it generates additional maintenance costs maintaining batteries. I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages. Batteries have shelf lives, and maintaining one per household is definitely more costly than maintaining the batteries to power the remotes.
Getting rid of costs, FTTH uses more power, and most of the people I've talked to said we can't feed it from the remotes even via copper mixed with the fiber. This creates issues when we need to provide service. Everyone always badmouth's the whole emergency phone thing, but we take it seriously in the rural areas where power outages are not uncommon, natural disasters are expected, and we are the ONLY utility that continues to function.
Before you get too hung up on the emergency phone thing, take a hard look at the present day. The telcos pushed SLC gear out everywhere. Those have batteries, but at least in some areas, no maintenance was done, batteries died, and when the power went out, so did the phones. The SLCs had generator plug-in setups to be used in an emergency, but in any natural disaster, it's unlikely there'd be enough portables deployed and maintained by the telco to keep the multiplexors alive. For myself, I moved my phone service off Verizon to Comcast in part because Comcast service always works through power outages, where Verizon in the last 5 years has always failed. That just means in my neighborhood, Comcast's batteries haven't died yet. If you want to make the emergency phone thing a part of the discussion, then regulations need to exist AND be enforced, and penalties assessed, for failure to provide such during power outages. It's not happening today, so don't expect it in the future either.
Daniel Senie wrote:
Before you get too hung up on the emergency phone thing, take a hard look at the present day. The telcos pushed SLC gear out everywhere.
I'm the network engineer for 12 ILECs. Over the last 10 years, I've seen several major outages (> 48 hours) where voice has been maintained. One ILEC was disappointed in not being able to maintain DSL as well (as DSLAM/SLC was separate). They've since developed a plan to solve that issue and to maintain DSL as well (just for those households that have power/generators themselves).
If you want to make the emergency phone thing a part of the discussion, then regulations need to exist AND be enforced, and penalties assessed, for failure to provide such during power outages. It's not happening today, so don't expect it in the future either.
That may be. I don't know what RBOCs do. The ILECs here are privately owned companies. They aren't publicly traded. They are a part of their communities. Don't get me wrong, profit is definitely on the top list, but not at the sacrifice of quality and reliability. When your daily life consists of spending time with your customers because it's your community, you do everything you can to protect your name and reputation. A not uncommon statement heard when someone doesn't like the answer given by the helpdesk, "I'm friends with the owner. I'm going to call and complain to him/her." Jack
Once upon a time, Daniel Senie <dts@senie.com> said:
Before you get too hung up on the emergency phone thing, take a hard look at the present day. The telcos pushed SLC gear out everywhere. Those have batteries, but at least in some areas, no maintenance was done, batteries died, and when the power went out, so did the phones. The SLCs had generator plug-in setups to be used in an emergency, but in any natural disaster, it's unlikely there'd be enough portables deployed and maintained by the telco to keep the multiplexors alive.
Around here, most BellSouth cabinets have a natural gas generator as part of the setup, so they stay up as long as the gas lines are good (and if something has happened to both the power lines and the gas service, it probably doesn't matter much anyway). We had a fairly large power outage here a few months ago that affected just about everybody except for my house and my sister's house (we're only a mile or so apart). Neither of us even knew the power was out until we left our houses. Her Comcast cable was out (my Knology wasn't), so she decided to go to the store (I just happened to also go out at the same time). Sticking with BellSouth/AT&T for phone service (and DSL for Internet) wasn't such a bad idea after all. -- Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net> Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.
On Aug 28, 2009, at 7:17 AM, Daniel Senie wrote:
If you want to make the emergency phone thing a part of the discussion, then regulations need to exist AND be enforced, and penalties assessed, for failure to provide such during power outages. It's not happening today, so don't expect it in the future either.
The FCC has adopted requirements for 24 hours of backup power for central offices and 8 hours for remote switches, digital loop carrier (SLCs), and cell sites among others back in 2007. However those rules have been on hold so far due to the usual wrangling. Unless Katrina fades completely from memory, some sort of requirement will likely come out, at least to maintain existing backup power equipment. Individual states may have their own preexisting regulations. Even in spite of the current state of FCC rulemaking, I've seen a number of new generators placed at cell sites.
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Jack Bates<jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages.
The battery in my FTTH NID is completely useless. It maintains the voice side of the NID but drops the Internet side. Only, I cancelled the POTS service years ago and use a Vonage phone. So now I need a second UPS for the already-battery-backed NID or I lose phone service. Brilliant design that. IIRC, when my FTTH was installed, I was told: here's the battery. It's now your problem. When this light goes red, call the number here to BUY a new one. Folks handle batteries for their flashlights and emergency radios and cars and cordless phones. I fail to understand why asking the customer to handle one more battery would stymie them. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Maybe an NID with an integrated phone and a hand-crank-generator so you can always crank it to make a call :) On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 1:59 PM, William Herrin <herrin-nanog@dirtside.com>wrote:
On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Jack Bates<jbates@brightok.net> wrote:
I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages.
The battery in my FTTH NID is completely useless. It maintains the voice side of the NID but drops the Internet side. Only, I cancelled the POTS service years ago and use a Vonage phone. So now I need a second UPS for the already-battery-backed NID or I lose phone service. Brilliant design that.
IIRC, when my FTTH was installed, I was told: here's the battery. It's now your problem. When this light goes red, call the number here to BUY a new one.
Folks handle batteries for their flashlights and emergency radios and cars and cordless phones. I fail to understand why asking the customer to handle one more battery would stymie them.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
On 26-Aug-2009, at 13:38, Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home.
I'm sure I remember hearing from someone that the timelines for disbursement of stimulus money were tight enough that many people expected much of the money to remain unspent. Does narrowing the scope of the funding to mandate fibre have the effect of funding more and better infrastructure, or will it simply result in less money being made available? Does it matter?
They have a saying in politics to the effect that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." This is a pretty good illustration. We have the opportunity to improve connectivity in rural America through the wise expenditure of taxpayer funding, and it's best not to squander it by insisting on top-shelf fiber or nothing at all. Let's push the fiber a little deeper, and bridge the last 20,000 feet with something that won't be too expensive to replace in 3-5 years. The budget ($7B) just isn't there to give every barn some nice GigE fiber, even though it would make the cows happy. Richard Bennett -----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley@hopcount.ca] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 1:42 PM To: Fred Baker Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband On 26-Aug-2009, at 13:38, Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home.
I'm sure I remember hearing from someone that the timelines for disbursement of stimulus money were tight enough that many people expected much of the money to remain unspent. Does narrowing the scope of the funding to mandate fibre have the effect of funding more and better infrastructure, or will it simply result in less money being made available? Does it matter?
I would argue that "broadband" is the upper X percentile of bandwidth options available to residential users. For instance, something like Verizon FiOS would be broadband while a 7 Mbps cable wouldn't. Jeff On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Richard Bennett<richard@bennett.com> wrote:
They have a saying in politics to the effect that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." This is a pretty good illustration. We have the opportunity to improve connectivity in rural America through the wise expenditure of taxpayer funding, and it's best not to squander it by insisting on top-shelf fiber or nothing at all. Let's push the fiber a little deeper, and bridge the last 20,000 feet with something that won't be too expensive to replace in 3-5 years. The budget ($7B) just isn't there to give every barn some nice GigE fiber, even though it would make the cows happy.
Richard Bennett
-----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley@hopcount.ca] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 1:42 PM To: Fred Baker Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
On 26-Aug-2009, at 13:38, Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home.
I'm sure I remember hearing from someone that the timelines for disbursement of stimulus money were tight enough that many people expected much of the money to remain unspent.
Does narrowing the scope of the funding to mandate fibre have the effect of funding more and better infrastructure, or will it simply result in less money being made available? Does it matter?
-- Jeffrey Lyon, Leadership Team jeffrey.lyon@blacklotus.net | http://www.blacklotus.net Black Lotus Communications of The IRC Company, Inc. Platinum sponsor of HostingCon 2010. Come to Austin, TX on July 19 - 21 to find out how to "protect your booty."
Having worked for rather large MSO in past I can tell you the issue with this that the cost man power and engineering time to go back and replace today with 3-5 forward technology is mostly like more then delta between copper and fiber today. -jim On Wed, Aug 26, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Richard Bennett<richard@bennett.com> wrote:
They have a saying in politics to the effect that "the perfect is the enemy of the good." This is a pretty good illustration. We have the opportunity to improve connectivity in rural America through the wise expenditure of taxpayer funding, and it's best not to squander it by insisting on top-shelf fiber or nothing at all. Let's push the fiber a little deeper, and bridge the last 20,000 feet with something that won't be too expensive to replace in 3-5 years. The budget ($7B) just isn't there to give every barn some nice GigE fiber, even though it would make the cows happy.
Richard Bennett
-----Original Message----- From: Joe Abley [mailto:jabley@hopcount.ca] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 1:42 PM To: Fred Baker Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
On 26-Aug-2009, at 13:38, Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home.
I'm sure I remember hearing from someone that the timelines for disbursement of stimulus money were tight enough that many people expected much of the money to remain unspent.
Does narrowing the scope of the funding to mandate fibre have the effect of funding more and better infrastructure, or will it simply result in less money being made available? Does it matter?
The push to dumb down the definition is not only to benefit the legacy providers. It also benefits the politicians. A lower standard means that a greater quantity of citizens can be deemed to have been given broadband. The politicians will claim that they have served more Americans... The hard underlying issue is cost-justifying expensive OSP builds in low-density areas. Yes, aerial construction is cheaper than UG. But, it is still hard to build a business case for providing service in a low-density area, especially as an over-builder. (And any terrestrial provider is essentially an over-builder now that DBS tv service is so pervasive.) One cannot count on ~100% penetration, as was possible when there was only one game in town. I don't know if we can ever cost-justify bringing *real* broadband (un-capped FE, GigE, fiber) service to the hinterland. Many of the countries with higher speed service that we compare ourselves against (e.g. S.Korea) are able to build at a very low price point because they have a very high percentage of MDUs. MDU builds are comparatively low cost. Urban MDU, where you can piggy-back on an existing building-entrance conduit are even cheaper. This is like farm subsidy or foreign aid. The tax payer is asked to subsidize bringing the benefits of modern urban/suburban technology to the middle of nowhere. However, if the program succeeds in increasing broadband penetration (whatever broadband is) perhaps it will have the beneficial effect of making the nation more homogeneous and harmonious. On 8/26/2009 10:38 AM, Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy - infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it.
On Aug 26, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Carlos Alcantar wrote:
I think the big push to get the fcc to define broadband is highly based on the rus/ntia setting definitions of what broadband is. If any anyone has been fallowing the rus/ntia they are the one handing out all the stimulus infrastructure grant loan money. So there are a lot of political reasons to make the definition of broadband a bit slower than one would think. I guess it doesn't hurt that the larger lec's with the older infrastructure are shelling out the money to lobby to make sure the definition stays as low as can be. They don't want to see the gov funding there competition. Just my 2 cents.
-carlos
-----Original Message----- From: Ted Fischer [mailto:ted@fred.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:50 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
Paul Timmins wrote:
Fred Baker wrote:
On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:
What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be
going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.
Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and broadband was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the
term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM. of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video)
That's my humble opinion. Let them use a new term, like "High Speed Internet".
Seconded
On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy - infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it.
Broadband stimulus money = $7,200,000,000 Housing units in USA (2000) = 115,904,641 Stimulus money per housing unit = $62.12 one-time What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money? Or for rural housing units (2000) = 25,938,698 Stimulus money per rural housing unit = $277.58 one-time What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money in a rural build-out? How much will fiber to the home cost in a rural area?
Sean Donelan wrote:
Stimulus money per rural housing unit = $277.58 one-time
What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money in a rural build-out?
How much will fiber to the home cost in a rural area?
For 1-2k customers in small rural towns I've been hearing numbers in the millions of dollars without FTTH. FTTH projects exceeded all DSL in price and had higher cost NIDs. There are also more engineering details that must be considered in FTTH (and standard telco engineering firms sometimes screw up on it; running the bill up more) to cover voice concerns. And while everyone is arguing about this, I'll let you know right now it is much MUCH harder to get money when putting copper in than fiber; including many of the different types of loans. I've seen people screwed over because of the push to fiber which has often made it cost prohibitive for them to get service and strained the telco finances reducing their overall ability to support service. So, yeah. I'd be happy if everyone would back down and quit pushing FTTH so hard and support sound, reliable, inexpensive FTTC technologies. They both have their place. Just for the record, I still have over 50% of my customer base in dialup. Of course, 98% of those dialups are in AT&T territory. My ILEC/CLEC customers have done well in providing DSL to a majority of their customers. They have even increased bandwidth where they can and tariffs allow. I hope to see AT&T expand further out than 3 miles from the CO, upgrading some of their double ended carrier and putting in DSL capable remotes. Given they probably can't recover costs on some of the existing plant, it is doubtful they'll put in more fiber than necessary. Jack
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy
Estimates to bring FTTH to all of America is in the $100 to $300B range. So yes, the $7.2B is a drop in the bucket. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Sean Donelan [mailto:sean@donelan.com] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 9:53 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband On Wed, 26 Aug 2009, Fred Baker wrote: -
infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it.
Broadband stimulus money = $7,200,000,000 Housing units in USA (2000) = 115,904,641 Stimulus money per housing unit = $62.12 one-time What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money? Or for rural housing units (2000) = 25,938,698 Stimulus money per rural housing unit = $277.58 one-time What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money in a rural build-out? How much will fiber to the home cost in a rural area?
Fred, I picked Aroostook, Washington, and Lincoln counties for a 4g wireless with backhaul infrastructure proposal. A wireline infrastructure proposal for these counties (BIP) would, for some arbitrary amount of capital expense, serve some of the population in towns, but leave the non-in-town populations with no change in infrastructure. I thought about adding a western (mountainous) county to the mix, but for a proof-of-concept those three are representative of most of rural Maine. All qualify as "rural remote", being more than 50 miles from a city of 20,000, or a suburban area of 50,000 (USDA RUS definition of "rural remote"). Not many of either of those in Maine anyway. As I wrote yesterday, "triple play" simply hasn't sold "broadband" (source: USDA stats and Maine ISP experience), therefore uptake and post-stimulus subscriber retention are wicked important. The BTOP vehicle provides two additional non-infrastructure grant opportunities, for "public computer centers" and for "sustainable broadband adoption", so as I wrote those I attempted to make best use of link properties and to-the-centers (not home, or curb) and whatever "sustainable" might mean and the available statutory purposes and therefore services above link to propose something innovative. My guess (its in my proposal so I guess its my proposal writing money bet) is that "rural broadband" means something other than IPv4 DHCP provisioned, fat but flaky pipes allowing access to asymmetric content. That works in the suburban and urban markets, but its failed, according to the USDA and my Maine ISP competitors, in rural USA and Maine. While I share (other hat, we signed our first zone last year and our second zone will be signed this year) the "suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC" discussion with myself, I think this misses the gambled mandatory-to-implement-feature (see "gamble", above) of locality. {Packet|Connection} users in rural areas have some requirement more pressing than parity of access to the service model that meets the requirements of non-rural {Packet|Connection} users. Eric Fred Baker wrote:
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy - infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it.
On Aug 26, 2009, at 9:44 AM, Carlos Alcantar wrote:
I think the big push to get the fcc to define broadband is highly based on the rus/ntia setting definitions of what broadband is. If any anyone has been fallowing the rus/ntia they are the one handing out all the stimulus infrastructure grant loan money. So there are a lot of political reasons to make the definition of broadband a bit slower than one would think. I guess it doesn't hurt that the larger lec's with the older infrastructure are shelling out the money to lobby to make sure the definition stays as low as can be. They don't want to see the gov funding there competition. Just my 2 cents.
-carlos
-----Original Message----- From: Ted Fischer [mailto:ted@fred.net] Sent: Wednesday, August 26, 2009 8:50 AM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
Paul Timmins wrote:
Fred Baker wrote:
On Aug 24, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Luke Marrott wrote:
What are your thoughts on what the definition of Broadband should be
going forward? I would assume this will be the standard definition for a number of years to come.
Historically, narrowband was circuit switched (ISDN etc) and broadband was packet switched. Narrowband was therefore tied to the digital signaling hierarchy and was in some way a multiple of 64 KBPS. As the
term was used then, broadband delivery options of course included virtual circuits bearing packets, like Frame Relay and ATM. of or relating to or being a communications network in which the bandwidth can be divided and shared by multiple simultaneous signals (as for voice or data or video)
That's my humble opinion. Let them use a new term, like "High Speed Internet".
Seconded
participants (21)
-
Andrew Carey -
Carlos Alcantar -
Chris Adams -
Daniel Senie -
deleskie＠gmail.com -
Dorn Hetzel -
Eric Brunner-Williams -
Frank Bulk - iName.com -
Fred Baker -
Jack Bates -
Jeffrey Lyon -
jim deleskie
-
Joe Abley -
Joel Esler -
Richard Bennett -
Robert E. Seastrom -
Robert Enger - NANOG -
Roy -
Sean Donelan -
Stephen Sprunk -
William Herrin