----- Original Message -----

From: "Rob McEwen" <rob@invaluement.com>

When any government entity desires log files from an ISP, and if that ISP is very protective of their customer's privacy and civil liberties, then the ISP typically ONLY complies with the request if there is a proper court order, granted by a judge, after "probable cause" of some kind of crime has been established, where they are not on a fishing expedition. But, in contrast, if the city government owns the network, it seems like a police detective contacting his fellow city employee in the IT department could easily circumvent the civil liberties protections. Moreover, there is an argument that the ISP being stingy with such data causes them to be "heros" to the public, and they gain DESIRED press and attention when they refuse to comply with such requests without a court order. In contrast, the city's IT staff and the police detective BOTH share the SAME boss's boss's boss. The IT guy won't get a pat on the back for making life difficult for the police department. He'll just silently lose his job eventually, or get passed up for a promotion. The motivation will be on him to PLEASE his fellow city employees, possibly at the expense of our civil liberties.

PS - of course, no problems here if the quest to gain information involves a muni network that is only used by city employees.

PPS - then again, maybe my "log file example" doesn't apply to the particular implementation that Jay described? Regardless, it DOES apply to various government implementations of broadband service.

It would, if I were talking about a situation where the muni *was the ISP*, supplying layer 3+ services. I'm not. I'm purposefully only talking about layer 1 service (where the residents contract with an ISP client of the muni, and that client supplies an ONT and takes an optical handoff) or, my preferred approach, a layer 2 service (where the muni supplies the ONT and the ISP client of the muni takes an aggregated Ethernet handoff (probably 10G fiber, possibly trunked). (Actually, my approach if I was building it would be Layer 2 unless the resident wants a Layer 1 connection to {a properly provisioned ISP,some other location of theirs}. Best of both worlds.) 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

There's a really simple solution to this problem... Let the muni provide L1/L2 network, and make sure that your L3 usage is entirely run over encrypted channels between you and your (non-muni) L3 service provider. At that point, sure, the muni can see that you sent a lot of packets full of gibberish back and forth to your ISP. And? Owen On Jan 29, 2013, at 08:46 , Rob McEwen <rob@invaluement.com> wrote:

On 1/29/2013 10:59 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:

...

...

From: "Rob McEwen" <rob@invaluement.com> (C) The fact that the Internet is a series of PRIVATE networks... NOT owned/operated by the Feds... is a large reason why the 4th amendment provides such protections... it becomes somewhat of a "firewall" of protection against Federal gov't trampling of civil liberties... but if they own the network, then that opens up many doors for them. Regular readers know that I'm really big on municipally owned fiber networks (at layer 1 or 2)... but I'm also a big constitutionalist (on the first, second, fourth, and fifth, particularly), and this is the first really good counter-argument I've seen, and it honestly hadn't occurred to me.

Rob, anyone, does anyone know if any 4th amendment case law exists on muni- owned networks?

Good question. Here is another thing to consider regarding SOME muni network... (at least where private citizens/businesses subscribe to that network)

When any government entity desires log files from an ISP, and if that ISP is very protective of their customer's privacy and civil liberties, then the ISP typically ONLY complies with the request if there is a proper court order, granted by a judge, after "probable cause" of some kind of crime has been established, where they are not on a fishing expedition. But, in contrast, if the city government owns the network, it seems like a police detective contacting his fellow city employee in the IT department could easily circumvent the civil liberties protections. Moreover, there is an argument that the ISP being stingy with such data causes them to be "heros" to the public, and they gain DESIRED press and attention when they refuse to comply with such requests without a court order. In contrast, the city's IT staff and the police detective BOTH share the SAME boss's boss's boss. The IT guy won't get a pat on the back for making life difficult for the police department. He'll just silently lose his job eventually, or get passed up for a promotion. The motivation will be on him to PLEASE his fellow city employees, possibly at the expense of our civil liberties.

PS - of course, no problems here if the quest to gain information involves a muni network that is only used by city employees.

PPS - then again, maybe my "log file example" doesn't apply to the particular implementation that Jay described? Regardless, it DOES apply to various government implementations of broadband service.

-- Rob McEwen http://dnsbl.invaluement.com/ rob@invaluement.com +1 (478) 475-9032

----- Original Message -----

From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>

I am a big proponent of muni-owned dark fiber networks. I want to be 100% clear about what I advocate here:

- Muni-owned MMR space, fiber only, no active equipment allowed. A big cross connect room, where the muni-fiber ends and providers are all allowed to colocate their fiber term on non-discriminatory terms.

- 4-6 strands per home, home run back to the muni-owned MMR space. No splitters, WDM, etc, home run glass. Terminating on an optical handoff inside the home.

Hmmm. I tend to be a Layer-2-available guy, cause I think it lets smaller players play. Does your position (likely more deeply thought out than mine) permit Layer 2 with Muni ONT and Ethernet handoff, as long as clients are *also* permitted to get a Layer 1 patch to a provider in the fashion you suggest? (I concur with your 3-pair delivery, which makes this more practical on an M-A-C basis, even if it might require some users to have multiple ONTs...) 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

It's a matter of economies of scale. If everyone has to light their own fiber, you haven't saved that much. If the fiber is lit, at L2, and charged back on a cost-recovery basis, then there are tremendous economies of scale. The examples that come to mind are campus and corporate networks. Miles Fidelman Jay Ashworth wrote:

...

From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org> I am a big proponent of muni-owned dark fiber networks. I want to be 100% clear about what I advocate here:

- Muni-owned MMR space, fiber only, no active equipment allowed. A big cross connect room, where the muni-fiber ends and providers are all allowed to colocate their fiber term on non-discriminatory terms. - 4-6 strands per home, home run back to the muni-owned MMR space. No splitters, WDM, etc, home run glass. Terminating on an optical handoff inside the home. Hmmm. I tend to be a Layer-2-available guy, cause I think it lets smaller

----- Original Message ----- players play. Does your position (likely more deeply thought out than mine) permit Layer 2 with Muni ONT and Ethernet handoff, as long as clients are *also* permitted to get a Layer 1 patch to a provider in the fashion you suggest?

(I concur with your 3-pair delivery, which makes this more practical on an M-A-C basis, even if it might require some users to have multiple ONTs...)

Cheers, -- jra

-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra

In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:54:26PM -0500, Jay Ashworth wrote:

Hmmm. I tend to be a Layer-2-available guy, cause I think it lets smaller players play. Does your position (likely more deeply thought out than mine) permit Layer 2 with Muni ONT and Ethernet handoff, as long as clients are *also* permitted to get a Layer 1 patch to a provider in the fashion you suggest?

No, and there's good reason why, I'm about to write a response to Owen that will also expand on why. There are a number of issues with the muni running the ONT: - Muni now has to have a different level of techs and truck rolls. - The Muni MMR now is much more complex, requiring power (including backup generators, etc) and likely 24x7 staff as a result. - The muni-ont will limit users to the technologies the ONT supports. If you want to spin up 96x10GE WDM your 1G ONT won't allow it. - The optic cost is not significantly different if the muni buys them and provides lit L2, or if the service/provider user provides them. The muni should sell L1 patches to anyone in the MMR. Note, this _includes_ two on-net buildings. So if your work and home are connected to the same muni-MMR you could order a patch from one to the other. It may now be max ~20km, so you'll need longer reach optics, but if you want to stand up 96x10GE WDM you're good to go. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

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. 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). 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. No ONT cost, no ONT limitations, no need to power it (UPS battery replacement, etc). It's a value subtract, not a value add. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 07:53:34PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:

It really isn't. You'd be surprised how many uncompensated truck rolls are eliminated every day by being able to talk to the ONT from the help desk and tell the subscriber "Well, I can manage your ONT and it's pretty clear the problem is inside your house. Would you like to pay us $150/hour to come out and troubleshoot it for you?"

I would love statistics from actual providers today. I don't know of any residential telco services (pots, ISDN BRI, or DSL) that has an active handoff they can test to without a truck roll. I don't know of any cable services with an active handoff similar to an ONT, although they can interrogate most cable boxes and modems for signal quality measurements remotely to get some idea of what is going on. On the flip side, when CableCo's provide POTS they must include a modem with a battery, and thus incur the cost of shipping new batteries out and old batteries back every ~5 years; which they sometimes do by truck roll... So it seems to me both of those services find things work just fine without an ONT-like test point. ONTs seem unique to FTTH deployments, of which most today are GPON... -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

----- Original Message -----

From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>

I don't know of any residential telco services (pots, ISDN BRI, or DSL) that has an active handoff they can test to without a truck roll.

FiOS and anyone else who's doing triple play from an ONT. :-)

I don't know of any cable services with an active handoff similar to an ONT, although they can interrogate most cable boxes and modems for signal quality measurements remotely to get some idea of what is going on. On the flip side, when CableCo's provide POTS they must include a modem with a battery, and thus incur the cost of shipping new batteries out and old batteries back every ~5 years; which they sometimes do by truck roll...

Yeah; I have 10,000ish passings in 2.8 sq mi; I *want* to visit each node once every 5 years. :-)

So it seems to me both of those services find things work just fine without an ONT-like test point. ONTs seem unique to FTTH deployments, of which most today are GPON...

Yes, but I hate GPON with a passion. 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

On Wed 30 Jan 2013 16:58:28 PST, John Osmon wrote:

Does anyone make an ONT with a blinky light that you can toggle on/off remotely? It'd be great to say: Go look at the "it works" light.

If the remote tech can control the light, the end user would have a better idea that the upstream provider really *was* in control -- rather than trying to placate the caller.

I don' know of any but that's a great idea. Sorta like a UID light on a server... -- /*=================[ Jake Khuon <khuon@NEEBU.Net> ]=================+  | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers     /| / [~ [~ |) | | -------- |  | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation  / |/  [_ [_ |) |_| NETWORKS |    +==================================================================*/

Some in the industry are pushing the idea of reaching deeper into the customer's network to provide more value, to generate more revenue and more stickiness. Don't stop at the ONT, use something like TR-069 to manage the customer's gateway device. On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 7:50 PM, joel jaeggli <joelja@bogus.com> wrote:

On 1/30/13 5:01 PM, Jake Khuon wrote:

...

On Wed 30 Jan 2013 16:58:28 PST, John Osmon wrote:

...

Does anyone make an ONT with a blinky light that you can toggle on/off remotely? It'd be great to say: Go look at the "it works" light.

If the remote tech can control the light, the end user would have a better idea that the upstream provider really *was* in control -- rather than trying to placate the caller.

I don' know of any but that's a great idea. Sorta like a UID light on a server...

We're totally at the wrong end of the usability specrum if we even have to ask questions like this. you can tell of a cable modem is online or not at a glance.

...

-- /*=================[ Jake Khuon <khuon@NEEBU.Net> ]=================+ | Packet Plumber, Network Engineers /| / [~ [~ |) | | -------- | | for Effective Bandwidth Utilisation / |/ [_ [_ |) |_| NETWORKS | +=============================**==============================** =======*/

Why do you always assume we're talking about carriers, or the evil telcos, RBOC's, etc....? I'm talking about small to medium-sized service providers looking to expand services to compete against the Comcast's and AT&T's of the world that can practically give away Internet because they already own the infrastructure. We (by which I mean those small-to-medium SP's) can compete not on price but on additional value and flexibility. On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 11:42 PM, Randy Bush <randy@psg.com> wrote:

...

Some in the industry are pushing the idea of reaching deeper into the customer's network to provide more value, to generate more revenue and

how sadly desperate. crawl up the stack.

carriers who whine about content going over the top need to get their heads out of the somethingorother. if you choose to be a trucker and folk are using your truck to transport gold, damned hard to justify whining when you choose to be a trucker.

randy

----- 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

On Jan 31, 2013, at 07:07 , Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu> wrote:

Late to the conversation, but I'll chime in that we established a model in Maine that is working pretty well, at least for middle-mile fiber.

When we started building out MaineREN (our RON) we decided that having the University own the fiber would tie it up in political red tape. So much so that it would ultimately not be made available to the private sector (because incumbents would accuse us of competing with them using public funds). We knew this because we had already spent a year in the legislature fighting off industry lobbyists.

Obviously there are considerable investments in such infrastructure that many private companies are unwilling or unable to make in rural areas (ROI takes too long), so we really wanted to make sure that future facilities would be built out in a way that would allow service providers to expand into the state cheaply, encourage competition, and ultimately provide better services at lower costs.

The goal was to establish geographically diverse, high stand-count, rings to reach the majority of the state, so we pitched it in a public-private partnership to go after Recovery Act funding.

That's also a worthy goal, but it doesn't address the issues that are the subject of this conversation. Middle-mile solutions like this are not all that uncommon, even in such backwards places (when it comes to networking infrastructure) as silicon valley. Where we still have a serious lack of deployment and virtually no competition, even in most major metros, is the last mile.

As of a few months ago the build-out is complete, and the first networks to make use of the fiber are starting to come online (including MaineREN).

The way we did it was to have the state government create a new public utility designation of "Dark Fiber Provider". There are a few rules in place to keep things fair: Mainly they're forbidden to provide lit services and they're required to provide open access to anyone at published rates.

This is definitely a good first step if you can get it through the legislative process without having the $TELCOS and $CABLECOS lobby against it to the point of death or dismemberment.

The result is "Maine Fiber Company":

http://www.mainefiberco.com/

It's still early on, but I'm anxious to see how things look in 10 years or so.

Sounds great... Now, the $50,000,000 question... How do we replicate that model at the consumer level?

A lot of people who like the idea of what we've done aren't sure if it's a good model to apply for last mile fiber. Personally, I think replicating this model to deliver dark fiber to the home (much like electricity) is the only way we'll be able to shield providers from having to make major investments to deliver the level of service we really need. By keeping it as a dark-fiber only service, you create an environment where there is competition instead of one provider keeping speeds low and prices high.

That's certainly the ideal, yes.

I initially thought having L2 separation would be good in that service changes could be done remotely, etc. But after giving it some thought, I think it places way too much potential for L2 to be the bottleneck or source of problematic service and if it's provided by a public utility or municipality it could take very long to fix (if it get's fixed at all) due to politics and budget hawks. I really want to have choice between providers even at the L2 level.

There are cases where the lack of L2 services could pose a barrier to entry for competition. That's why I proposed the following requirements: 1. Must sell dark fiber to any purchaser. 2. Must sell dark fiber to all purchasers on equal terms. (There must be a published price list and there cannot be deviations from that price list. If the price list is modified, existing customers receive the new pricing at the beginning of their next billing cycle.) 3. May provide value-added L2 services 4. If L2 services are provided, they are also subject to rule 2. 5. May not sell L3 or higher level services. 6. May not hold ownership or build any form of alliance or affiliation with a provider of L3 or higher level services. Owen

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

...

----- Original Message -----

...

From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>

...

I am a big proponent of muni-owned dark fiber networks. I want to be 100% clear about what I advocate here:

- Muni-owned MMR space, fiber only, no active equipment allowed. A big cross connect room, where the muni-fiber ends and providers are all allowed to colocate their fiber term on non-discriminatory terms.

...

- 4-6 strands per home, home run back to the muni-owned MMR space. No splitters, WDM, etc, home run glass. Terminating on an optical handoff inside the home.

Hmmm. I tend to be a Layer-2-available guy, cause I think it lets smaller players play. Does your position (likely more deeply thought out than mine) permit Layer 2 with Muni ONT and Ethernet handoff, as long as clients are *also* permitted to get a Layer 1 patch to a provider in the fashion you suggest?

(I concur with your 3-pair delivery, which makes this more practical on an M-A-C basis, even if it might require some users to have multiple ONTs...)

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

-- Ray Patrick Soucy Network Engineer University of Maine System

T: 207-561-3526 F: 207-561-3531

MaineREN, Maine's Research and Education Network www.maineren.net

That's why I'm not advocating for open access, I'm advocating for L1/L2 provider separation and a requirement that the L1 access itself be open. I have yet to get a firm answer, but as I understand PON, it doesn't actually matter so much whether you put the splitter/combiner in an MMR or near the CPE. Obviously, most of the "economy" of PON comes from putting the splitter near the subscriber, but so does the loss of open access at L1. OTOH, if you build out fiber from a city or neighborhood or whatever to an independent MMR, I don't believe there's any reason you couldn't cross-connect various users home-run fibers to splitter/combiners inside the MMR and then run that to a PON system (if you really wanted to for some reason). Owen On Jan 31, 2013, at 12:45 , Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

The short answer is that you don't today and it will be a long time (if ever) before its feasible. Europe is commonly held up as an example of an area where open access works and if you stick to DSL networks that's true. The problem is that the DSL networks (by and large) in Europe aren't expanding and are being overtaken by FTTx and to a lesser extent DOCSIS. The reasons why this is so can be debated, but it is definitely happening and given that trend there is very little incentive for the equipment manufacturers and protocol groups to build in open access as a core part of their design as it was in DSL, especially with PPPoX authentication.

Now, once networks get to purely active Ethernet things get more simple technically, after all you easily do QinQ tagging, but there has been little movement even in regulation tolerant Europe to force operators to open up and its much less likely to happen here in the US. Whats more many of the FTTx builds aren't Ethernet today and doing open access on any flavor of PON is so painful operationally that it simply won't happen.

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Jan 31, 2013, at 07:07 , Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu> wrote:

...

Late to the conversation, but I'll chime in that we established a model in Maine that is working pretty well, at least for middle-mile fiber.

When we started building out MaineREN (our RON) we decided that having the University own the fiber would tie it up in political red tape. So much so that it would ultimately not be made available to the private sector (because incumbents would accuse us of competing with them using public funds). We knew this because we had already spent a year in the legislature fighting off industry lobbyists.

Obviously there are considerable investments in such infrastructure that many private companies are unwilling or unable to make in rural areas (ROI takes too long), so we really wanted to make sure that future facilities would be built out in a way that would allow service providers to expand into the state cheaply, encourage competition, and ultimately provide better services at lower costs.

The goal was to establish geographically diverse, high stand-count, rings to reach the majority of the state, so we pitched it in a public-private partnership to go after Recovery Act funding.

That's also a worthy goal, but it doesn't address the issues that are the subject of this conversation. Middle-mile solutions like this are not all that uncommon, even in such backwards places (when it comes to networking infrastructure) as silicon valley.

Where we still have a serious lack of deployment and virtually no competition, even in most major metros, is the last mile.

...

As of a few months ago the build-out is complete, and the first networks to make use of the fiber are starting to come online (including MaineREN).

The way we did it was to have the state government create a new public utility designation of "Dark Fiber Provider". There are a few rules in place to keep things fair: Mainly they're forbidden to provide lit services and they're required to provide open access to anyone at published rates.

This is definitely a good first step if you can get it through the legislative process without having the $TELCOS and $CABLECOS lobby against it to the point of death or dismemberment.

...

The result is "Maine Fiber Company":

http://www.mainefiberco.com/

It's still early on, but I'm anxious to see how things look in 10 years or so.

Sounds great... Now, the $50,000,000 question... How do we replicate that model at the consumer level?

...

A lot of people who like the idea of what we've done aren't sure if it's a good model to apply for last mile fiber. Personally, I think replicating this model to deliver dark fiber to the home (much like electricity) is the only way we'll be able to shield providers from having to make major investments to deliver the level of service we really need. By keeping it as a dark-fiber only service, you create an environment where there is competition instead of one provider keeping speeds low and prices high.

That's certainly the ideal, yes.

...

I initially thought having L2 separation would be good in that service changes could be done remotely, etc. But after giving it some thought, I think it places way too much potential for L2 to be the bottleneck or source of problematic service and if it's provided by a public utility or municipality it could take very long to fix (if it get's fixed at all) due to politics and budget hawks. I really want to have choice between providers even at the L2 level.

There are cases where the lack of L2 services could pose a barrier to entry for competition. That's why I proposed the following requirements:

1. Must sell dark fiber to any purchaser. 2. Must sell dark fiber to all purchasers on equal terms. (There must be a published price list and there cannot be deviations from that price list. If the price list is modified, existing customers receive the new pricing at the beginning of their next billing cycle.) 3. May provide value-added L2 services 4. If L2 services are provided, they are also subject to rule 2. 5. May not sell L3 or higher level services. 6. May not hold ownership or build any form of alliance or affiliation with a provider of L3 or higher level services.

Owen

...

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

...

----- Original Message -----

...

From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>

...

I am a big proponent of muni-owned dark fiber networks. I want to be 100% clear about what I advocate here:

- Muni-owned MMR space, fiber only, no active equipment allowed. A big cross connect room, where the muni-fiber ends and providers are all allowed to colocate their fiber term on non-discriminatory terms.

...

- 4-6 strands per home, home run back to the muni-owned MMR space. No splitters, WDM, etc, home run glass. Terminating on an optical handoff inside the home.

Hmmm. I tend to be a Layer-2-available guy, cause I think it lets smaller players play. Does your position (likely more deeply thought out than mine) permit Layer 2 with Muni ONT and Ethernet handoff, as long as clients are *also* permitted to get a Layer 1 patch to a provider in the fashion you suggest?

(I concur with your 3-pair delivery, which makes this more practical on an M-A-C basis, even if it might require some users to have multiple ONTs...)

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

-- Ray Patrick Soucy Network Engineer University of Maine System

T: 207-561-3526 F: 207-561-3531

MaineREN, Maine's Research and Education Network www.maineren.net

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Jan 31, 2013, at 13:27 , Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

You can't share access from one splitter to multiple OLTs so the location of the splitter isn't important. AFAIK there is simply no concept for that idea in any of the PON specs and its certainly not something that Calix/Adtran/Zhone/Alcatel/$gear_maker are building right now. For that matter I can't think of a single piece of gear beyond DWDM/CWDM that actually operates are layer 1 to allow that kind of split and then its very limited in terms of the channels available and not suitable for the kind of deployment I think you're describing.

Sure it is... If you have an MMR where all of the customers come together, then you can cross-connect all of $PROVIDER_1's customers to a splitter provided by $PROVIDER_1 and cross connect all of $PROVIDER_2's customers to a splitter provided by $PROVIDER_2, etc. If the splitter is out in the neighborhood, then $PROVIDER_1 and $PROVIDER_2 and... all need to build out to every neighborhood. If you have the splitter next to the PON gear instead of next to the subscribers, then you remove the relevance of the inability to connect a splitter to multiple OLTs. The splitter becomes the provider interface to the open fiber plant. Owen

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 4:15 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: That's why I'm not advocating for open access, I'm advocating for L1/L2 provider separation and a requirement that the L1 access itself be open.

I have yet to get a firm answer, but as I understand PON, it doesn't actually matter so much whether you put the splitter/combiner in an MMR or near the CPE. Obviously, most of the "economy" of PON comes from putting the splitter near the subscriber, but so does the loss of open access at L1.

OTOH, if you build out fiber from a city or neighborhood or whatever to an independent MMR, I don't believe there's any reason you couldn't cross-connect various users home-run fibers to splitter/combiners inside the MMR and then run that to a PON system (if you really wanted to for some reason).

Owen

On Jan 31, 2013, at 12:45 , Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

...

Owen,

The short answer is that you don't today and it will be a long time (if ever) before its feasible. Europe is commonly held up as an example of an area where open access works and if you stick to DSL networks that's true. The problem is that the DSL networks (by and large) in Europe aren't expanding and are being overtaken by FTTx and to a lesser extent DOCSIS. The reasons why this is so can be debated, but it is definitely happening and given that trend there is very little incentive for the equipment manufacturers and protocol groups to build in open access as a core part of their design as it was in DSL, especially with PPPoX authentication.

Now, once networks get to purely active Ethernet things get more simple technically, after all you easily do QinQ tagging, but there has been little movement even in regulation tolerant Europe to force operators to open up and its much less likely to happen here in the US. Whats more many of the FTTx builds aren't Ethernet today and doing open access on any flavor of PON is so painful operationally that it simply won't happen.

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 3:31 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Jan 31, 2013, at 07:07 , Ray Soucy <rps@maine.edu> wrote:

...

Late to the conversation, but I'll chime in that we established a model in Maine that is working pretty well, at least for middle-mile fiber.

When we started building out MaineREN (our RON) we decided that having the University own the fiber would tie it up in political red tape. So much so that it would ultimately not be made available to the private sector (because incumbents would accuse us of competing with them using public funds). We knew this because we had already spent a year in the legislature fighting off industry lobbyists.

Obviously there are considerable investments in such infrastructure that many private companies are unwilling or unable to make in rural areas (ROI takes too long), so we really wanted to make sure that future facilities would be built out in a way that would allow service providers to expand into the state cheaply, encourage competition, and ultimately provide better services at lower costs.

The goal was to establish geographically diverse, high stand-count, rings to reach the majority of the state, so we pitched it in a public-private partnership to go after Recovery Act funding.

That's also a worthy goal, but it doesn't address the issues that are the subject of this conversation. Middle-mile solutions like this are not all that uncommon, even in such backwards places (when it comes to networking infrastructure) as silicon valley.

Where we still have a serious lack of deployment and virtually no competition, even in most major metros, is the last mile.

...

As of a few months ago the build-out is complete, and the first networks to make use of the fiber are starting to come online (including MaineREN).

The way we did it was to have the state government create a new public utility designation of "Dark Fiber Provider". There are a few rules in place to keep things fair: Mainly they're forbidden to provide lit services and they're required to provide open access to anyone at published rates.

This is definitely a good first step if you can get it through the legislative process without having the $TELCOS and $CABLECOS lobby against it to the point of death or dismemberment.

...

The result is "Maine Fiber Company":

http://www.mainefiberco.com/

It's still early on, but I'm anxious to see how things look in 10 years or so.

Sounds great... Now, the $50,000,000 question... How do we replicate that model at the consumer level?

...

A lot of people who like the idea of what we've done aren't sure if it's a good model to apply for last mile fiber. Personally, I think replicating this model to deliver dark fiber to the home (much like electricity) is the only way we'll be able to shield providers from having to make major investments to deliver the level of service we really need. By keeping it as a dark-fiber only service, you create an environment where there is competition instead of one provider keeping speeds low and prices high.

That's certainly the ideal, yes.

...

I initially thought having L2 separation would be good in that service changes could be done remotely, etc. But after giving it some thought, I think it places way too much potential for L2 to be the bottleneck or source of problematic service and if it's provided by a public utility or municipality it could take very long to fix (if it get's fixed at all) due to politics and budget hawks. I really want to have choice between providers even at the L2 level.

There are cases where the lack of L2 services could pose a barrier to entry for competition. That's why I proposed the following requirements:

1. Must sell dark fiber to any purchaser. 2. Must sell dark fiber to all purchasers on equal terms. (There must be a published price list and there cannot be deviations from that price list. If the price list is modified, existing customers receive the new pricing at the beginning of their next billing cycle.) 3. May provide value-added L2 services 4. If L2 services are provided, they are also subject to rule 2. 5. May not sell L3 or higher level services. 6. May not hold ownership or build any form of alliance or affiliation with a provider of L3 or higher level services.

Owen

...

On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 12:54 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

...

----- Original Message -----

...

From: "Leo Bicknell" <bicknell@ufp.org>

...

I am a big proponent of muni-owned dark fiber networks. I want to be 100% clear about what I advocate here:

- Muni-owned MMR space, fiber only, no active equipment allowed. A big cross connect room, where the muni-fiber ends and providers are all allowed to colocate their fiber term on non-discriminatory terms.

...

- 4-6 strands per home, home run back to the muni-owned MMR space. No splitters, WDM, etc, home run glass. Terminating on an optical handoff inside the home.

Hmmm. I tend to be a Layer-2-available guy, cause I think it lets smaller players play. Does your position (likely more deeply thought out than mine) permit Layer 2 with Muni ONT and Ethernet handoff, as long as clients are *also* permitted to get a Layer 1 patch to a provider in the fashion you suggest?

(I concur with your 3-pair delivery, which makes this more practical on an M-A-C basis, even if it might require some users to have multiple ONTs...)

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

-- Ray Patrick Soucy Network Engineer University of Maine System

T: 207-561-3526 F: 207-561-3531

MaineREN, Maine's Research and Education Network www.maineren.net

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Jan 31, 2013, at 13:57 , Fletcher Kittredge <fkittred@gwi.net> wrote:

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: If you have an MMR where all of the customers come together, then you can cross-connect all of $PROVIDER_1's customers to a splitter provided by $PROVIDER_1 and cross connect all of $PROVIDER_2's customers to a splitter provided by $PROVIDER_2, etc.

If the splitter is out in the neighborhood, then $PROVIDER_1 and $PROVIDER_2 and... all need to build out to every neighborhood.

If you have the splitter next to the PON gear instead of next to the subscribers, then you remove the relevance of the inability to connect a splitter to multiple OLTs. The splitter becomes the provider interface to the open fiber plant

Owen;

Interesting. Do you then lose the cost advantage because you need home run fiber back to the MMR? Do you have examples of plants built with this architecture (I know of one such plant, but I am hoping you will turn up more examples.)

I don't know of any. Yes, it would eliminate part of the theoretical cost savings of the PON architecture, but the point is that it would provide a technology agnostic last mile infrastructure that could easily be used by multiple competing providers and would not prevent a provider from using PON if they chose to do so for other reasons. Owen

On Jan 31, 2013, at 19:21 , Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Fletcher nailed it, if you want the architecture you're describing then you simply don't want PON. Its built around lower cost and a big part of that lower cost is minimizing the fiber costs by serving splitters (and thus many homes) from a single fiber that back hauls to the CO. The other reason PON won't work for what you want is the splitters are passive and completely static in their operation. Here's an image of one that may make this clearer:

http://media.wholesale-electrical-electronics.com/product/imgage/Electrical&Electronics/2010101220/6dc7c82d59d9fd931bfba560a3e85031.jpg

I know what a splitter is and how they work. I understand PON really quite a bit better than you imagine I do. Bottom line, you've got OLT -> FIBER(of length n) -> splitter -> fiber-drops to each house -> ONT. All I'm proposing is making n really short and making "fiber-drops to each house" really long. I'm not proposing changing the fundamental architecture. Yes, I recognize this changes the economics and may well make PON less attractive than other alternatives. I don't care. That's not a primary concern. The question is "can PON be made to work in this environment?" It appears to me that it can. It will work as I've described, but, yes, it's very suboptimal from a cost perspective if your only goal is to deploy PON for a single provider. If, OTOH, your goal is to have a fiber infrastructure in the neighborhoods that can support a multitude of possible services of which PON from a number of providers is just one such possible service, then, the PON operators can, in fact, install in the MMR and do the splitting at the MMR end of the subscriber fiber with home-runs from the MMR to each home. True, PON is probably not the best technology fit for this. Ethernet probably makes more sense in most cases. However, if you have providers that do PON everywhere else and they don't want to support "exception equipment" for your facility, then it allows them to install PON just like their other deployments, only the splitter is next to the OLT instead of out near a collection of ONTs.

If you have to either run several (or more) fibers to a neighborhood or have managed neighborhood elements then you've simply destroyed the use case for PON. Luckily this use case matches pretty exactly for Ethernet, but you must do your wholesale play at layer 2 IMO to work economically.

I disagree. If you have home-run fiber to a large bank of patch panels in an MMR that can serve a ~8km radius of subscribers and providers can colocate whatever L2+ equipment they want to in said MMR with said fibers available for lease on equal footing to all providers, then the providers can deploy whatever makes the most sense to them whether that's SONET, Ethernet, PON, or optical tin cans over your fiber-string. Yes, this is more expensive for the fiber deployment than running FTTH from the local BBox and having splitters in the BBox, but if it's being done intelligently, especially in areas of greenfield deployment, then it doesn't have to be a lot more expensive. I get roughly 201 Sq. Km. as the area of an 8km radius circle (For the metrically challenged, that's roughly 77 Sq. Mi. or an area a little larger than Washington DC (68.3 sq. mi according to wikipedia). If you're willing to require more expensive optics, you could go to a larger area served to accommodate lower population densities and for higher density areas, it might make economic sense to make the service radius smaller and have more centers. I don't know what the economically ideal subscriber volume per center would be. That would have to be calculated. Owen

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 6:28 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Jan 31, 2013, at 13:57 , Fletcher Kittredge <fkittred@gwi.net> wrote:

...

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: If you have an MMR where all of the customers come together, then you can cross-connect all of $PROVIDER_1's customers to a splitter provided by $PROVIDER_1 and cross connect all of $PROVIDER_2's customers to a splitter provided by $PROVIDER_2, etc.

If the splitter is out in the neighborhood, then $PROVIDER_1 and $PROVIDER_2 and... all need to build out to every neighborhood.

If you have the splitter next to the PON gear instead of next to the subscribers, then you remove the relevance of the inability to connect a splitter to multiple OLTs. The splitter becomes the provider interface to the open fiber plant

Owen;

Interesting. Do you then lose the cost advantage because you need home run fiber back to the MMR? Do you have examples of plants built with this architecture (I know of one such plant, but I am hoping you will turn up more examples.)

I don't know of any. Yes, it would eliminate part of the theoretical cost savings of the PON architecture, but the point is that it would provide a technology agnostic last mile infrastructure that could easily be used by multiple competing providers and would not prevent a provider from using PON if they chose to do so for other reasons.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

I disagree. Loss is loss, regardless of where the splitter is placed in the equation. Distance x loss + splitter insertion loss = total loss for purposes of link budget calculation. The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical. On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

You're basing your math off of some incorrect assumptions about PON. I'm actually sympathetic to your goal, but it simply can't work the way you're describing it in a PON network. Also, please don't base logic for open access on meet me rooms, this works in colo spaces and carrier hotels but doesn't in broadband deployments because of economics. If you want to champion this worthy goal you've got to accept that economics is a huge reason why this hasn't happened in the US and is disappearing where it has happened globally.

...

Bottom line, you've got OLT -> FIBER(of length n) -> splitter -> fiber-drops to each house -> ONT.

So far you're correct.

...

All I'm proposing is making n really short and making "fiber-drops to

each

...

house" really long. I'm not proposing changing the fundamental architecture. Yes, I recognize this changes the economics and may well make PON less attractive than other alternatives. I don't care. That's not a primary concern. The question is "can PON be made to work in this environment?" It appears to me that it can.

Here is where you're problems start. The issue is that the signal *prior to being split* can go 20km if you're splitting it 32 ways (or less) or 10km if you're doing a 64 way split. AFTER the splitter you have a MAX radius of about 1 mile from the splitter.

Here is a good document that describes the problem in some detail:

http://www.ofsoptics.com/press_room/media-pdfs/FTTH-Prism-0909.pdf

Also, here is a proposed spec that would allow for longer runs post splitter with some background on why it can't work in today's GPON deployments.

http://www.ericsson.com/il/res/thecompany/docs/publications/ericsson_review/...

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Actually, this is an issue… I should have seen it. You have 3 loss components… Power out = (Power in - loss to splitter - splitter loss) / nOut - loss-to-customer So, if the loss to the splitter is 3db and you have 20db (effective 320db on a 16x split) loss on each customer link, that's a radically worse proposition than 20db loss to the splitter and 3db loss to each customer (which is effectively 48db loss on a 16x split). It's still do-able, but you either need amplifier(s) or very short distances between the customer and the MMR. Given this consideration, I think the situation can still be addressed. Put the splitters in the B-Box and allow for the possibility that each subscriber can be XC to either a splitter or an upstream dedicated fiber. The provider side of each splitter would be connected to an upstream fiber to the MMR. So, each B-Box contains however many splitters are required and each splitter is connected upstream to a single provider, but you can still have multiple competitive providers in the MMR. This setup could support both PON and Ethernet as well as other future technologies. Owen On Feb 1, 2013, at 1:04 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote:

I should clarify: Distance x loss/km + splitter loss. = link loss.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote: I disagree. Loss is loss, regardless of where the splitter is placed in the equation. Distance x loss + splitter insertion loss = total loss for purposes of link budget calculation.

The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote: Owen,

You're basing your math off of some incorrect assumptions about PON. I'm actually sympathetic to your goal, but it simply can't work the way you're describing it in a PON network. Also, please don't base logic for open access on meet me rooms, this works in colo spaces and carrier hotels but doesn't in broadband deployments because of economics. If you want to champion this worthy goal you've got to accept that economics is a huge reason why this hasn't happened in the US and is disappearing where it has happened globally.

...

Bottom line, you've got OLT -> FIBER(of length n) -> splitter -> fiber-drops to each house -> ONT.

So far you're correct.

...

All I'm proposing is making n really short and making "fiber-drops to each house" really long. I'm not proposing changing the fundamental architecture. Yes, I recognize this changes the economics and may well make PON less attractive than other alternatives. I don't care. That's not a primary concern. The question is "can PON be made to work in this environment?" It appears to me that it can.

Here is where you're problems start. The issue is that the signal *prior to being split* can go 20km if you're splitting it 32 ways (or less) or 10km if you're doing a 64 way split. AFTER the splitter you have a MAX radius of about 1 mile from the splitter.

Here is a good document that describes the problem in some detail:

http://www.ofsoptics.com/press_room/media-pdfs/FTTH-Prism-0909.pdf

Also, here is a proposed spec that would allow for longer runs post splitter with some background on why it can't work in today's GPON deployments.

http://www.ericsson.com/il/res/thecompany/docs/publications/ericsson_review/...

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Feb 1, 2013, at 1:43 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote:

It's still a 23dB loss for each customer from the CO to the ONT.

I have an OLT that launches at +5dBm. At 1490nm, I should see about a .26dB loss per km. My 1x32 splitter is going to add about 16dB more loss. Assuming we ignore connector losses, and also assume that the customer is 10km away:

Nope… The power going into each fiber out of the splitter is 1/16th that of what went into the splitter. Yes, your total in-line loss is still 10km, but you are forgetting about the fact that you lost 15/16th of the power effectively going to the fiber when you went through the splitter (in addition to the splitter loss itself). So: CO Based splitter: Each customer gets (IN - 16dB - (10km x .26db))/32 Splitter at 9km: Each customer gets (IN - (9km x .26dB) -16db)/32-(1km x .26db) If we use 5dBm as our input, this works out: CO: (5db - 16db - (10km x .26db) / 32 /32 is effectively -15 db (-3db = ½ power, 32 = 2^5) Substituting: (5db - 16db - 2.6db) -15db = -28.6db to each customer. Spitter at 9km: (5db - (9km x .26db) -16db)/32-(1km x .26db) Substituting: (5db - 2.34db -16db)-15db-.26db = -28.08db to each customer So there is a difference, but it seems rather negligible now that I've run the numbers. However, it's entirely possible that I got this wrong somewhere, so I invite those more expert than I to review the calculations and tell me what I got wrong. Owen

CO-based splitter: +5dBm - 16dB - (10km x .26dB) = -13.6

Splitter at 9km: +5dBm - (9km x .26dB) - 16dB - (1km x .26dB) = -13.6

If someone can explain why this math would be wrong, I'd love to hear it and I'd be happy to run it past our vendor to see if they agree.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: Actually, this is an issue… I should have seen it.

You have 3 loss components… Power out = (Power in - loss to splitter - splitter loss) / nOut - loss-to-customer

So, if the loss to the splitter is 3db and you have 20db (effective 320db on a 16x split) loss on each customer link, that's a radically worse proposition than 20db loss to the splitter and 3db loss to each customer (which is effectively 48db loss on a 16x split).

It's still do-able, but you either need amplifier(s) or very short distances between the customer and the MMR.

Given this consideration, I think the situation can still be addressed.

Put the splitters in the B-Box and allow for the possibility that each subscriber can be XC to either a splitter or an upstream dedicated fiber. The provider side of each splitter would be connected to an upstream fiber to the MMR.

So, each B-Box contains however many splitters are required and each splitter is connected upstream to a single provider, but you can still have multiple competitive providers in the MMR.

This setup could support both PON and Ethernet as well as other future technologies.

Owen

On Feb 1, 2013, at 1:04 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote:

...

I should clarify: Distance x loss/km + splitter loss. = link loss.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote: I disagree. Loss is loss, regardless of where the splitter is placed in the equation. Distance x loss + splitter insertion loss = total loss for purposes of link budget calculation.

The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote: Owen,

You're basing your math off of some incorrect assumptions about PON. I'm actually sympathetic to your goal, but it simply can't work the way you're describing it in a PON network. Also, please don't base logic for open access on meet me rooms, this works in colo spaces and carrier hotels but doesn't in broadband deployments because of economics. If you want to champion this worthy goal you've got to accept that economics is a huge reason why this hasn't happened in the US and is disappearing where it has happened globally.

...

Bottom line, you've got OLT -> FIBER(of length n) -> splitter -> fiber-drops to each house -> ONT.

So far you're correct.

...

All I'm proposing is making n really short and making "fiber-drops to each house" really long. I'm not proposing changing the fundamental architecture. Yes, I recognize this changes the economics and may well make PON less attractive than other alternatives. I don't care. That's not a primary concern. The question is "can PON be made to work in this environment?" It appears to me that it can.

Here is where you're problems start. The issue is that the signal *prior to being split* can go 20km if you're splitting it 32 ways (or less) or 10km if you're doing a 64 way split. AFTER the splitter you have a MAX radius of about 1 mile from the splitter.

Here is a good document that describes the problem in some detail:

http://www.ofsoptics.com/press_room/media-pdfs/FTTH-Prism-0909.pdf

Also, here is a proposed spec that would allow for longer runs post splitter with some background on why it can't work in today's GPON deployments.

http://www.ericsson.com/il/res/thecompany/docs/publications/ericsson_review/...

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

OK... Like Einstein, math is not my strong suit. Unfortunately, I don't have his prowess with physics, either. Owen On Feb 1, 2013, at 14:59 , Henri Hannula <henri.hannula@msoy.fi> wrote:

You propably calculated the second one (5 - 2.34 -16)-15 + 0.26 since you got -28.08

(5 - 16 - 2.6) - 15 = -28.6 (5 - 2.34 - 16) - 15 - 0.26 = -28.6

-Hena

-----Alkuperäinen viesti----- Lähettäjä: Owen DeLong [mailto:owen@delong.com] Lähetetty: 2. helmikuuta 2013 0:00 Vastaanottaja: Jason Baugher Kopio: NANOG Aihe: Re: Muni fiber: L1 or L2?

On Feb 1, 2013, at 1:43 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote:

...

It's still a 23dB loss for each customer from the CO to the ONT.

I have an OLT that launches at +5dBm. At 1490nm, I should see about a .26dB loss per km. My 1x32 splitter is going to add about 16dB more loss. Assuming we ignore connector losses, and also assume that the customer is 10km away:

Nope. The power going into each fiber out of the splitter is 1/16th that of what went into the splitter.

Yes, your total in-line loss is still 10km, but you are forgetting about the fact that you lost 15/16th of the power effectively going to the fiber when you went through the splitter (in addition to the splitter loss itself).

So: CO Based splitter:

Each customer gets (IN - 16dB - (10km x .26db))/32

Splitter at 9km:

Each customer gets (IN - (9km x .26dB) -16db)/32-(1km x .26db)

If we use 5dBm as our input, this works out:

CO: (5db - 16db - (10km x .26db) / 32 /32 is effectively -15 db (-3db = ½ power, 32 = 2^5) Substituting: (5db - 16db - 2.6db) -15db = -28.6db to each customer.

Spitter at 9km: (5db - (9km x .26db) -16db)/32-(1km x .26db) Substituting: (5db - 2.34db -16db)-15db-.26db = -28.08db to each customer

So there is a difference, but it seems rather negligible now that I've run the numbers.

However, it's entirely possible that I got this wrong somewhere, so I invite those more expert than I to review the calculations and tell me what I got wrong.

Owen

...

CO-based splitter: +5dBm - 16dB - (10km x .26dB) = -13.6

Splitter at 9km: +5dBm - (9km x .26dB) - 16dB - (1km x .26dB) = -13.6

If someone can explain why this math would be wrong, I'd love to hear it and I'd be happy to run it past our vendor to see if they agree.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:16 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: Actually, this is an issue. I should have seen it.

You have 3 loss components. Power out = (Power in - loss to splitter - splitter loss) / nOut - loss-to-customer

So, if the loss to the splitter is 3db and you have 20db (effective 320db on a 16x split) loss on each customer link, that's a radically worse proposition than 20db loss to the splitter and 3db loss to each customer (which is effectively 48db loss on a 16x split).

It's still do-able, but you either need amplifier(s) or very short distances between the customer and the MMR.

Given this consideration, I think the situation can still be addressed.

Put the splitters in the B-Box and allow for the possibility that each subscriber can be XC to either a splitter or an upstream dedicated fiber. The provider side of each splitter would be connected to an upstream fiber to the MMR.

So, each B-Box contains however many splitters are required and each splitter is connected upstream to a single provider, but you can still have multiple competitive providers in the MMR.

This setup could support both PON and Ethernet as well as other future technologies.

Owen

On Feb 1, 2013, at 1:04 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote:

...

I should clarify: Distance x loss/km + splitter loss. = link loss.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 3:03 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote: I disagree. Loss is loss, regardless of where the splitter is placed in the equation. Distance x loss + splitter insertion loss = total loss for purposes of link budget calculation.

The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote: Owen,

You're basing your math off of some incorrect assumptions about PON. I'm actually sympathetic to your goal, but it simply can't work the way you're describing it in a PON network. Also, please don't base logic for open access on meet me rooms, this works in colo spaces and carrier hotels but doesn't in broadband deployments because of economics. If you want to champion this worthy goal you've got to accept that economics is a huge reason why this hasn't happened in the US and is disappearing where it has happened globally.

...

Bottom line, you've got OLT -> FIBER(of length n) -> splitter -> fiber-drops to each house -> ONT.

So far you're correct.

...

All I'm proposing is making n really short and making "fiber-drops to each house" really long. I'm not proposing changing the fundamental architecture. Yes, I recognize this changes the economics and may well make PON less attractive than other alternatives. I don't care. That's not a primary concern. The question is "can PON be made to work in this environment?" It appears to me that it can.

Here is where you're problems start. The issue is that the signal *prior to being split* can go 20km if you're splitting it 32 ways (or less) or 10km if you're doing a 64 way split. AFTER the splitter you have a MAX radius of about 1 mile from the splitter.

Here is a good document that describes the problem in some detail:

http://www.ofsoptics.com/press_room/media-pdfs/FTTH-Prism-0909.pdf

Also, here is a proposed spec that would allow for longer runs post splitter with some background on why it can't work in today's GPON deployments.

http://www.ericsson.com/il/res/thecompany/docs/publications/ericsson_ review/2008/3_PON.pdf

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Ok, serious question - How is GPON's downstream AES encryption keying handled? -- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com

Jason, Loss is loss, but that's not all that we have to deal with here inside of how PON works. I can tell you that not a single manufacturer I've worked with says anything differently. On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 4:03 PM, Jason Baugher <jason@thebaughers.com> wrote:

I disagree. Loss is loss, regardless of where the splitter is placed in the equation. Distance x loss + splitter insertion loss = total loss for purposes of link budget calculation.

The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical.

On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

...

Owen,

You're basing your math off of some incorrect assumptions about PON. I'm actually sympathetic to your goal, but it simply can't work the way you're describing it in a PON network. Also, please don't base logic for open access on meet me rooms, this works in colo spaces and carrier hotels but doesn't in broadband deployments because of economics. If you want to champion this worthy goal you've got to accept that economics is a huge reason why this hasn't happened in the US and is disappearing where it has happened globally.

...

Bottom line, you've got OLT -> FIBER(of length n) -> splitter -> fiber-drops to each house -> ONT.

So far you're correct.

...

All I'm proposing is making n really short and making "fiber-drops to

each

...

house" really long. I'm not proposing changing the fundamental architecture. Yes, I recognize this changes the economics and may well make PON less attractive than other alternatives. I don't care. That's not a primary concern. The question is "can PON be made to work in this environment?" It appears to me that it can.

Here is where you're problems start. The issue is that the signal *prior to being split* can go 20km if you're splitting it 32 ways (or less) or 10km if you're doing a 64 way split. AFTER the splitter you have a MAX radius of about 1 mile from the splitter.

Here is a good document that describes the problem in some detail:

http://www.ofsoptics.com/press_room/media-pdfs/FTTH-Prism-0909.pdf

Also, here is a proposed spec that would allow for longer runs post splitter with some background on why it can't work in today's GPON deployments.

http://www.ericsson.com/il/res/thecompany/docs/publications/ericsson_review/...

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Feb 1, 2013, at 14:17 , Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:

On 13-02-01 16:03, Jason Baugher wrote:

...

The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical.

It also has to do with existing fibre infrastructure. If a Telco has already adopted a "fibre to a node" philosophy, then it has a;ready installed a limited number of strands between CO and many neighbouhoods.

Since the discussion here is about muni fiber capabilities and ideal greenfield plant designs, existing fiber is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

It makes sense to standardise on one technology. And if that technology, because it is used by many, ends up much cheaper due to economies of scale, it makes sense to adopt it.

Only if you're a single vendor looking to provide a single-vendor solution. That's really not what this conversation is about, IMHO. In fact, that's a pretty good summary of the situation we're trying to fix.

And remember that it isn't just the cable. You need to consider the OLT cards. An OLT card can often support a few GPON systems each passing 32 homes.

Not sure why this matters...

With 1 strand per home, you take up one port per home served. (possibly per home passed depending on deployment philosophy). So you end up needing far more cards in an OLT to serve the same number of people. More $$$ needed.

Uh, no... That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about still using splitters, but, putting the splitter next to the OLT instead of near the ONT end. That's all.

GPON isn't suited for trunks. But for last mile, is it really so bad ?

Yes... Because...

2.mumble gpbs of capacity for 32 homes yields 62mbps of sustained download for each home. (assuming you have 32 homes conected and using it at same time)

Great by todays standards, but likely to be obsoleted within 10 years. Given the nearly 100 year old nature of some copper plants, I'd like to see us start building fiber plants in a way that doesn't lock us into a particular technology choice constrained to the economic tradeoffs that are relevant today and may be completely different in as little as 5 years.

If you have multicast and everyone is watching superbowl at same time, you're talking up very little bandwidth on that 2.mumble GPON link.

Meh. Since everyone seems to want to be able to pause, rewind, etc., multicast doesn't tend to happen so much even in the IPTV world these days. Owen

On Feb 1, 2013, at 21:22 , Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:

On 13-02-01 22:52, Owen DeLong wrote:

...

Since the discussion here is about muni fiber capabilities and ideal greenfield plant designs, existing fiber is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

Not so irrelevant. If the municipality wishes to attract as many competitive ISPs as possible, it wants to build a "standard" last mile that ISPs can easily interface to. One which is compatible with other FTTH systems.

Yes and no. As I said, I think it's more important to build a system that can accommodate as many different potential technologies as possible rather than to follow the conventional wisdom of the day developed by single-provider monopoly environments.

Currently, the standard is GPON (even though there are many variations to the theme).

Meh... Not in South Korea... The standard there is Gig-E to the home.

Sone may say that having L1 service with each ISP having their OLT with splitters at the CO is an advantage. It also means that each ISP has to have its own ONTs in homes and they can all choose different configs for OLTs and the light in the fibre. Greater flexibility to differentiate between ISPs. (one may choose RFoG for TV with DOCSIS for data while the other is an all data link with IPTV.)

Exactly.

But for an end user, switching ISPs would mean switching the CPE equipment too since the ONT installed by ISP-1 may not be compatible with OLT used by ISP-2.

So? I don't see that as a problem.

Requiring an ISP to have its own OLT at the CO with its own splitter also raises startup costs and reduces the chances of having competitive ISP environment.

Hence my suggestion that in environments where it may make sense to do so, the muni could offer an optional enhanced L2 service. In this case, the muni would supply OLTs, ONTs, and hand off the L3 work to the provider(s).

Providing L2 service means that ISPs connect to a municipal OLT, so they do not have to purchase OLTs and bother with splitters. At that point, it si simpler and cheaper to deploy splitters in neighbouhoods. It also reduces number of splices.

Which I advocate as an OPTIONAL additional service.

When you do 1:1, you may have a big cable with lots of strands leaving the CO, but you'll have a JWI in neighbouhood where you cross connect the strands from CO to the strand that uses the pre-fab cable to the backyards of homes served.

I'm not sure what your abbreviation "JWI" means.

So in all the calculations made on dB loss, the number of splices was not factored in. You're not going to get a continuous cable from the CO to the telephone pole behind a home. If you put the splitter at the CO you get the losses from the splitter, and then losses from a splice at the neighbouhood where trunk from CO connects to cables that runs through backyards.

Sure, but you get those same losses regardless of which side of the splitter they are on.

When you put the splitter in the neighbouhood, it performs both the splitting and the connection of the cable from CO to the backyards. So you eliminate one splice.

According to http://www.thefoa.org/tech/lossbudg.htm this is about 0.3db, so reduce the served radius by ~1km. I think I already allowed for that in proposing an 8km serving radius for 10km optics. Given that 48 Gig -> 2 10G switches are getting cheaper and cheaper (even in the managed variety) to the point where being able to deploy them would be about 1/10th the cost per port of an OLT, I'm not sure that GPON is necessarily the clear winner in a carrier neutral scenario. Put splitters in the neighborhood and don't build for home-runs, then you eliminate the ability to introduce new technologies. IMHO, that's a really bad bet at this point. Owen

On 13-02-02 10:36, Jay Ashworth wrote:

Yes, but everyone on a splitter must be backhauled to the same L1 provider, and putting splitters *in the outside plant* precludes any other type of L1 service, *ever*. So that's a non-starter.

If you have 4 ISPs, why not put 4 splitters in the neighbourhood ? Individual homes can be hooked to any one of the 4 splitters, and you then only need 4 strands between splitter and CO. I understand that having strands from CO to Homes is superior at the technical point of veiw and gives you more flexibility for different services (including commercial services to a home while the neighbour gets residential services). But if strands from CO to homes is so superior, how come telcos aren't doing it and are using GPON instead ?

On Feb 2, 2013, at 11:23 AM, Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:

On 13-02-02 10:36, Jay Ashworth wrote:

...

Yes, but everyone on a splitter must be backhauled to the same L1 provider, and putting splitters *in the outside plant* precludes any other type of L1 service, *ever*. So that's a non-starter.

If you have 4 ISPs, why not put 4 splitters in the neighbourhood ? Individual homes can be hooked to any one of the 4 splitters, and you then only need 4 strands between splitter and CO.

I understand that having strands from CO to Homes is superior at the technical point of veiw and gives you more flexibility for different services (including commercial services to a home while the neighbour gets residential services).

But if strands from CO to homes is so superior, how come telcos aren't doing it and are using GPON instead ?

Because Telcos are optimizing for different parameters. They want the cheapest way to provide an adequate solution by today's standards and, where possible, to discourage competition. They want to offer a very small number of very standardized products. GPON with splitters in the neighborhood meet those goals. Hopefully, a city has a somewhat opposite set of goals. To provide a quality infrastructure for many years to come which encourages and supports the development of a vibrant and competitive market for a wide variety of services. Owen

Perhaps I missed a reference to receiver sensitivity in this thread. Since the receiver optical-electric components are binary in nature, received optical dB only has to be equal to or greater than the receiver's sensitivity. Low or high dB received light produces the same quality at the receiver. Thus, dB loss can be extensive due to factors such as attenuation, splices, dispersal, but as long as the received dB level is equal to the receiver sensitivity, it doesn't matter how much launched dB is lost. Is the point that splitters reduce the effective distance from the launch point in the PON architecture? David On Fri, Feb 1, 2013 at 7:52 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Feb 1, 2013, at 14:17 , Jean-Francois Mezei < jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca> wrote:

...

On 13-02-01 16:03, Jason Baugher wrote:

...

The reason to push splitters towards the customer end is financial, not technical.

It also has to do with existing fibre infrastructure. If a Telco has already adopted a "fibre to a node" philosophy, then it has a;ready installed a limited number of strands between CO and many neighbouhoods.

Since the discussion here is about muni fiber capabilities and ideal greenfield plant designs, existing fiber is irrelevant to the discussion at hand.

...

It makes sense to standardise on one technology. And if that technology, because it is used by many, ends up much cheaper due to economies of scale, it makes sense to adopt it.

Only if you're a single vendor looking to provide a single-vendor solution. That's really not what this conversation is about, IMHO. In fact, that's a pretty good summary of the situation we're trying to fix.

...

And remember that it isn't just the cable. You need to consider the OLT cards. An OLT card can often support a few GPON systems each passing 32 homes.

Not sure why this matters...

...

With 1 strand per home, you take up one port per home served. (possibly per home passed depending on deployment philosophy). So you end up needing far more cards in an OLT to serve the same number of people. More $$$ needed.

Uh, no... That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about still using splitters, but, putting the splitter next to the OLT instead of near the ONT end. That's all.

...

GPON isn't suited for trunks. But for last mile, is it really so bad ?

Yes... Because...

...

2.mumble gpbs of capacity for 32 homes yields 62mbps of sustained download for each home. (assuming you have 32 homes conected and using it at same time)

Great by todays standards, but likely to be obsoleted within 10 years. Given the nearly 100 year old nature of some copper plants, I'd like to see us start building fiber plants in a way that doesn't lock us into a particular technology choice constrained to the economic tradeoffs that are relevant today and may be completely different in as little as 5 years.

...

If you have multicast and everyone is watching superbowl at same time, you're talking up very little bandwidth on that 2.mumble GPON link.

Meh. Since everyone seems to want to be able to pause, rewind, etc., multicast doesn't tend to happen so much even in the IPTV world these days.

Owen

On Feb 2, 2013, at 2:19 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:

On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 04:43:56PM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote:

...

The only place PON made any sense to me was extreme rural areas. If you could go 20km to a splitter and then hit 32 homes ~1km away (52km fiber pair length total), that was a win. If the homes are 2km from the CO, 32 pair (64km fiber pair length total) of home runs was cheaper than the savings on fiber, and then the cost of GPON splitters and equipment. I'm trying to figure out if my assessment is correct or not...

Is there any specific reason why muni networks don't use 1-10 GBit fiber mesh, using L3 switches in DSLAMs on every street corner?

Well, one reason is that, IMHO, the goal here is to provide a flexible L1 platform that will allow multiple competing providers a low barrier to entry to provide a multitude of competitive services. Owen

----- Original Message -----

From: "Scott Helms" <khelms@zcorum.com>

A layer 1 architecture isn't going to be an economical option for the foreseeable future so opining on its value is a waste of time...its simple not feasible now or even 5 years from now because of costs. The optimal open access network (with current or near future technology) is well known. Its called Ethernet and the methods to do triple play and open access are well documented not to mention already in wide spread use. Trying to enforce a layer 1 approach would be more expensive than the attempts to make this work with Packet Over SONET or even ATM.

What is about a normal Ethernet deployment that you see as a negative? What problem are you tying to solve?

Well, Scott, assuming you mean ethernet over fiber, then you've just said that it's economically infeasible to deploy the physical layer of precisely the architecture you advocate. I find these conflicting reports most conflicting. As for "what problems are you trying to solve", I just itemized that. 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

Owen, Cross connecting at layer 1 is what I'm saying isn't feasible. If you want to simply hand them a fiber then sell dark fiber or DWDM ports but trying to create an architecture around PON or other splitters won't work because PON splitters aren't compatible with other protocols. On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Feb 2, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

A layer 1 architecture isn't going to be an economical option for the foreseeable future so opining on its value is a waste of time...its simple not feasible now or even 5 years from now because of costs. The optimal open access network (with current or near future technology) is well known. Its called Ethernet and the methods to do triple play and open access are well documented not to mention already in wide spread use. Trying to enforce a layer 1 approach would be more expensive than the attempts to make this work with Packet Over SONET or even ATM.

What is about a normal Ethernet deployment that you see as a negative? What problem are you tying to solve?

Ethernet works just fine in the L1 solution I've proposed, so I'm not sure why you say it isn't economically viable to do so.

Owen

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

On Feb 2, 2013, at 2:19 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 04:43:56PM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote:

...

The only place PON made any sense to me was extreme rural areas. If you could go 20km to a splitter and then hit 32 homes ~1km away (52km fiber pair length total), that was a win. If the homes are 2km from the CO, 32 pair (64km fiber pair length total) of home runs was cheaper than the savings on fiber, and then the cost of GPON splitters and equipment. I'm trying to figure out if my assessment is correct or not...

Is there any specific reason why muni networks don't use 1-10 GBit fiber mesh, using L3 switches in DSLAMs on every street corner?

Well, one reason is that, IMHO, the goal here is to provide a flexible L1 platform that will allow multiple competing providers a low barrier to entry to provide a multitude of competitive services.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Owen, I think the confusion I have is that you seem to want to create solutions for problems that have already been solved. There is no cost effective method of sharing a network at layer 1 since DWDM is expensive and requires compatible gear on both sides and no one has enough fiber (nor is cheap enough in brand new builds) to simply home run every home and maintain that. ISPs that would want to use the shared network in general (>95% in my experience) don't want to maintain the access gear and since there is no clear way to delineate responsibilities when there is an issue its hard. 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. The thing you have to remember is that muni networks have to be cost effective and that's not just the capital costs. The operational cost in the long term is much greater than the cost of initial gear and fiber install. On Feb 2, 2013 4:54 PM, "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com> wrote:

It seems that you are (deliberately or otherwise) seriously misconstruing what I am saying.

I'm saying that if you build an L1 dark fiber system as we have described, the purchasers can use it to deploy Ethernet, PON, or any other technology.

I'm not saying it's how I would build out a PON only system. That was never the goal.

The goal is to provide a municipal L1 service that can be used by ANY provider for ANY service, or as close to that as possible.

To make the offering more attractive to low-budget providers, the system may also incorporate some L2 services.

Owen

On Feb 2, 2013, at 1:31 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

Cross connecting at layer 1 is what I'm saying isn't feasible. If you want to simply hand them a fiber then sell dark fiber or DWDM ports but trying to create an architecture around PON or other splitters won't work because PON splitters aren't compatible with other protocols.

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

On Feb 2, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

A layer 1 architecture isn't going to be an economical option for the foreseeable future so opining on its value is a waste of time...its simple not feasible now or even 5 years from now because of costs. The optimal open access network (with current or near future technology) is well known. Its called Ethernet and the methods to do triple play and open access are well documented not to mention already in wide spread use. Trying to enforce a layer 1 approach would be more expensive than the attempts to make this work with Packet Over SONET or even ATM.

What is about a normal Ethernet deployment that you see as a negative? What problem are you tying to solve?

Ethernet works just fine in the L1 solution I've proposed, so I'm not sure why you say it isn't economically viable to do so.

Owen

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

On Feb 2, 2013, at 2:19 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 04:43:56PM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote:

...

The only place PON made any sense to me was extreme rural areas. If you could go 20km to a splitter and then hit 32 homes ~1km away (52km fiber pair length total), that was a win. If the homes are 2km from the CO, 32 pair (64km fiber pair length total) of home runs was cheaper than the savings on fiber, and then the cost of GPON splitters and equipment. I'm trying to figure out if my assessment is correct or not...

Is there any specific reason why muni networks don't use 1-10 GBit fiber mesh, using L3 switches in DSLAMs on every street corner?

Well, one reason is that, IMHO, the goal here is to provide a flexible L1 platform that will allow multiple competing providers a low barrier to entry to provide a multitude of competitive services.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

...

Owen I think the confusion I have is that you seem to want to create solutions for problems that have already been solved. There is no cost effective method of sharing a network at layer 1 since DWDM is expensive and requires compatible gear on both sides and no one has enough fiber (nor is cheap enough in brand new builds) to simply home run every home and maintain that.

That's my fundamental design assumption, and you're the first person to throw a flag on it. I'm hearing $700 per passing and $600 per sub; those seem sustainable numbers for a 30 year service life amortization.

I'm not yet 100% clear if that's layer 1 only or layer 2 agg as well.

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 users are connected. That ring (usually Gig or 10Gig Ethernet today) needs to be connected to a central location so you can interconnect to other 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. 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. 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? 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?

[ And note that for me, it's practical; most everyone else is merely along for the ride. ]

...

ISPs that would want to use the shared network in general (>95% in my experience) don't want to maintain the access gear and since there is no clear way to delineate responsibilities when there is an issue its hard.

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 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.

...

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.

...

The thing you have to remember is that muni networks have to be cost effective and that's not just the capital costs. The operational cost in the long term is much greater than the cost of initial gear and fiber install.

Depends on what you're trying to do. But yes, I do know the difference between CAPEX and OPEX.

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 --------------------------------

...

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

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Technically, any of the architectures espoused by some of the commentators on this thread will work, and would at least be an order of magnitude better than what is available in the local loop today. One of the commentators, however, did underscore the biggest challenge by far to national broadband. (Even the watered down version consisting of a welter of autonomous municipal networks as is the subject of this thread). And that challenge is the stranglehold that incumbent telcos have on the local loop, and their caustic, anti-progress influence in City Halls, Sate Legislatures, and Washington DC. That is why the Australian NBN serves as a good example of how to wrest control of the local loop plant away from the telcos. In many areas of the US a parallel fiber network is already in place, built out by the Federal School Lunch e-rate program. Here, regrettably, the telcos have exerted their caustic influence by compelling legislators to allow only school and library traffic on the e-rate fiber. As far as a purely technical solution, in my own experience some years ago I worked in the entertainment business in the Burbank/Glendale, Ca. area. Both cites, led by the visionary Burbank Department of Water and Power, built out dark fiber networks. Of course, getting municipal fiber in Glendale required an intense struggle with the incumbent telco, which sent a representative to every city council meeting arguing that municipal fiber was bad for the city residents. David On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 6:35 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:

In a message written on Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 09:28:06PM -0500, Scott Helms wrote:

...

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.

If the goal is the minimize the capital outlay of a greenfield build, your model can be more efficient, depending on the geography covered. Basically you're assuming that the active electronics to make a ring are cheaper than building high count fiber back to a central point. There are geographies where that is both true, and not true. I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you're model is cheaper for a majority of builds.

On the other hand, I am not nearly as interested in minimizing the up front capital cost. It's an issue, sure, but I care much more about the total lifecycle cost. I'd rather spend 20% more up front to end up with 20-80% lower costs over 50 years. My argument is not that high count fiber back to a central location is cheaper in absolute, up front dollars, but that it's at worst a minimal amount more and will have neglegable additonal cost over a 40-80 year service life.

By contrast, the ring topology you suggest may be slightly less expensive up front, but will require the active parts that make up the ring to be swapped out every 7-20 years. I believe that will lead to greater lifecycle cost; and almost importantly impeed development of new services as the existing gear ends up incompatable with newer technologies.

-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

In a message written on Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 10:17:24PM -0500, Scott Helms wrote:

Here's the thing, over the time frame your describing you're probably going to have to look at more fiber runs just because of growth in areas that you didn't build for before. Even if you nail the total growth of homes and businesses in your area your chances of getting both the numbers right _and_ the locations are pretty slim. Also, you're going to have to replace gear no matter where it is core or nodes on a ring. Granted gear that lives in a CO can be less expensive but its not that much of a difference (~1% of gear costs). Having a ring topology is basically the best way we've come up with as of yet to hedge your bets, especially since you can extend your ring when you need.

I'm not sure I understand your growth argument; both models will require additional build costs for growth to the network, and I think they roughly parallel the tradeoff's we've been discussing. As for the gear, I agree that the cost per port for the equipment providing service (Ethernet switch, GPON bits, WDM mux, whatever) is likely to be roughly similar in a CO and in the field. There's not a huge savings on the gear itself. But I would strongly disagree the overall costs, and services are similar. Compare a single CO of equipment to a network with 150 pedistals of active gear around a city. The CO can have one generator, and one battery bank. Most providers don't even put generator with each pedistal, and must maintain separate battery banks for each. A single CO could relatively cheaply have 24x7x356 hands to correct problems and swap equipment, where as the distributed network will add drive time to the equation and require higher staffing and greater costs (like the truck and fuel). Geography is a huge factor though. My concept of home running all fiber would be an extremely poor choice for extremely rural, low density networks. Your ring choice would be much, much better. On the flip side, in a high density world, say downtown NYC, my dark fiber to the end user network is far cheaper than building super-small rings and maintaining the support gear for the equipment (generators and batteries, if you can get space for them in most buildings). Still, I think direct dark fiber has lower lifecycle costs for 70-80% of the population living in cities and suburban areas. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

In a message written on Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 10:53:04PM -0500, Scott Helms wrote:

tightly defined area that is densely populated today. I'd also say that this is not the normal muni network in the US today, since generally speaking muni networks spring up where the local area is poorly served by commercial operators.

Exactly, that's what I would like to fix. I personally haven't talked much about the poltical and regulatory polices that go along with the technical details I've discussed, but I want to build these muni-networks in the areas today dominated by the cablecos and telcos, and force them to use it rather than doing their own builds along with everyone else. As a citizen I get less people digging up streets and yards, and more competition since now more than just the incumbant telco and cableco can play ball. If Glasgow Kentucky (population ) can have fiber between any two buildings in town for $300 a month, why can't I? Somehow a small rural town of 14,000 can do it, but the big cities can't? http://www.epblan.com/ethernet.html I also suspect we could drop that cost a full order of magnitude with some economies of scale. People are doing this, and it does work, it's just being done in locations the big telcos and cablecos have written off... -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/

Absolutely muni networks can work. I'm supporting ~14 right now with an aggregate number of connections of around 40k (most are small). Having said that from my view (I work with telco's, cable MSOs, muni, and other network providers) muni networks fail more often than private networks. This is usually because they lack experience and their process is subject to interference by interested parties. In one case recently a muni network had a full page ad taken out by a operator who didn't want the city to build. That ad in the local paper caused lots of controversy, despite being largely inaccurate, and the controversy caused the city council to change the rules for the city at the last minute. On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 12:44 PM, John Osmon <josmon@rigozsaurus.com> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 09:04:43AM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote: [...]

...

People are doing this, and it does work, it's just being done in locations the big telcos and cablecos have written off...

To re-iterate this point, and get a note into the archives -- Muni networks *can* work.

Idaho Falls, ID has been offering dark fiber strands to anyone since 2007 or so: http://www.ifcirca.net/

When I last had network in the area, the cost was on the order of: - $1500/month/loop - $20/bldg on loop - one-time construction costs

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 4:38 PM, John Osmon <josmon@rigozsaurus.com> wrote:

Scott -- you've brought up *great* info for this thread. We all know that city/county/state/federal governments sometimes throw money away on boondoggles (as fiber could become). You've been able to pull from your direct experience to show how this is true.

I threw in Idaho Falls because I'm betting it will help someone doing research in the future. Can you throw out some of the positive examples you've run across?

Jason, the best cases I've seen were all those scenarios where if the muni didn't build the access it simply wouldn't happen. I've seen lots of different kinds of technologies used ranging from wireless (not 802.11), to DOCSIS cable (this is actually the most common in the US), and fiber. I can't share my customer's names unfortunately, but the successful ones all shared several things in common: 1) They had specific goals and built the network to reach those goals. In all the "good" situations the networks at least pay for themselves and in some places make a small profit. 2) They have personnel dedicated to their broadband offering that are motivated to make it succeed and the city listens to the technical and operational recommendations of that staff. 3) They focus on a relatively small number of products, generally either just L3 services or L3 services and broadcast video (especially for DOCSIS systems). 4) They get their pricing "right". This last point is perhaps the most important but hardest to do well. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

----- Original Message -----

From: "Scott Helms" <khelms@zcorum.com>

Here's the thing, over the time frame your describing you're probably going to have to look at more fiber runs just because of growth in areas that you didn't build for before. Even if you nail the total growth of homes and businesses in your area your chances of getting both the numbers right _and_ the locations are pretty slim. Also, you're going to have to replace gear no matter where it is core or nodes on a ring. Granted gear that lives in a CO can be less expensive but its not that much of a difference (~1% of gear costs). Having a ring topology is basically the best way we've come up with as of yet to hedge your bets, especially since you can extend your ring when you need.

In most cases that's true. My city, however, is built so close to 100% that I don't think it matters much. Over 2500 units per sqmi. The problem with gear in the ring isn't cost. It's OAM&P, and upgrades, and distributed emergency power, and, and, and... 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

I answered (I think) your other points in the last email I wrote, but I

wanted to address these specifically.

I believe that Sweden operates largely on this model and that the Australia NBN project does as well.

I would say that the Swedish model is a definite success.

Australia's NBN is still the planning and arguing phase. Sweden is most certainly not a string of muni networks, the dominant form of access there is cable without open access. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_Sweden You might have meant another European country and there are several that traditionally have had good open access networks but they are NOT fiber nor are they muni run. Across much of Europe the telco's have been forced to open their DSL networks to other operators and in many countries they cannot be the layer 3 provider. This has lead to a robust set of open DSL networks using PPPoE. The problem is that the same rules have NOT been applied to fiber networks (in large part because of technical issues, some genuine and others less so). The fiber networks are largely run by the telcos themselves, but these are new deployments and so the numbers of fiber connections in Europe is quite low.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Mark, That's true but none (AFAIK) of those connections are being built by muni's and all of the hand offs are done to the ISPs at layer 2. On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 4:45 PM, Mark Andrews <marka@isc.org> wrote:

In message < CAMrdfRw6B3+sPovj3W0xnVqkxgSe6ZB5hgLiCqX4kGzxpE7ytA@mail.gmail.com> , Scott Helms writes:

...

I answered (I think) your other points in the last email I wrote, but I

...

wanted to address these specifically.

I believe that Sweden operates largely on this model and that the Australia NBN project does as well.

I would say that the Swedish model is a definite success.

Australia's NBN is still the planning and arguing phase.

They may still be arguing, but there are fiber and fixed wireless customers receiving packets.

Mark -- Mark Andrews, ISC 1 Seymour St., Dundas Valley, NSW 2117, Australia PHONE: +61 2 9871 4742 INTERNET: marka@isc.org

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:06 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen, I think the confusion I have is that you seem to want to create solutions for problems that have already been solved. There is no cost effective method of sharing a network at layer 1 since DWDM is expensive and requires compatible gear on both sides and no one has enough fiber (nor is cheap enough in brand new builds) to simply home run every home and maintain that. ISPs that would want to use the shared network in general (>95% in my experience) don't want to maintain the access gear and since there is no clear way to delineate responsibilities when there is an issue its hard.

??

Who said anything about sharing the network at L1?

You did.

Is it more expensive to home-run every home than to put splitters in the neighborhood? Yes. Is it enough more expensive that the tradeoffs cannot be overcome? I remain unconvinced.

This completely depends on the area and the goals of the network. In most cases for muni networks back hauling everything is more expensive.

I'm not sure why you think it would be hard to delineate the responsibilities… You've got a fiber path maintained by the municipality with active equipment maintained by the ISP at each end. If the light coming out of the equipment at one end doesn't come out of the fiber at the other end, you have a problem in the municipality's domain. If the light makes it through in tact, you have a problem in the ISP's domain.

There is equipment available that can test that fairly easily.

OK, this one made my wife get scared I laughed so hard. You clearly have never tried to do this or had to work with different operators in the same physical network. Please, go talk to someone whose worked in the field of a FTTx network and describe this scenario to them. Its clear you don't want to hear it from me via email so please go do some research.

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. The thing you have to remember is that muni networks have to be cost effective and that's not just the capital costs. The operational cost in the long term is much greater than the cost of initial gear and fiber install.

We can agree to disagree. A muni network needs to be able to recover its costs. The costs of building out and maintaining home-run fiber are not necessarily that much greater than the costs of building out and maintaining fiber at the neighborhood. One option, for example, would be to have neighborhood B-Boxes where the fiber can either be fed into provider-specific splitters (same economy as existing PON deployments) or cross-connected to fiber on the F1 cable going back to the MMR (home-run).

We can agree all we want, that doesn't change history. Handing out connections at layer 1 is both more expensive and less efficient. Its also extremely wasteful (which is why its more expensive) since your lowest unit you can sell is a fiber strand whether the end customer wants a 3 mbps connection or a gig its the same to the city. I'm not saying you shouldn't sell dark fiber, I'm saying that in 99% of the cities you can't build a business model around doing just that unless your city doesn't want to break even on the build and maintenance.

The only additional cost in this system over traditional PON is the larger number of fibers required in the F1 cable.

PON networks aren't deployed this way and if you're going to backhaul all of the connections to a central point you wouldn't run PON. PON is worse in every performance related way to PON and the only reasons operators deploy it today is because its less expensive. Its less expensive because you don't have to backhaul all of the connections or have active components at the neighborhood level.

Owen

On Feb 2, 2013 4:54 PM, "Owen DeLong" <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

It seems that you are (deliberately or otherwise) seriously misconstruing what I am saying.

I'm saying that if you build an L1 dark fiber system as we have described, the purchasers can use it to deploy Ethernet, PON, or any other technology.

I'm not saying it's how I would build out a PON only system. That was never the goal.

The goal is to provide a municipal L1 service that can be used by ANY provider for ANY service, or as close to that as possible.

To make the offering more attractive to low-budget providers, the system may also incorporate some L2 services.

Owen

On Feb 2, 2013, at 1:31 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

Cross connecting at layer 1 is what I'm saying isn't feasible. If you want to simply hand them a fiber then sell dark fiber or DWDM ports but trying to create an architecture around PON or other splitters won't work because PON splitters aren't compatible with other protocols.

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 4:26 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

On Feb 2, 2013, at 12:07 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen,

A layer 1 architecture isn't going to be an economical option for the foreseeable future so opining on its value is a waste of time...its simple not feasible now or even 5 years from now because of costs. The optimal open access network (with current or near future technology) is well known. Its called Ethernet and the methods to do triple play and open access are well documented not to mention already in wide spread use. Trying to enforce a layer 1 approach would be more expensive than the attempts to make this work with Packet Over SONET or even ATM.

What is about a normal Ethernet deployment that you see as a negative? What problem are you tying to solve?

Ethernet works just fine in the L1 solution I've proposed, so I'm not sure why you say it isn't economically viable to do so.

Owen

On Sat, Feb 2, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

On Feb 2, 2013, at 2:19 AM, Eugen Leitl <eugen@leitl.org> wrote:

...

On Fri, Feb 01, 2013 at 04:43:56PM -0800, Leo Bicknell wrote:

...

The only place PON made any sense to me was extreme rural areas. If you could go 20km to a splitter and then hit 32 homes ~1km away (52km fiber pair length total), that was a win. If the homes are 2km from the CO, 32 pair (64km fiber pair length total) of home runs was cheaper than the savings on fiber, and then the cost of GPON splitters and equipment. I'm trying to figure out if my assessment is correct or not...

Is there any specific reason why muni networks don't use 1-10 GBit fiber mesh, using L3 switches in DSLAMs on every street corner?

Well, one reason is that, IMHO, the goal here is to provide a flexible L1 platform that will allow multiple competing providers a low barrier to entry to provide a multitude of competitive services.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 5:24 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

On Feb 3, 2013, at 12:33 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:

...

On Feb 2, 2013, at 5:06 PM, Scott Helms <khelms@zcorum.com> wrote:

Owen, I think the confusion I have is that you seem to want to create solutions for problems that have already been solved. There is no cost effective method of sharing a network at layer 1 since DWDM is expensive and requires compatible gear on both sides and no one has enough fiber (nor is cheap enough in brand new builds) to simply home run every home and maintain that. ISPs that would want to use the shared network in general (>95% in my experience) don't want to maintain the access gear and since there is no clear way to delineate responsibilities when there is an issue its hard.

??

Who said anything about sharing the network at L1?

You did.

No, I didn't. I said build out an L1 infrastructure such that individual connections can be leased from it. Not shared L1 connections. I have never advocated shared L1 connections.

Sharing the entire network at layer 1 is what I and I believe you were talking about. Not sharing individual fiber connections, but using the same fiber plant for multiple layer 2 technologies. This is what you're suggesting, correct?

...

Is it more expensive to home-run every home than to put splitters in the neighborhood? Yes. Is it enough more expensive that the tradeoffs cannot be overcome? I remain unconvinced.

This completely depends on the area and the goals of the network. In most cases for muni networks back hauling everything is more expensive.

I agree it's more expensive. The question is whether it's enough more expensive to make it infeasible. You still haven't come anywhere near addressing that question.

I've said repeatedly that this a network by network analysis. I've never said its infeasible, but that it is more expensive both initially and long term in MOST installs. That by itself is generally enough to invalidate the design since in almost all cases there's no benefit to home running all the connections. It doesn't make the connection faster nor do ISPs (as a group) care about a layer 1 versus layer 2 hand off.

...

I'm not sure why you think it would be hard to delineate the responsibilities… You've got a fiber path maintained by the municipality with active equipment maintained by the ISP at each end. If the light coming out of the equipment at one end doesn't come out of the fiber at the other end, you have a problem in the municipality's domain. If the light makes it through in tact, you have a problem in the ISP's domain.

There is equipment available that can test that fairly easily.

OK, this one made my wife get scared I laughed so hard. You clearly have never tried to do this or had to work with different operators in the same physical network. Please, go talk to someone whose worked in the field of a FTTx network and describe this scenario to them. Its clear you don't want to hear it from me via email so please go do some research.

I've talked to a few people doing exactly that. Yes, you need different test sets depending on which L2 gear is involved, but, in virtually ever case, there is a piece of test gear that can be used to test a loop independent of the configuration of the L2 gear in question.

Yes, there is a meter for all the different kinds of technologies that you might want to support. For example a DOCSIS 3.0 DSAM from JDSU will run you around $8000.00 A PON meter with long range lasers (more than 10 miles) from JDSU or Trilithic will cost you nearly $10,000. Exactly how many of those kinds of meters do you want to have to buy? How many of your staff are you going to train on them (they do require training and knowledge to use)?

For providers getting L1 service, it wouldn't be too hard to make this testing / providing necessary test equipment part of their contract.

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. The thing you have to remember is that muni networks have to be cost effective and that's not just the capital costs. The operational cost in the long term is much greater than the cost of initial gear and fiber install.

We can agree to disagree. A muni network needs to be able to recover its costs. The costs of building out and maintaining home-run fiber are not necessarily that much greater than the costs of building out and maintaining fiber at the neighborhood. One option, for example, would be to have neighborhood B-Boxes where the fiber can either be fed into provider-specific splitters (same economy as existing PON deployments) or cross-connected to fiber on the F1 cable going back to the MMR (home-run).

We can agree all we want, that doesn't change history. Handing out connections at layer 1 is both more expensive and less efficient. Its also extremely wasteful (which is why its more expensive) since your lowest unit you can sell is a fiber strand whether the end customer wants a 3 mbps connection or a gig its the same to the city. I'm not saying you shouldn't sell dark fiber, I'm saying that in 99% of the cities you can't build a business model around doing just that unless your city doesn't want to break even on the build and maintenance.

If it's $700 per home passed to build out home-run fibers (which seems to be a reasonable approximation from earlier discussions), then there's no reason you can't sell $40/month service over that where the L1 component is a $10/month ($7 for capital recovery, $3 for operations and support) pricing component.

Nope, no reason at all if you don't care about covering your costs.

By my estimates, to become truly impractical, you'd have to get somewhere north of $1500 per home passed.

...

The only additional cost in this system over traditional PON is the larger number of fibers required in the F1 cable.

PON networks aren't deployed this way and if you're going to backhaul all of the connections to a central point you wouldn't run PON. PON is worse in every performance related way to PON and the only reasons operators deploy it today is because its less expensive. Its less expensive because you don't have to backhaul all of the connections or have active components at the neighborhood level.

Then don't deploy PON. I don't care whether PON gets deployed or not. You keep coming back at this as if PON is somehow the goal. Personally, I'd rather see Gig-E in every home and be done with it.

However, the point is that building the infrastructure in that manner doesn't cost much more than building out traditional PON infrastructure (if you're doing it from greenfield) and it can support either technology.

Sure it does, even in greenfield and whats more it costs more over the long term UNLESS you know where every home and business will be located 10 years from now.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Owen, I'm trimming this for my own sanity if I snip out something important please let me know.

So long as you recognize that it's on a pair-by-pair basis end-to-end and not expecting any mixing/sharing/etc. by the L1 infrastructure provider, yes.

OK good, now we're speaking on the same topic :)

...

...

Is it more expensive to home-run every home than to put splitters in the neighborhood? Yes. Is it enough more expensive that the tradeoffs cannot be overcome? I remain unconvinced.

This completely depends on the area and the goals of the network. In most cases for muni networks back hauling everything is more expensive.

I agree it's more expensive. The question is whether it's enough more expensive to make it infeasible. You still haven't come anywhere near addressing that question.

I've said repeatedly that this a network by network analysis. I've never said its infeasible, but that it is more expensive both initially and long term in MOST installs. That by itself is generally enough to invalidate the design since in almost all cases there's no benefit to home running all the connections. It doesn't make the connection faster nor do ISPs (as a group) care about a layer 1 versus layer 2 hand off.

That's where we disagree. The benefit is that:

1. It doesn't lock the entire area into a single current technology.

Neither does a ring architecture.

2. It allows for individual subscribers (probably mostly businesses, but I have had a few occasions where this would have been useful as an individual) to get dark XC to other locations.

Neither does a ring architecture, you do have fewer long runs, but in any build you're going to end up with spare pairs to use for this and in my experience the number of businesses who want this in given area are very small. I can't think of a network where this is more than 1% of the business connections.

3. Subscribers who want individualized services from different vendors have a choice.

Subscribers don't care if the hand off is at layer 1 or layer 2 so this is moot as well.

4. Providers have to compete on a leveled playing field and there is thus incentive to innovate even if the innovation moves away from PON.

Again, this is a completely moot point. There is nothing in a ring or hub & spoke architecture that makes open access more difficult EXCEPT if you want to share lots of L1 connections.

...

...

I'm not sure why you think it would be hard to delineate the responsibilities… You've got a fiber path maintained by the municipality with active equipment maintained by the ISP at each end. If the light coming out of the equipment at one end doesn't come out of the fiber at the other end, you have a problem in the municipality's domain. If the light makes it through in tact, you have a problem in the ISP's domain.

There is equipment available that can test that fairly easily.

OK, this one made my wife get scared I laughed so hard. You clearly have never tried to do this or had to work with different operators in the same physical network. Please, go talk to someone whose worked in the field of a FTTx network and describe this scenario to them. Its clear you don't want to hear it from me via email so please go do some research.

I've talked to a few people doing exactly that. Yes, you need different test sets depending on which L2 gear is involved, but, in virtually ever case, there is a piece of test gear that can be used to test a loop independent of the configuration of the L2 gear in question.

Yes, there is a meter for all the different kinds of technologies that you might want to support. For example a DOCSIS 3.0 DSAM from JDSU will run you around $8000.00 A PON meter with long range lasers (more than 10 miles) from JDSU or Trilithic will cost you nearly $10,000. Exactly how many of those kinds of meters do you want to have to buy? How many of your staff are you going to train on them (they do require training and knowledge to use)?

For my proposed methods of build-out, no need for the long range lasers. As I said, everything should be within 8km of the MMR.

As I suggested, the simpler approach is to require the complaining L2 provider to cooperate in the diagnostic process and provide access to the applicable meters if necessary. The standard offered absent assistance from the L2 provider is OTDR success.

Medium range lasers (anything that's running on single mode fiber) versus long range don't drive the cost. OTDR is not and cannot test for any phase modulated system and that includes every form of PON, Active Ethernet, and RFoG. You _might_ be able to use one to test RS-232 over fiber depending on the vendor. This is where you're really not getting it. As the owner of the physical medium you WILL be the blame of every problem until you prove differently. Every end user install that goes poorly, every time there is a connection drop, and every time some end user of $L1 partner calls them complaining the city will get the blame.

...

For providers getting L1 service, it wouldn't be too hard to make this testing / providing necessary test equipment part of their contract.

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. The thing you have to remember is that muni networks have to be cost effective and that's not just the capital costs. The operational cost in the long term is much greater than the cost of initial gear and fiber install.

We can agree to disagree. A muni network needs to be able to recover its costs. The costs of building out and maintaining home-run fiber are not necessarily that much greater than the costs of building out and maintaining fiber at the neighborhood. One option, for example, would be to have neighborhood B-Boxes where the fiber can either be fed into provider-specific splitters (same economy as existing PON deployments) or cross-connected to fiber on the F1 cable going back to the MMR (home-run).

We can agree all we want, that doesn't change history. Handing out connections at layer 1 is both more expensive and less efficient. Its also extremely wasteful (which is why its more expensive) since your lowest unit you can sell is a fiber strand whether the end customer wants a 3 mbps connection or a gig its the same to the city. I'm not saying you shouldn't sell dark fiber, I'm saying that in 99% of the cities you can't build a business model around doing just that unless your city doesn't want to break even on the build and maintenance.

If it's $700 per home passed to build out home-run fibers (which seems to be a reasonable approximation from earlier discussions), then there's no reason you can't sell $40/month service over that where the L1 component is a $10/month ($7 for capital recovery, $3 for operations and support) pricing component.

Nope, no reason at all if you don't care about covering your costs.

I just explained where the expected costs get covered, so you're going to have to explain that statement.

No, you listed some more than optimistic numbers and passed that off as evidence. If you seriously think that the fiber connection is only worth $10 per month then you're off by ~100%. However, the point is that building the infrastructure in that manner

...

doesn't cost much more than building out traditional PON infrastructure (if you're doing it from greenfield) and it can support either technology.

Sure it does, even in greenfield and whats more it costs more over the long term UNLESS you know where every home and business will be located 10 years from now.

More yes, much more, I'm not so convinced.

You think the fiber connectivity is only worth $10 too....

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

----- Original Message -----

From: "Jean-Francois Mezei" <jfmezei_nanog@vaxination.ca>

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Subscribers don't care if the hand off is at layer 1 or layer 2 so this is moot as well.

This is where one has to be carefull. The wholesale scenario in Canada leaves indepdendant ISPs having to explain to their customers that they can't fix certain problems and that they must call the telco/cableco to get it fixed. (in the case of a certain cable company, they can't even call them, it has to be done by email with response of at least 48 hours).

Yes, and Scott is *horribly* pessimistic (in my opinion) about how difficult it will be to have ISP clients who a) understand this and b) don't tolerate it. I will have more to say on this below.

Another aspect: customers espect to be able to switch seamlessly from one ISP to the next. But ISP-2 can't take over from ISP-1 until ISP-1 has relinquised control over the line to the end user. In a layer 1 scenario, it means ISP-1 has to physically go and deinstall their CPE and disconnect strand from their OLT, and then ISP-2 can do the reverse and reconnect evrything to provide services.

What happens when ISP-1 isn't interested in a quick disconnect and ISP-2 has to wait days/weeks with end use without service ?

What happens is that they tell us, the hometown fiber network operator that they're switching to ISP-2, who has already put in their own Take order to us, and we splash cut the pair, with no responsibility to ISP-1 whose contract warns them that *our residents* take priority, and if they screw up, they'll lose by it. Customer happy, and foot-dragging ISP -- who should -- takes the brunt. They do it too much, they pay.

In a layer2 service, it is a matter of reconfiguring the OLT to pass ethernet packets to a different VLAN to a different ISP. No physical changes required and it can be almost tranparent to the end user who just has to make a new DHCP request and be provisioned by ISP-2.

Yes, and that's why my *primary* goal will be to provide L2 service with city-owned ONTs. Making sure the plant is L1 *compliant* is my secondary goal, so I don't lock out PtP or L1 clients. 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

Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:

This is where one has to be carefull. The wholesale scenario in Canada leaves indepdendant ISPs having to explain to their customers that they can't fix certain problems and that they must call the telco/cableco to get it fixed. (in the case of a certain cable company, they can't even call them, it has to be done by email with response of at least 48 hours).

So splitting responsabilities can be an annoyance if it becomes very visible to the end users.

No different from competing ISPs using DSL or PON.

Another aspect: customers espect to be able to switch seamlessly from one ISP to the next. But ISP-2 can't take over from ISP-1 until ISP-1 has relinquised control over the line to the end user.

No different from competing ISPs using DSL or PON.

In a layer 1 scenario, it means ISP-1 has to physically go and deinstall their CPE and disconnect strand from their OLT, and then ISP-2 can do the reverse and reconnect evrything to provide services.

No. Just say optical MDF.

What happens when ISP-1 isn't interested in a quick disconnect and ISP-2 has to wait days/weeks with end use without service ?

You assume ISP-1 quickly stop servicing the end user, don't you?

In a layer2 service, it is a matter of reconfiguring the OLT to pass ethernet packets to a different VLAN to a different ISP. No physical

What happens when OLT operator isn't interested in a quick reconfiguration, ISP-1 quickly stop servicing the end user and ISP-2 has to wait days/weeks with end user without service? Masataka Ohta

Jay Ashworth wrote:

...

...

In a layer 1 scenario, it means ISP-1 has to physically go and deinstall their CPE and disconnect strand from their OLT, and then ISP-2 can do the reverse and reconnect evrything to provide services.

No. Just say optical MDF.

Doesn't preclude the need to swap different models of ONTs.

No different from competing ISPs using DSL or PON.

...

...

What happens when ISP-1 isn't interested in a quick disconnect and ISP-2 has to wait days/weeks with end use without service ?

You assume ISP-1 quickly stop servicing the end user, don't you?

I assume everyone will behave, because they're all *the customers of me, the municipality*, and they have a vested interest in being good actors.

So, if the city is the MDF operator, L1 configuration should change almost immediately.

Again, *the city* is the OLT operator, in a L2 scenario, and I will flip the customer over almost immediately.

See above. Masataka Ohta

On 04-Feb-13 15:17, Jean-Francois Mezei wrote:

On 13-02-04 16:04, Scott Helms wrote:

...

Subscribers don't care if the hand off is at layer 1 or layer 2 so this is moot as well. This is where one has to be carefull. The wholesale scenario in Canada leaves indepdendant ISPs having to explain to their customers that they can't fix certain problems and that they must call the telco/cableco to get it fixed. (in the case of a certain cable company, they can't even call them, it has to be done by email with response of at least 48 hours).

This is not a show-stopper. In my state (TX), electric utilities have been strictly segregated into generation, distribution and retail. When I have a problem with my service, I call my retailer, who puts in a ticket with the distributor (i.e. grid operator). However, since the distributor has an equal relationship with _all_ retailers, rather than also having a retail arm itself (as in the telco model), there is no service problem. If anything, service is _better_ than when distribution and retailing were done by the same (monopoly) utility company because there are now formal SLAs and penalties.

Another aspect: customers espect to be able to switch seamlessly from one ISP to the next. But ISP-2 can't take over from ISP-1 until ISP-1 has relinquised control over the line to the end user. In a layer 1 scenario, it means ISP-1 has to physically go and deinstall their CPE and disconnect strand from their OLT, and then ISP-2 can do the reverse and reconnect evrything to provide services.

Wrong. As soon as retailer 2 puts in the connect order, everything gets switched over within one business day. The distributor stops billing retailer 1 because they're no longer in the picture. Now, if different CPE is required (not an issue for electricity), then the customer would notice that the CPE from retailer 1 suddenly stops working. They would then unplug it and follow the directions that came in the box with the CPE from retailer 2. No truck roll needed, unless they paid extra for that. (In a slightly different space with similar costs, prices and volumes, one carrier said rolling a truck for installation would blow their profit margin for the entire year.) 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

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That's where we disagree. The benefit is that:

1. It doesn't lock the entire area into a single current technology.

Neither does a ring architecture.

Yes it does... It locks you into whatever is supported on the ring.

I don't know how I can explain this more plainly, I can (more accurately have) taken a fiber build that was created as a ring & spoke SONET system and with the same fiber plant overlaid that with GigE and ATM (further back in time) to backhaul for PON, DSL, VOIP, and direct Active Ethernet. There is nothing about a hub & spoke architecture is this harmful or even suboptimal for doing Gig-E directly to end users today. This wasn't always true because we've only had 40G and 100G Ethernet for carrier networks for a few years. In the past we were limited by how big of an etherchannel network we could use for the ring. I'd also point out that the ring architecture is optimal for redundancy since you have fewer fiber bundles to get cut in the field and any cut to your ring gets routed around the ring by ERPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERPS) in less than 50 milliseconds.

2. It allows for individual subscribers (probably mostly businesses, but

...

I have had a few occasions where this would have been useful as an individual) to get dark XC to other locations.

Neither does a ring architecture, you do have fewer long runs, but in any build you're going to end up with spare pairs to use for this and in my experience the number of businesses who want this in given area are very small. I can't think of a network where this is more than 1% of the business connections.

That's because today, it's expensive and the price is usually way way way above cost-recovery (or, it's cost recovery of the build cost / n where n is a very small number of fibers).

Lower the price per instance and you very likely find new demands.

The vast majority of business don't WANT that kind of connectivity. How many MPLS connections get purchased by SMBs? That's the same kind of connectivity at layer 3 and that's a market that is almost entirely used by large corportations.

...

3. Subscribers who want individualized services from different vendors have a choice.

Subscribers don't care if the hand off is at layer 1 or layer 2 so this is moot as well.

But the vendors do and it makes a huge difference to the barrier to entry price for competing vendors offering different services. (I'm talking about more than just IP at this point).

What vendors? ISPs don't.

...

4. Providers have to compete on a leveled playing field and there is thus incentive to innovate even if the innovation moves away from PON.

Again, this is a completely moot point. There is nothing in a ring or hub & spoke architecture that makes open access more difficult EXCEPT if you want to share lots of L1 connections.

What I'm proposing is a hub and spoke architecture. It's just a much larger hub with much longer spokes.

That's called home running, but as I've said that's ok in some scenarios, its just that in most cases there is no benefit.

...

...

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I'm not sure why you think it would be hard to delineate the responsibilities… You've got a fiber path maintained by the municipality with active equipment maintained by the ISP at each end. If the light coming out of the equipment at one end doesn't come out of the fiber at the other end, you have a problem in the municipality's domain. If the light makes it through in tact, you have a problem in the ISP's domain.

There is equipment available that can test that fairly easily.

OK, this one made my wife get scared I laughed so hard. You clearly have never tried to do this or had to work with different operators in the same physical network. Please, go talk to someone whose worked in the field of a FTTx network and describe this scenario to them. Its clear you don't want to hear it from me via email so please go do some research.

I've talked to a few people doing exactly that. Yes, you need different test sets depending on which L2 gear is involved, but, in virtually ever case, there is a piece of test gear that can be used to test a loop independent of the configuration of the L2 gear in question.

Yes, there is a meter for all the different kinds of technologies that you might want to support. For example a DOCSIS 3.0 DSAM from JDSU will run you around $8000.00 A PON meter with long range lasers (more than 10 miles) from JDSU or Trilithic will cost you nearly $10,000. Exactly how many of those kinds of meters do you want to have to buy? How many of your staff are you going to train on them (they do require training and knowledge to use)?

For my proposed methods of build-out, no need for the long range lasers. As I said, everything should be within 8km of the MMR.

As I suggested, the simpler approach is to require the complaining L2 provider to cooperate in the diagnostic process and provide access to the applicable meters if necessary. The standard offered absent assistance from the L2 provider is OTDR success.

Medium range lasers (anything that's running on single mode fiber) versus long range don't drive the cost. OTDR is not and cannot test for any phase modulated system and that includes every form of PON, Active Ethernet, and RFoG. You _might_ be able to use one to test RS-232 over fiber depending on the vendor. This is where you're really not getting it. As the owner of the physical medium you WILL be the blame of every problem until you prove differently. Every end user install that goes poorly, every time there is a connection drop, and every time some end user of $L1 partner calls them complaining the city will get the blame.

You're assuming the current business model of incumbent-provider owned fiber. In a case where you have service providers not allowed to own fiber and a fiber provider not allowed to provide services, the incentives all work towards cooperation and the conflicts of interest between them are eliminated. I understand what you're saying about field technicians and their motivations, but, again those are based largely on the current business models and compensation schemes. In the proposed arena, there's no reason management at the service provider and management at the fiber provider cannot work together to address these issues. Further, the technician that blames the fiber plant for everything rather than cooperating to resolve said issues together will inherently have his installations take longer than the ones that cooperate, so he is actually already automatically incentivized in the correct direction. Admittedly, without some education, that may not be intuitively obvious to him, but I find that education is usually possible when attempted.

You need to understand that I've built the exact network your describing several times and in all those case this was for a muni network in a relatively small town (<25,000 residents). I also know who the installers are in that sized community (as a group, not personally) and even if you get the best ISP partners on the planet they're going to have normal installers doing much of the work.

For providers getting L1 service, it wouldn't be too hard to make this

...

...

testing / providing necessary test equipment part of their contract.

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. The thing you have to remember is that muni networks have to be cost effective and that's not just the capital costs. The operational cost in the long term is much greater than the cost of initial gear and fiber install.

We can agree to disagree. A muni network needs to be able to recover its costs. The costs of building out and maintaining home-run fiber are not necessarily that much greater than the costs of building out and maintaining fiber at the neighborhood. One option, for example, would be to have neighborhood B-Boxes where the fiber can either be fed into provider-specific splitters (same economy as existing PON deployments) or cross-connected to fiber on the F1 cable going back to the MMR (home-run).

We can agree all we want, that doesn't change history. Handing out connections at layer 1 is both more expensive and less efficient. Its also extremely wasteful (which is why its more expensive) since your lowest unit you can sell is a fiber strand whether the end customer wants a 3 mbps connection or a gig its the same to the city. I'm not saying you shouldn't sell dark fiber, I'm saying that in 99% of the cities you can't build a business model around doing just that unless your city doesn't want to break even on the build and maintenance.

If it's $700 per home passed to build out home-run fibers (which seems to be a reasonable approximation from earlier discussions), then there's no reason you can't sell $40/month service over that where the L1 component is a $10/month ($7 for capital recovery, $3 for operations and support) pricing component.

Nope, no reason at all if you don't care about covering your costs.

I just explained where the expected costs get covered, so you're going to have to explain that statement.

No, you listed some more than optimistic numbers and passed that off as evidence. If you seriously think that the fiber connection is only worth $10 per month then you're off by ~100%.

Even if it's $20/month and you charge $50/month for L3 service and you're still in good shape. However, the real world numbers presented so far show costs closer to $10/month, so I'm not sure where your data is coming from.

This is about what it costs to provide physical layer connectivity with most wired technologies in rural and smaller suburban environments. (Interestingly it actually costs more for wireless networks, though that's specifically not "cellular" but rather fixed and nomadic BWA like WIMAX.)

However, the point is that building the infrastructure in that manner

...

...

doesn't cost much more than building out traditional PON infrastructure (if you're doing it from greenfield) and it can support either technology.

Sure it does, even in greenfield and whats more it costs more over the long term UNLESS you know where every home and business will be located 10 years from now.

More yes, much more, I'm not so convinced.

You think the fiber connectivity is only worth $10 too....

$20/subscriber/month still strikes me as being within the realm of "not much more". So, based on your statement above...

Build your economic model, that delta of $10 is a big deal when you look at thousands of connections.

Owen

-- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

On Tue, Feb 5, 2013 at 11:30 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:

----- Original Message -----

...

From: "Scott Helms" <khelms@zcorum.com>

...

...

Yes it does... It locks you into whatever is supported on the ring.

I don't know how I can explain this more plainly, I can (more accurately have) taken a fiber build that was created as a ring & spoke SONET system and with the same fiber plant overlaid that with GigE and ATM (further back in time) to backhaul for PON, DSL, VOIP, and direct Active Ethernet.

"Overlaid"? Could you clarify that?

Sure, ring, hub & spoke, home run, star these are all descriptions of the physical architecture and many layer 2 technologies will happily use them all including Ethernet. To use a specific example an existing SONET ring (OC-3 to be precise) had be in service with an ILEC for more than a decade. This physical topology was a common one with a physical ring of fiber (32 strands, yes this was built back in the day) connected to Add/Drop Multiplexers (Fujitsu IIRC) along the ring as needed to deliver 25,000 or shorter copper loops either directly from the same cabinet that ADM was in or from a subtended Digital Loop Carrier off of a spur (collapsed ring) of the ring. Now, SONET connections work off a pair of fibers, one for transmit and one for receive. To run Ethernet (initially 100mbps but now 10G) we simply lit 2 of the remaining 30 strands to overlay an Ethernet ring on top of the SONET ring. We then placed switches in the same remote cabinets we had the ADMs and DLCs and started trenching the fiber drops.

Owen's assertion (and mine) is that a loop architecture *requires* active equipment, suited to the phy layer protocol, at each node. And while those loop fibers are running SONET, they can't be running anything else at the same time.

You're confounding the physical layer topology with the layer 2 protocol. You can't run SONET and Ethernet on the same physical fiber at the same time (unless you use WDM but that's confusing the discussion) but you'd never build a ring of fiber with only two strands.

...

There is nothing about a hub & spoke architecture is this harmful or even suboptimal for doing Gig-E directly to end users today.

You propose to run a ring *for each subscriber*? Or put active gear in the field to mux the subscriber AE loops into a SONET ring?

Or some other approach I don't know it possible?

SONET is simply the legacy (and expensive) way that telco's used to build rings. I'd neither use it nor recommend it for much of anything today. Calix, Occam(also Calix now), Adtran, and all the other guys who play in this space will happily construct a Gig/10G/40G Ethernet ring in the same shelf you're going to be buying to put your GPON or AE line cards in.

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This wasn't

always

...

true because we've only had 40G and 100G Ethernet for carrier networks for a few years. In the past we were limited by how big of an etherchannel network we could use for the ring. I'd also point out that the ring architecture is optimal for redundancy since you have fewer fiber bundles to get cut in the field and any cut to your ring gets routed around the ring by ERPS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ERPS) in less than 50 milliseconds.

I infer from that continuation of your thought that you mean the second: active optical muxes out in the plant.

I'm sure I've made clear why that design limits me in ways I don't want to be limited when building a fiber plant for a 50 year lifetime, but let's address your responses below.

The only limitation you have is a limited supply of total fibers (hint, this is a big reason why its cheaper to build and run).

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Lower the price per instance and you very likely find new demands.

The vast majority of business don't WANT that kind of connectivity.

The vast majority of businesses don't want it at the price they have to pay for it now -- or more to the point, the consultants who do their IT don't.

You have no real way, I should think, to extrapolate whether that will continue as prices drop, especially if sharply.

The vast majority of businesses don't know and don't care about HOW their connectivity is delivered and wouldn't know the difference between Layer 1 and Layer 2 if it punched them in the face. Almost all businesses want INTERNET connectivity at the highest quality & speed at the lowest cost and that's it. There are a small percentage, mainly larger businesses, that do have special requirements, but those special requirements very seldom include a L1 anything.

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How many MPLS connections get purchased by SMBs? That's the same kind of connectivity at layer 3 and that's a market that is almost entirely used by large corportations.

Sure; most small businesses don't need that.

Nor medium businesses, and that's where knowing your (potential) customer base matters more than anything I can tell you. If you're in an area with lots of technology jobs and/or financial companies your network will look differently than an average small town muni build. If your customer base is primarily residential with a few businesses (hospitals and schools also count here) then you'll be lucky to sell a handful of L1 connections and some of the people who will be interested will want it for very low bit rate (means low price too) uses like RS-232 over fiber for managing SCADA nodes or other telemetry pieces.

But there are some that do, and there are some that it doesn't matter *where they are at*. "Fiber on your wall with no upfront engineering charge" is a pretty strong call, in some markets, and I won't have to do most of the publicity myself; it'll make the news.

You'll get some publicity, especially if you do a little self promoting. The problem I see is that you seem to think that by building the L1 piece you're going to have ISPs that are eager to serve your customers. If your demographics are like most small towns in the US that just isn't very likely. Any ISP partner is going to have to build and maintain a lot of infrastructure before they can serve the first end user and your "no upfront engineering" is simply not true unless you're going to configure and run MetroE and/or GPON shelves for them. In any sharing scenario (L1, L2, or L3) the ISP is going to have to connect to you with enough bandwidth to serve those end users as well. How many service providers have expressed interest? Have you talked pricing for the loops and colo space yet?

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But the vendors do and it makes a huge difference to the barrier to entry price for competing vendors offering different services. (I'm talking about more than just IP at this point).

What vendors? ISPs don't.

And your assertion here is based on what? How many places have ISPs had a *choice* as to whether to take a L1 optical or L2 aggregated handoff?

I've done nothing but work with ISPs, often in the situation you're describing, for the past 15 years. I also know how ISPs, especially at the size you might attract operate.

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What I'm proposing is a hub and spoke architecture. It's just a much larger hub with much longer spokes.

That's called home running, but as I've said that's ok in some scenarios, its just that in most cases there is no benefit.

Today. Neither you nor I know how that will change in 20, 30, or 50 years. But that's the horizon I'm planning not to block.

You're betting money against Ethernet's (not to mention any new technology) ability to keep up as a technology. You're statement is true, but its a lot like buying insurance against meteor strikes. Today on a normal ring topology most people are installing hundreds of pairs of physical fiber so even without adding Wave Division Multiplexing in you can easily build a ring with several terabits per second capacity. Even easier(and cheaper) is to build several 10G rings on top of each other with the exact same shelves you're going to be using to push out GPON or AE.

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You're assuming the current business model of incumbent-provider owned fiber. In a case where you have service providers not allowed to own fiber and a fiber provider not allowed to provide services, the incentives all work towards cooperation and the conflicts of interest between them are eliminated. I understand what you're saying about field technicians and their motivations, but, again those are based largely on the current business models and compensation schemes. In the proposed arena, there's no reason management at the service provider and management at the fiber provider cannot work together to address these issues. Further, the technician that blames the fiber plant for everything rather than cooperating to resolve said issues together will inherently have his installations take longer than the ones that cooperate, so he is actually already automatically incentivized in the correct direction.

This is my goal.

Its an admirable goal, but you're never going to have CCIEs (probably not even CCNAs) doing installs. Installation is, has been, and will in all likelihood continue to be done by people with limited skill sets. You building your own fiber plant and making it easier for ISPs to connect isn't going to change that.

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Admittedly, without some education, that may not be intuitively obvious to him, but I find that education is usually possible when attempted.

You need to understand that I've built the exact network your describing several times and in all those case this was for a muni network in a relatively small town (<25,000 residents). I also know who the installers are in that sized community (as a group, not personally) and even if you get the best ISP partners on the planet they're going to have normal installers doing much of the work.

When you say "normal installers", do you mean "employees of the ISP", "employees of the muni", or "subcontractors of one of those two"?

And why is that pertinent?

Whoever does the install at the home or office. Who they work for really doesn't matter since the skill set will be largely the same. Its pertinent because you can have the greatest plant on the planet but if your install isn't done correctly the end user (the guy paying you or your partner) won't be happy. The majority of your day to day problems will be driven by installs. The fiber was improperly terminated, the drop was in the wrong place, the ONT didn't work correctly, etc. Please, go join the LinkedIn FTTx group and read some of the things there: You probably can't follow that link until you join but its a good discussion of some of the problems. http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&gid=83578&type=member&item=208400553&qid=379425dd-6f05-4caa-b2d4-f4fbf2aeb9cc&trk=group_most_popular-0-b-ttl&goback=%2Egmp_83578

Your assertion seems to be that it will be necessary to have "abnormal" installers in the field in order for them not to dump problem tickets off to the muni and fail to help meaningfully in fixing them.

First, I think this unlikely since, in most cases, we'll have 3pr available at each address. If we think there's a problem with the pair, we can "cut to clear" *temporarily*, and if the second pair is ok, then the sub is back online while we test the first pair and clear the problem.

(GTE's failure, for all that I give them shit about CtC is that they never *worked* the dead pairs; as long as you do, it's not a problem.)

That's great, and I'm glad to hear you've worked out that part of the drop but most of the problems occur from the drop into the house or office. The last 20 yards are the most problematic and most changed. This is where the installer matters most and why even good plant has bad installs.

Second, since we'll be terminating all 3 pairs to a jackbox, the installation contractor will be able to perform and document whatever acceptance testing we instruct them to. Sure, that will cost some more money, but again, if your capital plant is tested good when installed, this reduces markedly the opex maintenance cost over time. Where that breakeven point will be depends on what they want to charge me to do the testing, just as it does with Cat6.

[ Scott: ]

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Sure it does, even in greenfield and whats more it costs more over the long term UNLESS you know where every home and business will be located 10 years from now.

A luxury I do have, since my city is nearly 100.0% built; it's certainly 100% platted.

That's good, and again my argument isn't that you shouldn't home run all

your connections, but rather using the idea of L1 handoffs as a reason to do so is flawed and that hub and spoke does not limit your options.

[ Owen: ]

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More yes, much more, I'm not so convinced.

And Owen isn't the only one who thinks that, and I think I know Rob Seastrom well enough from the list to think he wouldn't concur unless he had some data from which to work.

Again, its not (I think I've said this enough) a problem in certain scenarios. The issue I take is that hub & spoke doesn't limit your future use and that L1 connectivity as a reason to do home runs is seldom worth the expense.

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 --------------------------------

You *put active equipment out in the physical plant*.

I'm sure that there are some physical plant design criteria that permit that decision, but mine isn't one of them, for reasons I believe I've made fairly clear.

You disagree with some of those as well, of course, but you understand *that* I have made them, and I would expect, therefore, also why this entire subthread isn't germane to the problem I'm trying to solve, right?

I've tried to make clear that yes, in some scenarios (and your situation may well fit here) that it makes sense so I think we can drop this portion.

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Owen's assertion (and mine) is that a loop architecture *requires* active equipment, suited to the phy layer protocol, at each node. And while those loop fibers are running SONET, they can't be running anything else at the same time.

You're confounding the physical layer topology with the layer 2 protocol. You can't run SONET and Ethernet on the same physical fiber at the same time (unless you use WDM but that's confusing the discussion) but you'd never build a ring of fiber with only two strands.

Certainly not.

But a ring a) requires *some kind* of active equipment between the MDF and the ONT, and b) does not support PtP at all.

So, *for my stated purposes*, it's not an acceptable alternative.

Right, I'm questioning the value of and required number of point to point connections. You certainly can do dozens of point to point connections with a hub and spoke by simply having a patch panel where your cabinets (which you'll probably have anyhow).

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There is nothing about a hub & spoke architecture is this harmful or even suboptimal for doing Gig-E directly to end users today.

You propose to run a ring *for each subscriber*? Or put active gear in the field to mux the subscriber AE loops into a SONET ring?

Or some other approach I don't know is possible?

SONET is simply the legacy (and expensive) way that telco's used to build rings. I'd neither use it nor recommend it for much of anything today. Calix, Occam(also Calix now), Adtran, and all the other guys who play in this space will happily construct a Gig/10G/40G Ethernet ring in the same shelf you're going to be buying to put your GPON or AE line cards in.

I'm sure, but it's still a ring.

If I ever want to upgrade it, I have to do a lot more than rack new gear in my "CO", and then move patch cords one at a time.

Not really, all that changes (and this does matter) is where you swap cards out.

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I infer from that continuation of your thought that you mean the second: active optical muxes out in the plant.

I'm sure I've made clear why that design limits me in ways I don't want to be limited when building a fiber plant for a 50 year lifetime, but let's address your responses below.

The only limitation you have is a limited supply of total fibers (hint, this is a big reason why its cheaper to build and run).

Nope, that is, in fact, not the only limitation; the others have been expressed or implied, but are left as an exercise for the student.

Then I'd have continue to say none, since I've done all of the things you're saying are limitations. If your position was something like, "We did the economic study and it will cost us less to home run everything than to place remote cabinets with power." I'd have never questioned you at all. I know you've made a decision, but you _seem_ to have made it on faulty assumptions: 1) You will have demand for layer 1 connectivity sufficient to offset the higher costs of home running all the fiber both today and in 10 years. 2) Not home running creates limitations, mainly on assumption #1, that make it untenable. If #1 isn't true (and I strongly doubt it is) then #2 can't be either. That doesn't mean that home running is wrong for you, but if you did your math on those two assumptions then its certainly questionable.

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Almost all businesses want INTERNET connectivity at the highest quality & speed at the lowest cost and that's it. There are a small percentage, mainly larger

businesses,

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that do have special requirements, but those special requirements very seldom include a L1 anything.

Yes, but now we're into Whorf's Hypothesis: your vocabulary limits the things you're *able* to think about; it hasn't been practical to *supply* MAN L1 fiber at reasonable prices until about now.

I'm basing my views on talking to ISPs around North America and beyond and helping them plan their networks. You're basing your view on? I could certainly be wrong and it wouldn't be the first time nor will it be the last. Having said that, if you don't have some solid market research or some interested ISPs telling you what they want exactly what are you basing your opinion on?

Sure, and I don't expect to sell a lot of it up front, unless my launch ISP wants to use their own L2 gear. *But this does not preclude my building to enable it*, which is a different thing from how much of it I expect to sell.

If costs were identical I'd agree, but they're not. Again, I'm not saying that your situation is wrong for home running cable. I'm simply saying you should be looking at the costs of remote cabinets versus the cost of home running and NOT a product that you don't expect to sell.

Yep, and PR is not foreign to me; it will actually be in the project budget, along with outside counsel.

Let me know when you guys are ready and we'll be glad to send some traffic your way.

Oh, Jesus; Scott. I've been clear from in front that this is a 36 months to shovel project for me; no, I haven't talked to providers yet; I'm still angling for the *job*.

But you're convinced you have the right architecture? This dichotomy seems odd to me.

And yet, you didn't answer the question: *how many places has the choice about which you express an opinion *actually been made* by an ISP serving subs on a fiber plant they don't own, if any*?

Very few in the US. In Europe its more common, but even where its available as the commentator from France asserted, its only the largest ISPs that take that route and its not always smooth. In most places where I've been involved open access was done on either cable or DSL networks. Doing it in DSL, which has something like 90% of the open access market, is straightforward via PPPoE at layer 2. In DOCSIS its also done at layer 2 because of how cable modems work (they look at each downstream signal).

But that, Scott, is orthogonal to *whether they can work with my L1 guy(s) to find a problem*; a CC?? is not necessary for that, that I can see.

And anybody big enough to want to come in and do L1 fiber *will already have guys who are fiber-trained*.

The problem here is the economics. Its not a case of can I make it work, you can. Its a problem of do I make money (or at least break even) when I make it work. I'll posit that your L1 connections will require more time from your technicians while you're taking in less revenue. Are you going to pre-qualify your L1 partners? How?

I've been avoiding LinkedIN like bubonic plague.

Its a good resource, since most people entering the field don't know what mailing lists are much less Usenet or IRC...../em grumbles about young whippersnappers

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The last 20 yards are the most problematic and most changed. This is where the installer matters most and why even good plant has bad installs.

Sure. But see way above about "install contractor testing to the jacks".

Or, immediately below. :-}

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Second, since we'll be terminating all 3 pairs to a jackbox, the installation contractor will be able to perform and document whatever acceptance testing we instruct them to. Sure, that will cost some more money, but again, if your capital plant is tested good when installed, this reduces markedly the opex maintenance cost over time. Where that breakeven point will be depends on what they want to charge me to do the testing, just as it does with Cat6.

No comment there?

So your L1 partners will have to have a PON tester as well....you are selective.

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[ Scott: ]

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Sure it does, even in greenfield and whats more it costs more over the long term UNLESS you know where every home and business will be located 10 years from now.

A luxury I do have, since my city is nearly 100.0% built; it's certainly 100% platted.

A side note, what happens when you need more than 3 pair to each jack? How are you building to MDUs, assuming you have some in the area? What happens if a new apartment complex is built next year?

Perhaps. But we seem to have established that homerun vs, say, GPON with splitters in the plant, is merely delta; maybe 5-8% more CAPEX. And the other alternative you present, ring with active muxes in the field, I have already ruled out for the reasons above.

Until I get to the point where I have real, current, quoted numbers on the plant install in various approaches, I suppose we ought to let this thread drop for now.

Probably a good idea, I had actually assumed from the thread you were past that point.

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 --------------------------------

However, for any given ring, you are locked into a single technology and you have to put active electronics out in the field.

Correct, but you can have many layer 2 rings riding your physical ring. In a normal install you're going to have over a hundred fibers in your physical ring, I'd personally build it with over two hundred, but that's just me. Here's the Graybar catalog with a good breakdown of the kinds of fiber you can choose from, though you have to have a rep to get pricing: http://www.graybar.com/documents/graybar-sps-osp.pdf

You can't, given a ring architecture, provide dark fiber leases.

That's incorrect, you simply don't have as many available but in a current "normal" build you could easily provide 100+ dark fiber leases that extend from your MDF (still don't like using this term here) all the way down to the home or business.

I realize it is your argument that one doesn't need to do so, there's no market for it, etc. However, I don't agree with you.

No, my argument is that the demand for dark fiber is very low and so building your network so you can provide every single connection as dark fiber is wasteful.

Sure, but, you're ring only works with things that do L2 aggregation in the field with active electronics in the field. This means that for any L2 technology a particular subscriber wants to use, you need to either already have that L2 technology deployed on a ring, or, you need to deploy another ring to support that technology.

First, exactly how many and what Layer 2 technologies BESIDES Ethernet do you think you have a market for?

VPNs are popular today (whether MPLS, IPSEC, or otherwise) because L1 connections are expensive and VPNS are (relatively) cheap.

If dark fiber can be provided for $30/month per termination (we've already agreed that the cost is $20 or less), that changes the equation quite a bit. If, as a business, I can provide corporate connectivity and internet access to my employees for $30/month/employee without having to use a VPN, but just 802.1q trunking and providing them a router (or switch) that has different ports for Corporate and Personal LANs in their house, that changes the equation quite a bit.

First, there are very few businesses in the size town we've been discussing that even have this scenario as a wish list item. Second, how many businesses that need/want remote connectivity for their workers at home AREN'T running Ethernet on their corporate LAN and at the employees' home? Another thing to remember is that many businesses run VPNs because of the encryption and controls it provides, not because they can't get or afford direct connectivity. You have a vanishingly small set of potential customers IMO.

Admittedly, this only works for the employees that live within range, but it's an example of the kinds of services that nobody even imagines today because we can't get good L1 services cheap yet.

This is the key point. IF someone was able to put together a nationwide or even regional offering to allow inexpensive Layer 1 connectivity things would be different. However, that's not going to happen AND we already have good cheap solutions to deal with that. Most commonly VPLS over GRE or VPN whose only real cost beyond the basic home Internet connection, is a ~$350 CPE that supports the protocol. So, if you're running a company with regional or nationwide offices and home workers would you be attracted to a more limited method of connection that is only available in certain areas as opposed to the solution that works everywhere? Which is easier for your IT staff to support?

Sure, but elsewhere you've pointed out that the last 20 yards are where most of the problems occur… Guess what… The last 20 yards should be the service provider, not the L1 in this case. If you're worried that the tech will blame problems in the last 20 yards on the prem. loop, that's a matter of teaching them where to plug in the box for testing the L1 loop.

MMR-------[B-Box]------[Customer Patch]------[IW Termination]

1. Plug into IW Termination If it works, great, you're done. If not:

2. Plug into Customer Patch. If it works, problem is isolated to the IW side of things, not the muni's responsibility.

If it doesn't, contact the muni and schedule a joint visit to troubleshoot. Muni will provide an OTDR. Any modulation-specific diagnostic gear to be provided by the service provider.

I'm willing to bet that I could teach this to the average installer in a matter of minutes.

I'm not gonna argue the troubleshooting point anymore, far be it for me to deny you the opportunity to hit your own thumb and learn the lesson that way. -- Scott Helms Vice President of Technology ZCorum (678) 507-5000 -------------------------------- http://twitter.com/kscotthelms --------------------------------

Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> writes:

GPON/DOCSIS/RFoG? That's one people are deploying today.

Over the 50 year proposed lifetime of the plant? WTF knows. That's exactly the point.

To paraphrase Tom Peters, you don't look like a trailbreaker by *emulating what other trailbreakers have done*.

I'm not *trying* to do the last thing.

I'm trying to do the next thing. Or maybe the one after that.

The existing copper network was in many cases built like a star with some very long runs. This worked fine for telephony, but not so well with ADSL. The result is that providers move their active equipment closer to the subscriber. Is there a risk that up-and-coming technologies will depend on shorter fiber runs? Will the fiber be built in such a way that it joins up in places where it is possible to later add active equipment if that becomes desirable? /Benny

I think that risk low enough to take it, especially since my entire city fits in about a 3mi radius. :-)

This is data I'd like to have had earlier, if your total diameter is 6 miles then the math will almost certainly work to home run everything, though I'd still run the numbers.

No, I expect ranges to get *longer* per constant dollar spent, actually.

Are you legally or otherwise restricted from extending beyond the city limits in your state?

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 --------------------------------

----- Original Message -----

From: "Scott Helms" <khelms@zcorum.com>

Yep, that's likely what will happen over the long term anyhow. That's why I asked about a new apartment building in your territory. You decision would be either run additional fiber to support each apartment as an end point, simply provide backhaul to some other provider, or put your own actives somewhere nearby.

In fact, there is *one* large multiunit in my city, and I don't believe that there is space for anymore; my CO location is *right across the street from that*. :-) If someone *does* want to put another in, they will have to pay for me to pull the new fiber to their lot; that's how we do it with other utilities.

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Doing things which are not quite cost effective *yet* is pretty much the *hallmark* of government, is it not? Hybrid car tax breaks, Solar PV install tax breaks... these things are all subsidies to the consumer cost of a technology, so as to increase its uptake and push it onto the consumer-cost S-curve; this is a government practice with at least a century long history.

It's pretty much what I'm trying to accomplish here. And thanks for teasing that thought out of my head, so I can make sure it's in my internal sales pitch. :-)

All of those items have some chance of mass deployment. Mass deployment of Layer 1 connectivity in the US is much *much *less likely.

For the about 19th time: *that isn't my goal*. My goal is "not limiting future technology developments of deployment". Homerun fiber merely happens to have "L1 access to providers" as a side benefit.

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First, exactly how many and what Layer 2 technologies BESIDES Ethernet do you think you have a market for?

GPON/DOCSIS/RFoG? That's one people are deploying today.

That question was in reference to commercial accounts not service providers.

I'm glad you want to limit the question, but I don't.

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Perhaps. But the *current* potential customer base does not merit locking in a limited design in a 50-year plant build.

That's a business call, but like a lot of decisions you're making a ton of assumptions as well. You're assuming for example that the costs of running additional fibers won't go down significantly during that 50 year time span.

Sure I am. Do you really expect that we'll find an appreciably cheaper method than directional-bore-and-blow? More to the point, the "-blow" part of that, since I'll be over-provisioning the conduit.

You're assuming that the cost of DWDM gear won't go down sufficiently that running new fiber is simply not needed to support the new architecture.

Which seems the opposite argument.

You're also assuming that Layer 1 will at some point have a reason for customer adoption when the entire world is working on Layer 3 methods of doing this.

Perhaps. But Juan Moore-Thyme: The extra cost of the plant build is somewhere between delta and epsilon; it *barely* even merits the amount of time we've burned up talking about it. I *can* fake loop with a home-run build, the converse is -- so far as I can see -- not true; loop builds *require* powered active equipment in the field, and I have half a dozen reasons to *really not want that a lot*.

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This is the key point. IF someone was able to put together a nationwide or even regional offering to allow inexpensive Layer 1 connectivity things would be different.

How, Scott, would you expect that sort of thing might happen?

By people taking the first step?

Yeah; thought so.

There are more "first steps" that are never followed up than people actually starting a trend. There is a guy in my neighborhood that swears we can all drive around in cars powered by recycled frying oil and he built one to prove it works. I should point out that your idea is not new nor are you the first to try to build something like this.

Good, then there should be lots of examples, successful *by their terms* or not, at which I can look.

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My county doesn't have the same first-trencher advantage my city does... but it does have the advantage that *it is nearly 100% built out as well*; we are, I believe, the densest county *in the United States*; maybe Manhattan beats us. Maybe DC; maybe Suffolk County in Mass.

So it's not at all impossible that we might be the first domino to fall; there are a lot of barrier island communities near me that would be similarly easy to fiber, since they're so one-dimensional.

(Geographically; I'm sure their residents are quite nice. :-)

Today there are networks based on this premise in every state I've cared to check.

There are a lot of premises in this conversation; exactly which part did you mean?

Here in Georgia the independent phone companies formed a seperate organization called US Carrier (which was recently sold for much less than they put into it). The muni's formed a partnering (initially) network called MEAG that was later renamed to GA Public Web ( http://www.gapublicweb.net/). When the two were first constructed in the early 2000's they actually had a interconnects and could sell off each other's network, but that fell apart over time.

Another good reference; thanks.

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However, that's not going to happen AND we already have good cheap solutions to deal with that. Most commonly VPLS over GRE or VPN whose only real cost beyond the basic home Internet connection, is a ~$350 CPE that supports the protocol.

You're paying $350 for VPN routers?

Could I be one of your vendors?

VPLS and good remote management is well worth $350.

I was quite happy with SnapGear before they got bought, out (still am, actually), and they were about half that.

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your IT staff to support?

Accurate, but not germane. They're not my target market.

Owen brought up that example.

Sure, there are lots of target markets. But no specific target market (except perhaps L1 ISPs) is driving my decision. 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

----- Original Message -----

From: "Stephen Sprunk" <stephen@sprunk.org>

Sure, almost nobody asks for dark fiber today because they know it costs several orders of magnitude more than a T1 or whatever. However, if the price for dark fiber were the same (or lower), latent demand would materialize. Why would I pay through the nose for a T1 when I can light the fiber myself with 10GE for $20/mo?

This was part of my argument, yes. h And it even occurred to me over the weekend that this will reduce the engineering charges to get me onto the already-built backbone loops: They don't need to build to my *CO*, just to a splice at the edge of my city, and *I* can backhaul the uplinks in myself.

What you're missing is that in this model, _every_ connection is L1 from the fiber owner's perspective. Let service providers worry about L2 and above.

In fairness to Scott, he didn't *miss* it, he simply has his "feasible" slider set to a different place than I/we do.

Why would the ISP "have to build and maintain a lot of infrastructure"? All they need is a fiber-capable Ethernet switch in a colo to turn up their first customer. That's a lot simpler than trying to turn up their first customer via an ILEC's DSLAM, for instance.

Well, that means *they have to build out in my city*; I can't aggregate L1 and backhaul it to them.

There's nothing wrong with the muni operating a L2 (or even L3) carrier of last resort, just to ensure that _some_ useful service is available to residents. However, it should (a) be priced high enough to attract competitors and (b) be a distinct entity, treated by the fiber arm as no different from any other L1 customer. None of the shenanigans like the ILECs play, where the wholesale rate to competitors is higher than the retail rate for the ILEC's own service.

That's true at L3, but at L2, my goal is to encourage *much smaller* ISPs (like the one I used to engineer in 1996, Centurion Technologies; we were profitable with about 400 dialup customers into a 40 and a 20 modem dialup bank backhauled by 512kb/s *and I would come to your house and make it work if I had to*. :-). By having the city run L2 over our L1, we can accomplish that; unlike L3, I don't believe it actually needs to be a separate company; I expect most ISP business to be at L2; L1 is mostly an accomodation to potential larger ISPs who want to do it all themselves. Or FiOS. :-)

You're missing the simplicity of dark fiber. The carrier orders a L1 circuit from a customer to their facility. The L1 provider just patches one fiber pair to another fiber pair, which can be done by a trained monkey. Then the carrier connects their own equipment to the fiber at their own facility and at the customer site, everything lights up and the spice^Wdata flows. Again, that can be done by a trained monkey. You don't need a CCIE or even a CCNA to do this. Heck, it's even simpler than what's required today for DSL, cable or satellite installers.

Scott asserts that it's not that easy In The Real World; it remains to be seen whether he's right.

(Note that inside wiring is a completely separate issue, and carriers _will_ have to train techs on how to do that since few are familiar with fiber, but that is an optional service they can charge extra for. The L1 provider's responsibility ends at the NIU on an outside wall, same as an ILEC's, so it's not their problem in the first place.)

The L2 might end there, too, if I decide on outside ONTs, rather than an optical jackblock inside. 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