I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer. But I am wondering what ISP's do for their residential and business customers for designing POP's that they usually access to get theur traffic into a given ISP and beyond. Is it usually a L1/L2 connection from the CE to the last mile POP? Or L2 even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
On 2/7/19 6:46 PM, David Ratkay wrote:
I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer. But I am wondering what ISP's do for their residential and business customers for designing POP's that they usually access to get theur traffic into a given ISP and beyond. Is it usually a L1/L2 connection from the CE to the last mile POP? Or L2 even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
L3 switches that can handle a reasonable number of routes/VLANs/MACs and lots of bandwidth are so cheap that I'm fond of pushing L3 fairly deep into the access network with them in many cases. Not much benefit to that if you prefer centralized BRAS/BNG style boxes with all the bells and whistles to take the traffic management away from your last-mile gear, though. So you need access gear with its own traffic management capabilities and potentially L2 filtering of higher level traffic (DHCP snooping, ARP/ND inspection, RA guard, TCP/UDP port blocking, etc.) and that may limit your options or force you to terminate fewer customers at a PoP than you'd like to stay within the capabilities of a typical L3 switch product. I've never been overly fond of the Ma' Bell style designs with humongous routers in centralized areas and L2-only haul out to the last-mile termination. The failure modes of such systems often result in hilariously large outages that are super visible publicly and put egg on peoples' face. A neighborhood being down is a little easier to manage from a customer relations POV, I think, and it's easy to make that happen with distributed L3 termination. I've also found it easier to handle multiple backhaul paths at L3 than L2 since spanning tree is such a pain in the butt, but E-RPS/G.8032, if you get switches that support it, can also be very handy. There are some smaller, somewhat cost-effective full-touch routers that can help bridge the gap between those two options, though. Juniper's MX104 and the Cisco ASR1k series are some reasonable options for that, but it'll definitely cost more than a cheap L3 switch for a given amount of bandwidth. I do like to separate SMB and Resi traffic, but it's mostly for customer service reasons rather than technical reasons. That separation rarely entails separate equipment but rather just VLANs and PCPs, IP subnets, etc. Now if you want to sell DIA type services where you can offer full BGP tables, MPLS interconnection, etc., that's another matter. A need for IPv4 CGNAT may, as well, but things like 464XLAT, lw4o6, MAP, etc. can fix that up if you're willing to put some extra requirements on your CPE/RG. If you're in a position where you want to or have to offer competitors access to your network to sell service directly to customers, that's also going to potentially really change the situation. -- Brandon Martin
On 8/Feb/19 02:37, Brandon Martin wrote:
I've never been overly fond of the Ma' Bell style designs with humongous routers in centralized areas and L2-only haul out to the last-mile termination. The failure modes of such systems often result in hilariously large outages that are super visible publicly and put egg on peoples' face. A neighborhood being down is a little easier to manage from a customer relations POV, I think, and it's easy to make that happen with distributed L3 termination.
We don't do Consumer services, but for our Enterprise customers, we run IP/MPLS all the way into the Access and deliver services directly off those devices. Like you, we don't like centralizing services for the very same reasons that you state. That said, I've often considered different architectures if we did provide Consumer services - from centralized BNG's on a per-region or per-town basis, as well as de-centralized BNG's on smaller routers (back when the MX80 had just launched, but obviously not fit-for-purpose in 2019). Ultimately, I can't find a feasible way to deliver Consumer services scalably and inexpensively in a de-centralized model. But, I suppose, given the nature of the product and the ARPU, reasonable centralization for such customers is not a bad thing.
There are some smaller, somewhat cost-effective full-touch routers that can help bridge the gap between those two options, though. Juniper's MX104 and the Cisco ASR1k series are some reasonable options for that, but it'll definitely cost more than a cheap L3 switch for a given amount of bandwidth.
Our poison is the Cisco ASR920 and Juniper MX204. I am yet to find any other platforms with the size, density, capability and price for full IP/MPLS capability in the Access.
I do like to separate SMB and Resi traffic, but it's mostly for customer service reasons rather than technical reasons. That separation rarely entails separate equipment but rather just VLANs and PCPs, IP subnets, etc.
Many years ago, I did consider running both Consumer and Enterprise traffic on one router - and for purposes of pride, I'm sure the major vendors would like to boast that they could allow you to do this. But in practice, it's probably a bad idea... BNG's have too many moving parts, and for some platforms, there is actually special code optimized for BNG deployments that may have an impact on traditional Enterprise or Service Provider customers. So I would separate BNG's from regular edge routers.
Now if you want to sell DIA type services where you can offer full BGP tables, MPLS interconnection, etc., that's another matter. A need for IPv4 CGNAT may, as well, but things like 464XLAT, lw4o6, MAP, etc. can fix that up if you're willing to put some extra requirements on your CPE/RG.
We do all this in the Access on our ASR920's and MX204's (once we start deploying them).
If you're in a position where you want to or have to offer competitors access to your network to sell service directly to customers, that's also going to potentially really change the situation.
Why? Chances are they will require Ethernet access between their customer and their head-end, which is a typical scenario. Mark.
On 2/8/19 2:07 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
I do like to separate SMB and Resi traffic, but it's mostly for customer service reasons rather than technical reasons. That separation rarely entails separate equipment but rather just VLANs and PCPs, IP subnets, etc.
Many years ago, I did consider running both Consumer and Enterprise traffic on one router - and for purposes of pride, I'm sure the major vendors would like to boast that they could allow you to do this. But in practice, it's probably a bad idea... BNG's have too many moving parts, and for some platforms, there is actually special code optimized for BNG deployments that may have an impact on traditional Enterprise or Service Provider customers.
So I would separate BNG's from regular edge routers.
Enterprise DIA is a whole different beast. For sure, that stays separate at least for now. Some of the forthcoming PON technologies have so much bandwidth that it may become attractive to start merging them at the access layer for smaller customers, and then I guess we'll have to see what the best way to handle L3 termination on that is. If anything, just ensuring that the (often) separate tech teams have the proper access to it and knowledge of what the others are doing might be a bit of an issue.
If you're in a position where you want to or have to offer competitors access to your network to sell service directly to customers, that's also going to potentially really change the situation.
Why? Chances are they will require Ethernet access between their customer and their head-end, which is a typical scenario.
I'm thinking that, if you push L3 termination all the way out to the last access node (FTTN DSLAM being the obvious one here), you may then lack a decent way to haul pure Ethernet back to their head-end. If your L3 termination also supports MPLS, or Q-in-Q, you're probably fine. The latter might negate the potential advantages of distributed L3 from a routing POV by forcing you to again run STP or similar. If you're doing L3 termination a bit more centralized, even if not with big behemoths on a "one per super-metro" basis, this may not be a problem at all. HFC and FTTx PONs might end up being like that inherently just because of the nature of the plant and tech that runs on it. -- Brandon Martin
On 8/Feb/19 19:44, Brandon Martin wrote:
I'm thinking that, if you push L3 termination all the way out to the last access node (FTTN DSLAM being the obvious one here), you may then lack a decent way to haul pure Ethernet back to their head-end. If your L3 termination also supports MPLS, or Q-in-Q, you're probably fine. The latter might negate the potential advantages of distributed L3 from a routing POV by forcing you to again run STP or similar.
If you're doing L3 termination a bit more centralized, even if not with big behemoths on a "one per super-metro" basis, this may not be a problem at all. HFC and FTTx PONs might end up being like that inherently just because of the nature of the plant and tech that runs on it.
My assumption is that you'd be running full IP/MPLS all the way into the Access. In that case, what I'm saying is that you can run EoMPLS to deliver the service. Mark.
On 2/9/19 2:13 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
My assumption is that you'd be running full IP/MPLS all the way into the Access. In that case, what I'm saying is that you can run EoMPLS to deliver the service.
Bingo. You're fine as long as your access L3 gear speaks MPLS. That does somewhat bump you out of the realm of "cheap L3 switch", but there are still options. -- Brandon Martin
On 9/Feb/19 18:07, Brandon Martin wrote:
Bingo. You're fine as long as your access L3 gear speaks MPLS. That does somewhat bump you out of the realm of "cheap L3 switch", but there are still options.
IP-capable switches that have little to no MPLS support would certainly be cheaper than one that does. But given the benefits of an MPLS-based Metro-E network vs. the traditional architecture, I find current prices somewhat reasonable. Mark.
Just wondering, but what IP-capable MPLS switches are people using to deploy AE to residential internet connections? Most 48 port AE switches from repetuable vendors are crazy expensive, and I can't see how the ROI would ever work compared to GPON. On Sat, Feb 9, 2019 at 4:25 PM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 9/Feb/19 18:07, Brandon Martin wrote:
Bingo. You're fine as long as your access L3 gear speaks MPLS. That does somewhat bump you out of the realm of "cheap L3 switch", but there are still options.
IP-capable switches that have little to no MPLS support would certainly be cheaper than one that does.
But given the benefits of an MPLS-based Metro-E network vs. the traditional architecture, I find current prices somewhat reasonable.
Mark.
On 14/Feb/19 04:41, Colton Conor wrote:
Just wondering, but what IP-capable MPLS switches are people using to deploy AE to residential internet connections? Most 48 port AE switches from repetuable vendors are crazy expensive, and I can't see how the ROI would ever work compared to GPON.
I'd never use an MPLS-capable router (even if it looks like a switch) for Consumer customers. That math doesn't work. As a pure FTTH Active-E AN, I still think the Brocade (Extreme) CER/CES is a good box. Cisco had the good sense of pushing out the ME2600X for this years ago, and then opted to pull it. I can't find anything in their portfolio that makes sense to me for this. Juniper don't have anything on their end, either, that makes sense to me for this. So I'd probably still stick with the Brocade/Extreme. Mark.
Not sure if this is what y'all are talking about, but I use lots of Juniper ACX5048 (previously Cisco ME3600 or ASR9000) for mpls-capable router edging in native ip/ethernet from ftth gpon network into mpls l2circuits and LOTS of vrf.... vrf for public ip, vrf for cgnat for private ip, vrf for voice... I'm glad I did it. Residential----- ONT-----ftth/gpon------OLT------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf x-------cgnat/inet------ Residential----- DSL Modem-----DSLAM-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf y-------cgnat/inet------ Residential----- Cable Modem-----CMTS-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf z-------cgnat/inet------ -Aaron
Aaron, Indeed the ACX5048 is a great box but expensive. I was talking about using the Gig-e ports of a 48 port switch to face subscribers, and asking what low cost IP-Capable MPLS capable 48 port switch fits that role. Basically an access switch for AE. On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 9:10 AM Aaron Gould <aaron1@gvtc.com> wrote:
Not sure if this is what y'all are talking about, but I use lots of Juniper ACX5048 (previously Cisco ME3600 or ASR9000) for mpls-capable router edging in native ip/ethernet from ftth gpon network into mpls l2circuits and LOTS of vrf.... vrf for public ip, vrf for cgnat for private ip, vrf for voice... I'm glad I did it.
Residential----- ONT-----ftth/gpon------OLT------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf x-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- DSL Modem-----DSLAM-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf y-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- Cable Modem-----CMTS-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf z-------cgnat/inet------
-Aaron
A much more common configuration is a combination of a low cost 48-port L2 aggregation switch, something whitebox or similar to a Taiwanese OEM/ODM such as edgecore, with a single 10GbE uplink to a small MPLS-capable router. One 10Gbps link can fit a great many 1GbE active-E residential customers in it. On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 10:52 AM Colton Conor <colton.conor@gmail.com> wrote:
Aaron,
Indeed the ACX5048 is a great box but expensive. I was talking about using the Gig-e ports of a 48 port switch to face subscribers, and asking what low cost IP-Capable MPLS capable 48 port switch fits that role. Basically an access switch for AE.
On Thu, Feb 14, 2019 at 9:10 AM Aaron Gould <aaron1@gvtc.com> wrote:
Not sure if this is what y'all are talking about, but I use lots of Juniper ACX5048 (previously Cisco ME3600 or ASR9000) for mpls-capable router edging in native ip/ethernet from ftth gpon network into mpls l2circuits and LOTS of vrf.... vrf for public ip, vrf for cgnat for private ip, vrf for voice... I'm glad I did it.
Residential----- ONT-----ftth/gpon------OLT------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf x-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- DSL Modem-----DSLAM-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf y-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- Cable Modem-----CMTS-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf z-------cgnat/inet------
-Aaron
On Thu, 14 Feb 2019, Aaron Gould wrote:
Not sure if this is what y'all are talking about, but I use lots of Juniper ACX5048 (previously Cisco ME3600 or ASR9000) for mpls-capable router edging in native ip/ethernet from ftth gpon network into mpls l2circuits and LOTS of vrf.... vrf for public ip, vrf for cgnat for private ip, vrf for voice... I'm glad I did it.
Residential----- ONT-----ftth/gpon------OLT------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf x-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- DSL Modem-----DSLAM-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf y-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- Cable Modem-----CMTS-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf z-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----fiber media converter---L2 switch-- and then the rest of the setup you can re-use. AE isn't magic, insted of having an OLT,CMTS or DSLAM you just have an L2 ethernet switch. They're mostly just media converters anyway. 15 years ago I deployed ADSL like this: Residential---DSL modem---DSLAM----L3 switch So DSL-modem---DSLAM was just doing RFC1843bridged over ATM. Just media converters. Same thing, just different type of media converter. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 14/Feb/19 17:10, Aaron Gould wrote:
Not sure if this is what y'all are talking about, but I use lots of Juniper ACX5048 (previously Cisco ME3600 or ASR9000) for mpls-capable router edging in native ip/ethernet from ftth gpon network into mpls l2circuits and LOTS of vrf.... vrf for public ip, vrf for cgnat for private ip, vrf for voice... I'm glad I did it.
Residential----- ONT-----ftth/gpon------OLT------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf x-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- DSL Modem-----DSLAM-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf y-------cgnat/inet------
Residential----- Cable Modem-----CMTS-----------ACX5048-----mpls/vrf z-------cgnat/inet------
I've never been a fan of the ACX because of its merchant silicon. On the other hand, that makes it quite affordable. Mark.
On 2/14/19 12:08 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
As a pure FTTH Active-E AN, I still think the Brocade (Extreme) CER/CES is a good box.
The CES is...wonky. My Foundry/Brocade/Extreme SEs have steered me away from them on more than one occasion. The CER is fine but of course more expensive. It'll take a full Internet table, though, which is handy. For AE resi deployments, I'd aggregate folks onto cheap 48 port switches then terminate onto a single pizza box router somewhere "less deep" in the network. Distributed, in-field L3 termination doesn't mean you have to terminate L3 right at the customer-facing port. -- Brandon Martin
On 14/Feb/19 23:25, Brandon Martin wrote:
The CES is...wonky. My Foundry/Brocade/Extreme SEs have steered me away from them on more than one occasion.
The CER is fine but of course more expensive. It'll take a full Internet table, though, which is handy.
For AE resi deployments, I'd aggregate folks onto cheap 48 port switches then terminate onto a single pizza box router somewhere "less deep" in the network. Distributed, in-field L3 termination doesn't mean you have to terminate L3 right at the customer-facing port.
One of the reasons I'd pay a little extra for an Active-E FTTH-centric switch is to control bandwidth right at the port the customer connects to. Cheap Ethernet switches generally don't have this capability (or if they do, have it in only one direction). This is why I felt the CES/CER were reasonable, but purely as Layer 2 termination and not using their IP/MPLS capabilities. Anyway, it's been a while since I had any interest in this, so it's possible life has changed since I was at the beach :-). Mark.
Well the CES is EOLed. ACX5048 can be had for around $10k, so not cheap for residential customers but fine for upstream aggregation. On Fri, Feb 15, 2019 at 2:00 AM Mark Tinka <mark.tinka@seacom.mu> wrote:
On 14/Feb/19 23:25, Brandon Martin wrote:
The CES is...wonky. My Foundry/Brocade/Extreme SEs have steered me away from them on more than one occasion.
The CER is fine but of course more expensive. It'll take a full Internet table, though, which is handy.
For AE resi deployments, I'd aggregate folks onto cheap 48 port switches then terminate onto a single pizza box router somewhere "less deep" in the network. Distributed, in-field L3 termination doesn't mean you have to terminate L3 right at the customer-facing port.
One of the reasons I'd pay a little extra for an Active-E FTTH-centric switch is to control bandwidth right at the port the customer connects to. Cheap Ethernet switches generally don't have this capability (or if they do, have it in only one direction). This is why I felt the CES/CER were reasonable, but purely as Layer 2 termination and not using their IP/MPLS capabilities.
Anyway, it's been a while since I had any interest in this, so it's possible life has changed since I was at the beach :-).
Mark.
On 15/Feb/19 15:06, Colton Conor wrote:
Well the CES is EOLed.
Like I said, been a while. But with a quick scan over the years, nothing is blowing my skirt up.
ACX5048 can be had for around $10k, so not cheap for residential customers but fine for upstream aggregation.
You need wine you vendors :-). Mark.
On 15/Feb/19 15:06, Colton Conor wrote:
Well the CES is EOLed.
Like I said, been a while. But with a quick scan over the years, nothing is blowing my skirt up.
ACX5048 can be had for around $10k, so not cheap for residential customers but fine for upstream aggregation.
You need to wine you vendors :-). Mark.
Not all gen of CER takes full routes. I got a pair of 1gen here with 512k FIB. ----- Alain Hebert ahebert@pubnix.net PubNIX Inc. 50 boul. St-Charles P.O. Box 26770 Beaconsfield, Quebec H9W 6G7 Tel: 514-990-5911 http://www.pubnix.net Fax: 514-990-9443 On 2/14/19 4:25 PM, Brandon Martin wrote:
On 2/14/19 12:08 AM, Mark Tinka wrote:
As a pure FTTH Active-E AN, I still think the Brocade (Extreme) CER/CES is a good box.
The CES is...wonky. My Foundry/Brocade/Extreme SEs have steered me away from them on more than one occasion.
The CER is fine but of course more expensive. It'll take a full Internet table, though, which is handy.
For AE resi deployments, I'd aggregate folks onto cheap 48 port switches then terminate onto a single pizza box router somewhere "less deep" in the network. Distributed, in-field L3 termination doesn't mean you have to terminate L3 right at the customer-facing port.
It frightens me when I realize how long it's been since I was active in NANOG (2006?, but a lot before then). Happily, I'm surfacing from a lot of health and personal issues, and starting to do some consulting. *waves to lots of old friends, thinking of the time, in frustration, that I called VZ the employer of last resort for color-blind cable splicers. No long term insult intended.* I'm newly on the cable TV advisory commission for the Village of Chatham on Cape Cod, and trying to find other counterparts and specific experience. I am proposing that my committee take on a broader scope, to include municipal communications architecture not just with cable, but with town owned facilities/leased duct/carrier hotel, systematic cellular repeater towar placement and leasing, and WLANs among town buildings and possibly for residents. I'm also interacting with the emergency operations manager for various VHF, GETS/WPS telephony, and perhaps satellite. We're a fishing community with lots of marine band radio and satellite; the backup for the town and county emergency communications is 2-meter ham. Anyone else doing something like this? As a fishing and resort area, we'll be looking at providing WLAN connectivity in the harbor and nearby waters. We have an incumbent cable provider, which will not change this year. The committee advises the town on the contract and modifications. One area is that the town share of cable revenues is going down with more movie-over-IP and the like getting users to drop cable subscriptions. Cellular repeater rents might be one balancer. -- Howard C. Berkowitz 95 George Ryder Rd. Chatham, MA 02633 sy@netcases.net (509)241-1362 cell (866)262-6579 fax
On Wed, 13 Feb 2019, Colton Conor wrote:
Just wondering, but what IP-capable MPLS switches are people using to deploy AE to residential internet connections? Most 48 port AE switches from repetuable vendors are crazy expensive, and I can't see how the ROI would ever work compared to GPON.
Why do you need MPLS? Most people just use regular L2 switches with some SAVI functionality (DHCP inspection, RA guard tec). When I did this, we happened to have an L3 switch there so I made each customer IPv6 (protocol based vlan) broadcast domain unique for each customer, and the L3 switch had built in DHCPv6-PD server. So just route a /51 to it, and it was a self contained IPv6 upstream router. For IPv4 we had a shared vlan and I didn't change that design at all. For the FTTH deployment I am currently connected to, other end of my fiber is a big L2 chassi switch (~600 ports) with 10GE uplink to somewhere, and it does SAVI and then there is some BNG somewhere at the other end of this 10GE uplink. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On Thu, 07 Feb 2019 18:46:40 -0500, David Ratkay said:
I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer.
Actually,trivial to answer: "It depends". Often due to "hysterical raisins".
even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
How well is servicing both out of one POP working for you? If what you have in City A is working for you, your business plan, and your customers, don't change it :) Some companies may want 2 POPs because one area of the city is highly commercial/industrial and all the home eyeball networks are on the other side of town. Or they're DSL providers in a not densely packed town, and needed two POPs to get all the customers inside the cable foot limit for sane DSL. Or they had their residential POP already up and running, and then acquired a business ISP that already had a POP. Or they designed it based on what dark fiber or coller was already in conduits or up on poles. I'm sure that at least one DSL provider ended up with two POPs due to the headaches of trying to get one POP past the incumbent, and there's probably somebody who ended up with one POP because it was impossible to set up 2 with the incumbent...
We run direct fiber connections to each house and business and terminate them on the same switches. Our switches are housed in small "huts" that are dispersed throughout the city and each handle a specific area then the huts are all connected in a ring. It really comes down to what your geography looks like. Aaron On 2/7/2019 5:46 PM, David Ratkay wrote:
I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer. But I am wondering what ISP's do for their residential and business customers for designing POP's that they usually access to get theur traffic into a given ISP and beyond. Is it usually a L1/L2 connection from the CE to the last mile POP? Or L2 even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
Good for you. None of this PON splitter nonsense. Miles Fidelman On 2/8/19 2:17 PM, Aaron wrote:
We run direct fiber connections to each house and business and terminate them on the same switches. Our switches are housed in small "huts" that are dispersed throughout the city and each handle a specific area then the huts are all connected in a ring. It really comes down to what your geography looks like.
Aaron
On 2/7/2019 5:46 PM, David Ratkay wrote:
I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer. But I am wondering what ISP's do for their residential and business customers for designing POP's that they usually access to get theur traffic into a given ISP and beyond. Is it usually a L1/L2 connection from the CE to the last mile POP? Or L2 even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
I've always felt PON is a tool for people who don't know how to design a proper network. Aaron On 2/8/2019 1:38 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Good for you. None of this PON splitter nonsense.
Miles Fidelman
On 2/8/19 2:17 PM, Aaron wrote:
We run direct fiber connections to each house and business and terminate them on the same switches. Our switches are housed in small "huts" that are dispersed throughout the city and each handle a specific area then the huts are all connected in a ring. It really comes down to what your geography looks like.
Aaron
On 2/7/2019 5:46 PM, David Ratkay wrote:
I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer. But I am wondering what ISP's do for their residential and business customers for designing POP's that they usually access to get theur traffic into a given ISP and beyond. Is it usually a L1/L2 connection from the CE to the last mile POP? Or L2 even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
On 02/08/2019 12:48 PM, Aaron wrote:
I've always felt PON is a tool for people who don't know how to design a proper network.
Why is that? I always thought PON was a technology that reduced the number of active ports, thus altering the port cost per subscriber significantly by not actually needing dedicated ports. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
It also significantly reduces the requirement to distribute active equipment into the field while massively reducing the feeder fibre requirement. Point to point has its place to be sure, but mass market FTTH is not viable without PON's economics. On 02/08/2019 12:48 PM, Aaron wrote:
I've always felt PON is a tool for people who don't know how to design a proper network.
Why is that? I always thought PON was a technology that reduced the number of active ports, thus altering the port cost per subscriber significantly by not actually needing dedicated ports. -- Grant. . . . unix || die --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus
My statement was meant to be tongue in cheek. We deliver 1G to the home free of charge and make our money on the 10,40 and 100G connections. We haven't been able to deliver those capacities over PON so we've never really taken it seriously. As with everything else, you're use case and economics may vary. Aaron On 2/8/2019 2:31 PM, Tony Wicks wrote:
It also significantly reduces the requirement to distribute active equipment into the field while massively reducing the feeder fibre requirement. Point to point has its place to be sure, but mass market FTTH is not viable without PON's economics.
On 02/08/2019 12:48 PM, Aaron wrote:
I've always felt PON is a tool for people who don't know how to design a proper network. Why is that?
I always thought PON was a technology that reduced the number of active ports, thus altering the port cost per subscriber significantly by not actually needing dedicated ports.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
We do 1 gig over pon (gpon)...Calix E7 (olt) Yes, it's my understanding, and I agree with previous post response, that PON is for using 1 fiber strand to a home (bidir , different wavelengths for xmt and rcv) and then I believe it even gets prism'd (however the heck they do it) into a 1/32 split or something like that so that you don't have to run direct fibers from every home back to the CO.... ...AND, in a rural area, geez, those are loooonnnnggg fiber runs.... so a pon cabinet in the field helps greatly Yes, 2.4g down and 1.2 g up is a concern when you've sold (oversubscribed) more bw than that We are concerned and looking for ways to overcome this and keep up with subscriber bw demands all the time ... fun and job secure -Aaron ....another Aaron :) -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Aaron Sent: Friday, February 8, 2019 3:02 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Last Mile Design My statement was meant to be tongue in cheek. We deliver 1G to the home free of charge and make our money on the 10,40 and 100G connections. We haven't been able to deliver those capacities over PON so we've never really taken it seriously. As with everything else, you're use case and economics may vary. Aaron On 2/8/2019 2:31 PM, Tony Wicks wrote:
It also significantly reduces the requirement to distribute active equipment into the field while massively reducing the feeder fibre requirement. Point to point has its place to be sure, but mass market FTTH is not viable without PON's economics.
On 02/08/2019 12:48 PM, Aaron wrote:
I've always felt PON is a tool for people who don't know how to design a proper network. Why is that?
I always thought PON was a technology that reduced the number of active ports, thus altering the port cost per subscriber significantly by not actually needing dedicated ports.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 http://www.wholesaleinternet.com ================================================================
For a lot of us, PONs are a way of life and may not even have any 100G capable devices in our network, muchless enough to make our money on. While you may be so "lucky" to "never really take it seriously", it is supporting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homes in the US. PON is the lifeblood if many rural communities. I'm luckily to have a healthy mix of PON and AE operations since I'm located next to cities. But I've met cooperatives in the middle of no where with super low density where it's 6 people + 2 donkeys on staff. AE would never work there, but PONs allow them cheap and available broadband options. Unless someone wants to give enough funding to run AE to people's homes, PONs will continue to allow many communities to have more than cellular internet access options, if that. This email has been sent from my phone. Please excuse any brevity, typos, or lack of formality. ________________________________ From: Aaron <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> Sent: Friday, February 8, 2019 16:03 To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Last Mile Design My statement was meant to be tongue in cheek. We deliver 1G to the home free of charge and make our money on the 10,40 and 100G connections. We haven't been able to deliver those capacities over PON so we've never really taken it seriously. As with everything else, you're use case and economics may vary. Aaron On 2/8/2019 2:31 PM, Tony Wicks wrote:
It also significantly reduces the requirement to distribute active equipment into the field while massively reducing the feeder fibre requirement. Point to point has its place to be sure, but mass market FTTH is not viable without PON's economics.
On 02/08/2019 12:48 PM, Aaron wrote:
I've always felt PON is a tool for people who don't know how to design a proper network. Why is that?
I always thought PON was a technology that reduced the number of active ports, thus altering the port cost per subscriber significantly by not actually needing dedicated ports.
-- ================================================================ Aaron Wendel Chief Technical Officer Wholesale Internet, Inc. (AS 32097) (816)550-9030 https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wholesal... ================================================================
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, Chris Gross wrote:
For a lot of us, PONs are a way of life and may not even have any 100G capable devices in our network, muchless enough to make our money on. While you may be so "lucky" to "never really take it seriously", it is supporting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homes in the US.
PON is the lifeblood if many rural communities. I'm luckily to have a healthy mix of PON and AE operations since I'm located next to cities. But I've met cooperatives in the middle of no where with super low density where it's 6 people + 2 donkeys on staff. AE would never work there, but PONs allow them cheap and available broadband options.
Unless someone wants to give enough funding to run AE to people's homes, PONs will continue to allow many communities to have more than cellular internet access options, if that.
PON and AE both have their strengths and weakness and make sense for different deployment scenarios. My biggest problem with PON is that it seems some operators build their fiber plant for PON for all deployment cases and then it's extremely hard to back out of it and switch to AE. If you have AE you can switch to PON fairly easily, but not the other way around if you've put splitters in the manholes. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
PON in my view is well suited for residential distribution and use profiles. 10G/XG-PON at 10gig/2.5gig is a pretty serious residential connection and even 2.5/1 is pretty great for residential 1/1 symmetric service. That said, I would in urban environments not recommend designing for GPON physical cable plan - go AE on your cabling. Play with PON if you want more headaches here with little redeeming features IMO. Instead, design rings/meshes, and think redundant/diverse path and entry/distro. There’s a reason telco standards work. These days there’s little reason to separate residential vs commercial traffic, it’s all packets at our scale. Our core is agnostic and switches anything we throw it at hardware speed, and it’s HA (min 2 core routers in every POP - even some customer buildings have diverse/redundant fiber entry from us now, back to multiple $alldayallnightjob POPs no less, in some cases to meet regulatory minimum standards compliance. All of our DCs are built this way. Fact is, if you want a network to be fast as hell, and never ever go down, think redundant everything with diversity. That said, for rural distribution, especially cheap aerial residential services in far flung locations - there’s literally nothing finer and faster and more cost effective than GPON - which is HUGELY important for reaching the final 15 MILLION Americans that do not have broadband internet connections at all. For those people, GPON can be nothing short of utterly life transforming. -Ben Cannon CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC ben@6by7.net <mailto:ben@6by7.net>
On Feb 8, 2019, at 10:22 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> wrote:
On Fri, 8 Feb 2019, Chris Gross wrote:
For a lot of us, PONs are a way of life and may not even have any 100G capable devices in our network, muchless enough to make our money on. While you may be so "lucky" to "never really take it seriously", it is supporting hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of homes in the US.
PON is the lifeblood if many rural communities. I'm luckily to have a healthy mix of PON and AE operations since I'm located next to cities. But I've met cooperatives in the middle of no where with super low density where it's 6 people + 2 donkeys on staff. AE would never work there, but PONs allow them cheap and available broadband options.
Unless someone wants to give enough funding to run AE to people's homes, PONs will continue to allow many communities to have more than cellular internet access options, if that.
PON and AE both have their strengths and weakness and make sense for different deployment scenarios. My biggest problem with PON is that it seems some operators build their fiber plant for PON for all deployment cases and then it's extremely hard to back out of it and switch to AE. If you have AE you can switch to PON fairly easily, but not the other way around if you've put splitters in the manholes.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
PON in urban areas absolutely makes sense. Maybe less in a high rise area, where each building can have a small building wide network of its own. But it in areas with single family homes PON is king. Our POPs can have up to 10 000 customers each. All on a single 96 fiber strand cable leading into the POP building. We have extra ducts, but nothing that would allow us to change that to a point to point network. That would require 100x that 96 fiber cable. With extra ducts it would be possible to rebuild from PON to point to point. But it would require massive investments. Basically you would have to invest all that we saved by building PON. For starters, you would have to have many more POPs. And yes, there are splitters in the hand holes. This is not what stops you from rebuilding from PON. It is the fact that we never paid for extra fiber. The backbone in a sub area is typically build with a 24 fiber strand cable. Because fibers are not free and are actually quite expensive as the number of fibers grow and the distances get longer. We can do a few point to point connections, for example if we need to deliver a commercial service or for our own needs (to connect POPs etc). We are not big on commercial services. But if we were, I would use WDM splitters for that. Or the long awaited 10G PON if that ever arrives and turns out at a price point that works. Regards, Baldur
I should probably have mentioned that in this sense I view “urban” as exclusive to “single family homes” - meaning I’m talking about high density modern urban with under grounding requirements - and high rise residential towers. We are the opposite, we are presently enterprise, midsize, and exotic-small business only, and have no residential arm or support structure (or SLA expectations, or standards or lack thereof) of a residential connection. -Ben. -Ben Cannon CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC ben@6by7.net <mailto:ben@6by7.net>
On Feb 9, 2019, at 2:54 AM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
PON in urban areas absolutely makes sense. Maybe less in a high rise area, where each building can have a small building wide network of its own. But it in areas with single family homes PON is king.
Our POPs can have up to 10 000 customers each. All on a single 96 fiber strand cable leading into the POP building. We have extra ducts, but nothing that would allow us to change that to a point to point network. That would require 100x that 96 fiber cable.
With extra ducts it would be possible to rebuild from PON to point to point. But it would require massive investments. Basically you would have to invest all that we saved by building PON. For starters, you would have to have many more POPs.
And yes, there are splitters in the hand holes. This is not what stops you from rebuilding from PON. It is the fact that we never paid for extra fiber. The backbone in a sub area is typically build with a 24 fiber strand cable. Because fibers are not free and are actually quite expensive as the number of fibers grow and the distances get longer. We can do a few point to point connections, for example if we need to deliver a commercial service or for our own needs (to connect POPs etc).
We are not big on commercial services. But if we were, I would use WDM splitters for that. Or the long awaited 10G PON if that ever arrives and turns out at a price point that works.
Regards,
Baldur
My preference, for the home, would be Active-E. But I do understand the economics that may support PON, and my position on that has softened over the years. My service provider delivers their FTTH service to me via PON, and for the most part, it's been all good. That said, I was particularly impressed with what CDE Lightband did in Clarksville, Tennessee, where they deployed their FTTH network with Active-E using Brocade to over 60,000 subscribers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV1nYGl_Bjc If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E: In South Africa, we have an access network operator that uses Active-E primarily to deliver their service, making it perhaps the only FTTH provider not using PON to do this. I find this quite fascinating. Mark. On 9/Feb/19 12:59, Ben Cannon wrote:
I should probably have mentioned that in this sense I view “urban” as exclusive to “single family homes” - meaning I’m talking about high density modern urban with under grounding requirements - and high rise residential towers.
We are the opposite, we are presently enterprise, midsize, and exotic-small business only, and have no residential arm or support structure (or SLA expectations, or standards or lack thereof) of a residential connection.
-Ben.
-Ben Cannon CEO 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC ben@6by7.net <mailto:ben@6by7.net>
On Feb 9, 2019, at 2:54 AM, Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com <mailto:baldur.norddahl@gmail.com>> wrote:
PON in urban areas absolutely makes sense. Maybe less in a high rise area, where each building can have a small building wide network of its own. But it in areas with single family homes PON is king.
Our POPs can have up to 10 000 customers each. All on a single 96 fiber strand cable leading into the POP building. We have extra ducts, but nothing that would allow us to change that to a point to point network. That would require 100x that 96 fiber cable.
With extra ducts it would be possible to rebuild from PON to point to point. But it would require massive investments. Basically you would have to invest all that we saved by building PON. For starters, you would have to have many more POPs.
And yes, there are splitters in the hand holes. This is not what stops you from rebuilding from PON. It is the fact that we never paid for extra fiber. The backbone in a sub area is typically build with a 24 fiber strand cable. Because fibers are not free and are actually quite expensive as the number of fibers grow and the distances get longer. We can do a few point to point connections, for example if we need to deliver a commercial service or for our own needs (to connect POPs etc).
We are not big on commercial services. But if we were, I would use WDM splitters for that. Or the long awaited 10G PON if that ever arrives and turns out at a price point that works.
Regards,
Baldur
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
Speaking of which, the Grant County Public Utility District (Washington State), has wired active ethernet all over their rural county. Seems to me that the cost difference between splitters & switches is a pretty minor component of deploying FTTH - the costs are in the trenching, and the fiber. What you put on the poles, or in the lawn furniture, is a pretty minor cost component. Though... getting power to the switches might be an issue, less so if you're deploying on power poles. Miles Fidelman On 2/9/19 12:59 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Electrical consumption of the equipment is different and then the environmental conditioning that larger electronic load. Let's not forget that actual consumer bit consumption changes very little whether they have 20 megs or 2 gigs provisioned and available. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Saturday, February 9, 2019 12:20:36 PM Subject: Re: Last Mile Design Speaking of which, the Grant County Public Utility District (Washington State), has wired active ethernet all over their rural county. Seems to me that the cost difference between splitters & switches is a pretty minor component of deploying FTTH - the costs are in the trenching, and the fiber. What you put on the poles, or in the lawn furniture, is a pretty minor cost component. Though... getting power to the switches might be an issue, less so if you're deploying on power poles. Miles Fidelman On 2/9/19 12:59 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
I expect things are going to change as IoT takes off - security cameras, baby monitors, start to push video upstream - that makes a difference. And then there are the efforts of cell carriers to push traffic onto home wifi - more and more facetime video will also add load. Miles On 2/9/19 3:14 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Electrical consumption of the equipment is different and then the environmental conditioning that larger electronic load.
Let's not forget that actual consumer bit consumption changes very little whether they have 20 megs or 2 gigs provisioned and available.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp><https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *From: *"Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> *To: *nanog@nanog.org *Sent: *Saturday, February 9, 2019 12:20:36 PM *Subject: *Re: Last Mile Design
Speaking of which, the Grant County Public Utility District (Washington State), has wired active ethernet all over their rural county.
Seems to me that the cost difference between splitters & switches is a pretty minor component of deploying FTTH - the costs are in the trenching, and the fiber. What you put on the poles, or in the lawn furniture, is a pretty minor cost component. Though... getting power to the switches might be an issue, less so if you're deploying on power poles.
Miles Fidelman
On 2/9/19 12:59 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
The biggest use of bandwidth as the IoT buzzword comes to fruition is exploits. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> To: "Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> Cc: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Saturday, February 9, 2019 2:26:13 PM Subject: Re: Last Mile Design I expect things are going to change as IoT takes off - security cameras, baby monitors, start to push video upstream - that makes a difference. And then there are the efforts of cell carriers to push traffic onto home wifi - more and more facetime video will also add load. Miles On 2/9/19 3:14 PM, Mike Hammett wrote: Electrical consumption of the equipment is different and then the environmental conditioning that larger electronic load. Let's not forget that actual consumer bit consumption changes very little whether they have 20 megs or 2 gigs provisioned and available. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions Midwest Internet Exchange The Brothers WISP ----- Original Message ----- From: "Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> To: nanog@nanog.org Sent: Saturday, February 9, 2019 12:20:36 PM Subject: Re: Last Mile Design Speaking of which, the Grant County Public Utility District (Washington State), has wired active ethernet all over their rural county. Seems to me that the cost difference between splitters & switches is a pretty minor component of deploying FTTH - the costs are in the trenching, and the fiber. What you put on the poles, or in the lawn furniture, is a pretty minor cost component. Though... getting power to the switches might be an issue, less so if you're deploying on power poles. Miles Fidelman On 2/9/19 12:59 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
There is that. On 2/9/19 3:27 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
The biggest use of bandwidth as the IoT buzzword comes to fruition is exploits.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp><https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *From: *"Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> *To: *"Mike Hammett" <nanog@ics-il.net> *Cc: *nanog@nanog.org *Sent: *Saturday, February 9, 2019 2:26:13 PM *Subject: *Re: Last Mile Design
I expect things are going to change as IoT takes off - security cameras, baby monitors, start to push video upstream - that makes a difference.
And then there are the efforts of cell carriers to push traffic onto home wifi - more and more facetime video will also add load.
Miles
On 2/9/19 3:14 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
Electrical consumption of the equipment is different and then the environmental conditioning that larger electronic load.
Let's not forget that actual consumer bit consumption changes very little whether they have 20 megs or 2 gigs provisioned and available.
----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL><https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb><https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions><https://twitter.com/ICSIL> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix><https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange><https://twitter.com/mdwestix> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp><https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg> ------------------------------------------------------------------------ *From: *"Miles Fidelman" <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net> *To: *nanog@nanog.org *Sent: *Saturday, February 9, 2019 12:20:36 PM *Subject: *Re: Last Mile Design
Speaking of which, the Grant County Public Utility District (Washington State), has wired active ethernet all over their rural county.
Seems to me that the cost difference between splitters & switches is a pretty minor component of deploying FTTH - the costs are in the trenching, and the fiber. What you put on the poles, or in the lawn furniture, is a pretty minor cost component. Though... getting power to the switches might be an issue, less so if you're deploying on power poles.
Miles Fidelman
On 2/9/19 12:59 PM, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: > On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote: > >> If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget >> (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E: > > For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to > the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard > of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them. > -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
On 2/9/19 1:20 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
Though... getting power to the switches might be an issue, less so if you're deploying on power poles.
Just because you're on the power poles doesn't mean you can easily get permission or space to mount powered equipment on them let alone power at reasonable costs. In areas with a commercial for-profit monopoly electric utility, just getting attachment space in the telecom zone at a reasonable price can be a big issue, and often putting stuff outside the telecom cable attachment zone is impossible. -- Brandon Martin
It is not impossible just more expensive. Incidentally here in Denmark we have TDC now converting active ethernet to GPON. lør. 9. feb. 2019 19.01 skrev Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>:
On Sat, 9 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
If I had to build a consumer broadband network and had the budget (and owned the fibre) to do so, I'd definitely always choose Active-E:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 2019-02-09 18:59 CET, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
However, large parts (probably even most) of our FTTH deployments have been built, and are owned, by our municipalities, not private companies. And have had government subsidies. (Sometimes outsourced to normal commercial companies, but those companies then have the municipality as their customer, not us end-users.) Even without the subsidies, I expect that changes what kind of long- term view is taken on the investment. A purely commercial company might want a return on their investments in just a few years, and if the fiber plant needs to be replaced in its entirety ten years from now, that will be the problem of a different CEO. :-) A municipality (or a company wholly owned by the municipality) is used to build roads and water pipes with expected lifetimes of 50 years, and might build their fiber plants expecting them to live 20 years or longer. /Bellman
On 2/9/19 4:04 PM, Thomas Bellman wrote:
On 2019-02-09 18:59 CET, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them. However, large parts (probably even most) of our FTTH deployments have been built, and are owned, by our municipalities, not private companies. And have had government subsidies. (Sometimes outsourced to normal commercial companies, but those companies then have the municipality as their customer, not us end-users.)
Even without the subsidies, I expect that changes what kind of long- term view is taken on the investment. A purely commercial company might want a return on their investments in just a few years, and if the fiber plant needs to be replaced in its entirety ten years from now, that will be the problem of a different CEO. :-) A municipality (or a company wholly owned by the municipality) is used to build roads and water pipes with expected lifetimes of 50 years, and might build their fiber plants expecting them to live 20 years or longer.
Yes indeed, longer time horizon, but generally not so much subsidized as: - having a big initial customer (municipal electric utility, water utility, the city or county) - a lot of municipal builds are essentially done for internal purposes, with service to the public as a bonus - still, usually funded by bonds - long-term money, low rates - and maybe some money from the NTIA (also available to rural coops) - a view of networks as infrastructure, with cost-recovery pricing, rather than as a revenue stream to milk (same as internal networks at a university or corporation) By and large, there's a pretty good argument that we SHOULD be viewing broadband networks as infrastructure, with ownership & management to match. (Fair disclosure, I used to promote that view as director of a non-profit policy shop, and as a consultant to municipal governments. I've also helped design & build big networks, for big customers - in my days at BBN - so it's an informed opinion :-). Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
The FTTH rollout in Sweden has resulted in monopoly and the prices are high. Anything will work if you do not need to compete and you are getting financed by someone with money to spend. lør. 9. feb. 2019 22.05 skrev Thomas Bellman <bellman@nsc.liu.se>:
On 2019-02-09 18:59 CET, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
However, large parts (probably even most) of our FTTH deployments have been built, and are owned, by our municipalities, not private companies. And have had government subsidies. (Sometimes outsourced to normal commercial companies, but those companies then have the municipality as their customer, not us end-users.)
Even without the subsidies, I expect that changes what kind of long- term view is taken on the investment. A purely commercial company might want a return on their investments in just a few years, and if the fiber plant needs to be replaced in its entirety ten years from now, that will be the problem of a different CEO. :-) A municipality (or a company wholly owned by the municipality) is used to build roads and water pipes with expected lifetimes of 50 years, and might build their fiber plants expecting them to live 20 years or longer.
/Bellman
Certainly the devil is in the details, in New Zealand the access layer (GPON plus local transport) is largely regulated. Then Retail service providers buy the access component wholesale and add layer3, national backhaul etc. Retail for unlimited 1G/500M internet is about $75USD/month, for 100/50 you are looking at about 50USD/month. Key to this was the breakup of the incumbent into an access plus retail provider. This was done by allowing power (lines) companies in a few regions to win the access component contract. From: NANOG <nanog-bounces@nanog.org> On Behalf Of Baldur Norddahl Sent: Sunday, 10 February 2019 6:21 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Last Mile Design The FTTH rollout in Sweden has resulted in monopoly and the prices are high. Anything will work if you do not need to compete and you are getting financed by someone with money to spend. On 2019-02-09 18:59 CET, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote: --- This email has been checked for viruses by Avast antivirus software. https://www.avast.com/antivirus
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019, Tony Wicks wrote:
Certainly the devil is in the details, in New Zealand the access layer (GPON plus local transport) is largely regulated. Then Retail service providers buy the access component wholesale and add layer3, national backhaul etc. Retail for unlimited 1G/500M internet is about $75USD/month, for 100/50 you are looking at about 50USD/month. Key to this was the breakup of the incumbent into an access plus retail provider. This was done by allowing power (lines) companies in a few regions to win the access component contract.
The general going rate for a 250/100 in Sweden is around 35EUR for the kind of service where you can then choose any ISP. Typically the first-mile provider takes the bulk of this money. In the cases where the proprty is on STOKAB fiber footprint (or equivalent) and you have a reasonably large MDU the landlord can contract an ISP to deliver ETTH to all apartments (typically CAT6 from switch in basement) where the going rate per apartment is around 5-15EUR a month for something like 100/100, 1G/100M or 1G/1G. All of this with *PON nowhere to be seen. It's all AE over fiber or CAT5/6/7. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 10/Feb/19 15:27, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
The general going rate for a 250/100 in Sweden is around 35EUR for the kind of service where you can then choose any ISP. Typically the first-mile provider takes the bulk of this money.
In the cases where the proprty is on STOKAB fiber footprint (or equivalent) and you have a reasonably large MDU the landlord can contract an ISP to deliver ETTH to all apartments (typically CAT6 from switch in basement) where the going rate per apartment is around 5-15EUR a month for something like 100/100, 1G/100M or 1G/1G.
Which is what I know about having a mate that has a home in Stockholm. So when Baldur mentioned that it was expensive, I was curious to understand if we were talking about the same Sweden. Fair point, my mate is on a Stokab-driven network, but EUR35 for 250Mbps is nothing to laugh at. I'm paying double that for 100Mbps in Johannesburg, on GPON. Mark.
On Sun, 10 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
Fair point, my mate is on a Stokab-driven network, but EUR35 for 250Mbps is nothing to laugh at. I'm paying double that for 100Mbps in Johannesburg, on GPON.
I also have available 250/50 via DOCSIS for approx the same EUR35. Basically access technology (AE/GPON/DOCSIS) doesn't matter a huge part, it's all about market and competition. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 10/Feb/19 16:30, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
I also have available 250/50 via DOCSIS for approx the same EUR35.
Basically access technology (AE/GPON/DOCSIS) doesn't matter a huge part, it's all about market and competition.
In essence, agreed. For the most part, my 100Mbps does the job, despite it being "a bit too priced". It could have been worse, but as things go in Africa at the moment in this space, what I am paying for 100Mbps FTTH is actually very reasonable. The only reason for considering anything faster is when I upgrade my standard HD TV to 4K/UHD, and then I can upgrade my Netflix subscription to match :-). But for the current use-case (a small LAN, family Internet access, VoD streaming, a VoIP "land" line and my home office), I can't really complain. I wouldn't know what to do with a Gig, but at least my provider can get me there, should that day come. Mark.
Hello There are of course regions where monopoly has created even higher prices. But it should be fair to compare the Skåne region of Sweden directly with the greater Copenhagen area of Denmark, as those are separated by just a bridge. In Denmark the government choose to regulate access to the fiber infrastructure owned by the incumbent operator TDC. The cheapest access is to "raw fiber" meaning the "alternate operator" gets access to an uninterrupted stretch of fiber between a POP and the end user. We can then connect our own equipment in both ends. My company started out by doing exactly that. We were the first to implement GPON technology on the TDC owned fiber. TDC was at the time using active ethernet, but have since started migrating everything to GPON as well. Maybe they got inspired. The regulated prices are found here: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/endelig_prisafgoerels... Sorry, that document is in danish. Maybe the swedish guys can understand some of it. There are multiple prices, but the price we pay for most of our users is (1584-577)/12 = DKK 83.92 / month (USD 12.76 / EUR 11.24). As you get access to the fiber itself, nobody will care what speeds or even what technology you use on that fiber. It is also possible to rent access to so called "bit stream access". In this case TDC will provide a VPN connection to the end user and the operator will just have to provide the IP service. To compare with that 250 Mbit/s swedish offering, we can lookup the price for 250 Mbit/s BSA service in the DONG area (this means mostly anything near Copenhagen): (2170-625.7)/12 = DKK 128.69 / month (USD 19.56 / EUR 17.24). How much do you really need to add on top of that, if all you need to do is buy that $0.12/Mbps transit from HE.net and let TDC take care of everything else? In any case, we are now building out our own fiber to cover the gaps left by TDC. Here the end user has to pay DKK 12,000 (USD 1,824 / EUR 1,608) one time fee and with that he gets everything including 5 years of free internet. This works out at DKK 200 / month including 25% VAT tax (USD 30 / EUR 27). I guarantee that it is not possible to build at this price without using PON technology. The network is fully funded by the users themselves and we have a paid off network after just 5 years. Regards, Baldur
On 10/Feb/19 17:46, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
As you get access to the fiber itself, nobody will care what speeds or even what technology you use on that fiber.
This has always been the end-goal: * How many IPTV channels do I get; not how much bandwidth do they require? * How many annual free Voice minutes do they get; not how many concurrent calls can I fit into 128Kbps? * Is Netflix 4K streaming included; not how much bandwidth do I have for streaming? * e.t.c.
In any case, we are now building out our own fiber to cover the gaps left by TDC. Here the end user has to pay DKK 12,000 (USD 1,824 / EUR 1,608) one time fee and with that he gets everything including 5 years of free internet. This works out at DKK 200 / month including 25% VAT tax (USD 30 / EUR 27).
Very interesting - don't you feel that an initial outlay like that could put some potential customers off? Then again, per capita income in Denmark, I'd imagine, could allow most to think about this. If all that buys me Internet access for 5 years before I have to shell out anymore wedge, I'd do it. Mark.
On 2019-02-11 04:57 CET, Mark Tinka wrote:
On 10/Feb/19 17:46, Baldur Norddahl wrote: [...]
In any case, we are now building out our own fiber to cover the gaps left by TDC. Here the end user has to pay DKK 12,000 (USD 1,824 / EUR 1,608) one time fee and with that he gets everything including 5 years of free internet. This works out at DKK 200 / month including 25% VAT tax (USD 30 / EUR 27).
Very interesting - don't you feel that an initial outlay like that could put some potential customers off? Then again, per capita income in Denmark, I'd imagine, could allow most to think about this. If all that buys me Internet access for 5 years before I have to shell out anymore wedge, I'd do it.
I assume this is targeted towards single-family detached houses, where the family owns the house themselves. Then they likely will view that as an investment in the house. If you want to sell your house a couple of years later, and it doesn't have a fiber connection, buyers will be less attracted to the house, and want to pay less. It might also be more expensive to connect after the initial buildout of an area. I believe that's how the commercial companies in Sweden that build FTTH work. I can also note that where I live (Linköping, Sweden), the municipal fiber company charges ~2400 EUR to connect a single-family home to their network. That does *not* include the laying of fiber on your property, from the street to your house. And on top of that, you need to buy Internet connectivity from a normal commercial ISP at a monthly cost; the municipal fiber company only provides layer 2 connectivity between the home and the ISPs (currently 19 different ISPs). /Bellman
On 11/Feb/19 11:31, Thomas Bellman wrote:
I assume this is targeted towards single-family detached houses, where the family owns the house themselves. Then they likely will view that as an investment in the house. If you want to sell your house a couple of years later, and it doesn't have a fiber connection, buyers will be less attracted to the house, and want to pay less.
Makes sense.
It might also be more expensive to connect after the initial buildout of an area. I believe that's how the commercial companies in Sweden that build FTTH work.
Cities also aren't keen on opening up streets again, e.t.c.
I can also note that where I live (Linköping, Sweden), the municipal fiber company charges ~2400 EUR to connect a single-family home to their network. That does *not* include the laying of fiber on your property, from the street to your house. And on top of that, you need to buy Internet connectivity from a normal commercial ISP at a monthly cost; the municipal fiber company only provides layer 2 connectivity between the home and the ISPs (currently 19 different ISPs).
Having an option, even though it could be pricey, is better than not having anything at all. Mark.
On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
In any case, we are now building out our own fiber to cover the gaps left by TDC. Here the end user has to pay DKK 12,000 (USD 1,824 / EUR 1,608) one time fee and with that he gets everything including 5 years of free internet. This works out at DKK 200 / month including 25% VAT tax (USD 30 / EUR 27).
Very interesting - don't you feel that an initial outlay like that could put some potential customers off? Then again, per capita income in Denmark, I'd imagine, could allow most to think about this. If all that buys me Internet access for 5 years before I have to shell out anymore wedge, I'd do it.
In Sweden it's very common that people who live in detached house areas have to pay 1500-3000EUR to get attached to the fiber network as it's being built out. There are even bank loans you can get to pay for this, and pay it off over time. It's considered to be a good deal because it improves the value of the house as well as a huge improvement over having satellite-dish/terrestrial TV and ADSL/LTE for Internet access, now instead you can pay 30-40EUR a month to get a everything over the fiber. Now, I like the LLUB model where ISPs get access to the dark fiber all the way to the customer, and we do have that here as well, just not as commonly as I'd like. That's where https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/ comes from where they offer 10GE for 50EUR a month. This is done on Telia LLUB:ed dark fiber which costs around 15EUR a month (regulated price). It's a great PR case for "dark fiber access rocks and bitstream sucks". You get IPv6 in there as well, which isn't commonly available on most of the bitstream access services (because not only do we not do PON, we don't do PPPoE either here in Sweden). So it's a mixed bag and pricing and functionality could definitely be better, but the FTTH rollout has gone quite well here and it's as usual 10-15 different factors contributing but the willingness of the population who lives in houses to fork out 1500-3000EUR for fiber install has made this a lot less cash flow misery for the ISPs that roll this out. I just wish there would have been a requirement for everybody to actually rent this dark fiber out (which there isn't unless you're one of the biggest players) because after paying those 1500-3000EUR and you ask the fiber installation company "who owns this fiber?" they say "we do" and if you ask "ok, I'd like it connected to someone else" they will say "huh? what do you mean". There is an unfortunate common conflation between the fiber optic cable and the services offered on it. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 11/Feb/19 12:49, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
In Sweden it's very common that people who live in detached house areas have to pay 1500-3000EUR to get attached to the fiber network as it's being built out. There are even bank loans you can get to pay for this, and pay it off over time. It's considered to be a good deal because it improves the value of the house as well as a huge improvement over having satellite-dish/terrestrial TV and ADSL/LTE for Internet access, now instead you can pay 30-40EUR a month to get a everything over the fiber.
Yes, makes sense, especially if you can get support to fund it.
Now, I like the LLUB model where ISPs get access to the dark fiber all the way to the customer, and we do have that here as well, just not as commonly as I'd like. That's where https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/ comes from where they offer 10GE for 50EUR a month. This is done on Telia LLUB:ed dark fiber which costs around 15EUR a month (regulated price). It's a great PR case for "dark fiber access rocks and bitstream sucks". You get IPv6 in there as well, which isn't commonly available on most of the bitstream access services (because not only do we not do PON, we don't do PPPoE either here in Sweden).
Cut the price of wine and meat and I'll move to this PPPoE-free land :-).
So it's a mixed bag and pricing and functionality could definitely be better, but the FTTH rollout has gone quite well here and it's as usual 10-15 different factors contributing but the willingness of the population who lives in houses to fork out 1500-3000EUR for fiber install has made this a lot less cash flow misery for the ISPs that roll this out. I just wish there would have been a requirement for everybody to actually rent this dark fiber out (which there isn't unless you're one of the biggest players) because after paying those 1500-3000EUR and you ask the fiber installation company "who owns this fiber?" they say "we do" and if you ask "ok, I'd like it connected to someone else" they will say "huh? what do you mean". There is an unfortunate common conflation between the fiber optic cable and the services offered on it.
I get what you're saying, but sadly, someone has to take the risk to build out a network. Unless you are a large incumbent like Telia, chances are it will be company whose sole focus is just fibre network construction, and anything higher up in the layers is of no interest to them. Mark.
On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
someone else" they will say "huh? what do you mean". There is an unfortunate common conflation between the fiber optic cable and the services offered on it.
I get what you're saying, but sadly, someone has to take the risk to build out a network. Unless you are a large incumbent like Telia, chances are it will be company whose sole focus is just fibre network construction, and anything higher up in the layers is of no interest to them.
The problem here is that it might be an energy company or someone who isn't really into datacom. Now they're going to have to operate an active network to provide this "bitstream access" with DHCP relays, BCP38 support and all that comes with it. The result is that right now, most of these networks do not support IPv6 and they do not support > 1 gigabit/s speed (some don't even support more than 100-500 either). If they had just stayed at the L1 level and provided dark fiber for the amount of money mentioned before (for instance 10-15 EUR a month) then a lot of the problems wouldn't be there. They could have used the same organisation as before that now could do fiber as well, and that's that. Simple product, can't go wrong in a lot of weird ways. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 11/Feb/19 15:55, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
If they had just stayed at the L1 level and provided dark fiber for the amount of money mentioned before (for instance 10-15 EUR a month) then a lot of the problems wouldn't be there. They could have used the same organisation as before that now could do fiber as well, and that's that. Simple product, can't go wrong in a lot of weird ways.
We have the same problem here in Africa too (and I saw it in Asia-Pac while I was there as well)... non-telco-centric companies that deployed fibre to manage their non-telco infrastructure, now entering the telco space to make use of the excess capacity, or because they want to be part of the "next digital wave", with zero operational experience, and a single-mindedness about one thing - "We will never sell dark fibre to anyone". Ultimately, they wise up or get bought by an operator. It's just a question of how much patience you've got to spend. Mark.
On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
We have the same problem here in Africa too (and I saw it in Asia-Pac while I was there as well)... non-telco-centric companies that deployed
Speaking of an Asia-Pac example, Thailand, the government owned telco. https://www.tot.co.th/%E0%B8%9A%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A3... Typically there are 1-3 different FTTH providers if you live in something that resembles a town, pay 50-100EUR installation fee, they show up within days to pull your new fiber and now you can have 150/50 for around 20EUR a month. The price level has remained the same the past 5-6 years, but speed has gone up from 10/3 to 150/50 for the same monthly payment. Last year the 150/50 price level offering was 100/20 instead. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
On 11/Feb/19 16:21, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
Speaking of an Asia-Pac example, Thailand, the government owned telco.
https://www.tot.co.th/%E0%B8%9A%E0%B8%A3%E0%B8%B4%E0%B8%81%E0%B8%B2%E0%B8%A3...
Typically there are 1-3 different FTTH providers if you live in something that resembles a town, pay 50-100EUR installation fee, they show up within days to pull your new fiber and now you can have 150/50 for around 20EUR a month.
The price level has remained the same the past 5-6 years, but speed has gone up from 10/3 to 150/50 for the same monthly payment. Last year the 150/50 price level offering was 100/20 instead.
I can attest to this as I saw exactly the same thing in Malaysia, and more so after I've been away these past couple of years. The company I worked for at the time started rolling our GPON with the top speed at 50Mbps for several hundred RM/month back in 2010. 9 years later, they are selling 1Gbps @ RM99/month. I suppose we can choke it down to the cost of living in the North Western hemisphere being what it is, or some such reason :-). Mark.
For my fellow americans, LLUB stands for Local Loop UnBundling. What we might call a Unbundled Network Element. On Mon, Feb 11, 2019 at 5:49 AM Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se> wrote:
On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:
In any case, we are now building out our own fiber to cover the gaps left by TDC. Here the end user has to pay DKK 12,000 (USD 1,824 / EUR 1,608) one time fee and with that he gets everything including 5 years of free internet. This works out at DKK 200 / month including 25% VAT tax (USD 30 / EUR 27).
Very interesting - don't you feel that an initial outlay like that could put some potential customers off? Then again, per capita income in Denmark, I'd imagine, could allow most to think about this. If all that buys me Internet access for 5 years before I have to shell out anymore wedge, I'd do it.
In Sweden it's very common that people who live in detached house areas have to pay 1500-3000EUR to get attached to the fiber network as it's being built out. There are even bank loans you can get to pay for this, and pay it off over time. It's considered to be a good deal because it improves the value of the house as well as a huge improvement over having satellite-dish/terrestrial TV and ADSL/LTE for Internet access, now instead you can pay 30-40EUR a month to get a everything over the fiber.
Now, I like the LLUB model where ISPs get access to the dark fiber all the way to the customer, and we do have that here as well, just not as commonly as I'd like. That's where https://www.bahnhof.se/villafiber/ comes from where they offer 10GE for 50EUR a month. This is done on Telia LLUB:ed dark fiber which costs around 15EUR a month (regulated price). It's a great PR case for "dark fiber access rocks and bitstream sucks". You get IPv6 in there as well, which isn't commonly available on most of the bitstream access services (because not only do we not do PON, we don't do PPPoE either here in Sweden).
So it's a mixed bag and pricing and functionality could definitely be better, but the FTTH rollout has gone quite well here and it's as usual 10-15 different factors contributing but the willingness of the population who lives in houses to fork out 1500-3000EUR for fiber install has made this a lot less cash flow misery for the ISPs that roll this out. I just wish there would have been a requirement for everybody to actually rent this dark fiber out (which there isn't unless you're one of the biggest players) because after paying those 1500-3000EUR and you ask the fiber installation company "who owns this fiber?" they say "we do" and if you ask "ok, I'd like it connected to someone else" they will say "huh? what do you mean". There is an unfortunate common conflation between the fiber optic cable and the services offered on it.
-- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se
-- Fletcher Kittredge GWI 207-602-1134 www.gwi.net
On Sun Feb 10, 2019 at 06:41:29PM +1300, Tony Wicks wrote:
in New Zealand the access layer (GPON plus local transport) is largely regulated. Then Retail service providers buy the access component wholesale and add layer3, national backhaul etc. Retail for unlimited 1G/500M internet is about $75USD/month, for 100/50 you are looking at about 50USD/month
What is the wholesale price? Is the same for everyone? In the UK the line is reasonably priced (wholesale around US$15/month for FTTC, FTTP is rare and $25 to $80/month) but backhaul is a problem as the incumbent charges around $40/ Mb/s /month. You're not going to sell a service with that for a viable price when retail prices are around $20/month for the popular products (40 and 80Mb/s). It skews the market to a hand full of large providers who can afford to build their own backhaul On the FTTH I've been involved in (www.balquhidder.net) I used AE rather than GPON. Positive factors were: Simple, cheaper, CPE not needing replacing each time a new faster wifi standard appears (the service is 1Gb/s). Simpler build with dispersed properties. Preference to maintain a (cheaper) ethernet switch vs propriertary GPON Any business can be given dedicated 1G DIA and can independently upgrade to 10G. With a lot of farms/home working the business/domestic distinction is fluid. Negative: Higher fibre costs but not huge vs GPON kit. A fibre cut results in a lot more fibres to splice increasing time to repair (96c on our trunks, would be 12c with GPON). This is the only major AE issue. brandon
I find the input to this discussion from non-US operators very useful. Thank you. One flaw of America is our parochialism and isolation means we don't learn from experiences elsewhere. We are so used to leading the world in technology that we have very little exposure to advances outside of the US. This is particularly true in the ISP world were demonstrably other regions are ahead of the US. Personally, I would be very interested in learning more about what is going on in New Zealand and Scandinavia. Pointers to background reading would be deeply appreciated, or even good search terms. -- Fletcher Kittredge GWI 207-602-1134 www.gwi.net
On 9/Feb/19 19:59, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
Love what Stokab did/are doing. A prime example of how well things can be done if gubbermints and the private sector are efficient. Mark.
Hi Mark,
My preference, for the home, would be Active-E. But I do understand the economics that may support PON, and my position on that has softened over the years.
Same for me. I like the architecture where the PON splitters are in powered roadside cabinets (even though the splitter is passive). That way the ISP can convert it to AE at any time they want. The architectures where PON has been hardcoded into the design has always felt like a huge risk regarding future developments. Cheers, Sander
We have around 60,000 homes passed with GPON architecture. I'm not really sure how we would have built that with active roadside cabinets, and still have been able to maintain any sort cost control. If we did it with a home run individual fibre scheme hauled back to a central POP, the frame would have been massive and the power and cooling requirements would have made the entire project unfeasible. Maybe the economics are different in other markets. Because PON is so widely deployed, you can count on vendors coming up with capacity increases (NG, X, etc.) to support the installed base of infrastructure. Verizon alone will drive that market. From a purist point of view, AE is a nice idea, but it really isn't necessary for now or the foreseeable future. At 01:22 PM 09/02/2019, Sander Steffann wrote:
Hi Mark,
My preference, for the home, would be Active-E. But I do understand the economics that may support PON, and my position on that has softened over the years.
Same for me. I like the architecture where the PON splitters are in powered roadside cabinets (even though the splitter is passive). That way the ISP can convert it to AE at any time they want. The architectures where PON has been hardcoded into the design has always felt like a huge risk regarding future developments.
Cheers, Sander
-- Clayton Zekelman Managed Network Systems Inc. (MNSi) 3363 Tecumseh Rd. E Windsor, Ontario N8W 1H4 tel. 519-985-8410 fax. 519-985-8409
On 2/9/19 11:22 AM, Sander Steffann wrote:
Same for me. I like the architecture where the PON splitters are in powered roadside cabinets (even though the splitter is passive). That way the ISP can convert it to AE at any time they want. The architectures where PON has been hardcoded into the design has always felt like a huge risk regarding future developments.
I agree that PON with splitters where you can't put Active Ethernet equipment is largely equivalent to solution lock-in. But is that in and of itself a bad thing? Especially when viewed in within the lifecycle of the network? From an outsider n00b point of view, the things that I'm reading it seems that people don't like about PON are largely it's inflexibility to be able to be converted to Active Ethernet without careful forethought and planning at construction time of the fiber network to allow it to change in the future. In some ways, I've heard of the industry having this, or a very similar discussion for 25 years. Twisted pair (Cat 3 vs Cat 5 vs Cat 5e vs Cat 6) vs coax (RG 59 vs RG 6 vs F-11) vs fiber (OS1 vs OS2 vs OM1 vs OM2 vs OM3 vs OM4 vs OM5) vs RF (myriad of options). Included to topology designs equating to lock-in. However, none of this seems to be related to how functional any given design is. I guess perhaps that the subject "Last Mile Design" does encourage discussions about topology and technology. So let me ask this: Are there any functional reasons to favor AE over PON /within/ the lifecycle of a deployment? Does one methodology offer any significant advantages or disadvantages over the other? If so, is (are) the pro(s) / con(s) applicable to specific use case(s)? Remember that there are LOTs of ways to do things. I'm trying to glean what makes one method better or worse than another, possibly for different types of deployments. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
On 2/9/19 1:44 PM, Grant Taylor via NANOG wrote:
So let me ask this: Are there any functional reasons to favor AE over PON /within/ the lifecycle of a deployment? Does one methodology offer any significant advantages or disadvantages over the other? If so, is (are) the pro(s) / con(s) applicable to specific use case(s)?
With early PON designs, upstream bandwidth was horrible. Not particularly useful if you're doing things like remote backup, or video chatting, or running a server (business grade service). GPON does better on upstream bandwidth, but it's still asymmetric. If you're marketing to business customers, or home office professionals, of families with multiple users that consume upstream bandwidth, AE gives you a lot of room for upside growth (assuming you provision the right kinds of fiber). --- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
On 2/9/19 12:12 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
With early PON designs, upstream bandwidth was horrible. Not particularly useful if you're doing things like remote backup, or video chatting, or running a server (business grade service). GPON does better on upstream bandwidth, but it's still asymmetric.
Intriguing. I would have not considered my municipal GPON to be asymmetric. Well, not as such. Routinely, when I do speed tests I get better upstream speeds than I do downstream speeds. (More below.)
If you're marketing to business customers, or home office professionals, of families with multiple users that consume upstream bandwidth, AE gives you a lot of room for upside growth (assuming you provision the right kinds of fiber).
Are you referring to the dedicated bandwidth between the CPU and the AE equipment? Or the fact that bandwidth feeding the GPON and all subscribers is aggregate? I have attributed the asymmetry in my speed tests to be that most people on my GPON are predominantly downloading, thus consuming aggregate download bandwidth. Conversely, few are uploading more than requests, thus using relatively little of the aggregate upload bandwidth. Do I see asymmetry? Yes. Is it truly asymmetric? I don't think so. I think is just based on consumption of aggregate bandwidth. I have no idea if this is normal for GPON or not. Hence one of the reasons that I'm finding this thread enlightening. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
GPON is 2.4 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream. Residential users are download heavy and more than 1:2. However there is a big difference between average, peak and micro burst. The conclusion is not simple. We typically have 60+ users on each port. We sell 1000/1000 internet. And yet we only get good ratings for the speed. I find that many, that are sceptical about the shared bandwidth of GPON, forget that a typical POP might only be fed by a 10 Gbps uplink. Usually this has much lower bandwidth per user than the GPON link. Regards Baldur lør. 9. feb. 2019 20.52 skrev Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>:
On 2/9/19 12:12 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
With early PON designs, upstream bandwidth was horrible. Not particularly useful if you're doing things like remote backup, or video chatting, or running a server (business grade service). GPON does better on upstream bandwidth, but it's still asymmetric.
Intriguing.
I would have not considered my municipal GPON to be asymmetric. Well, not as such. Routinely, when I do speed tests I get better upstream speeds than I do downstream speeds. (More below.)
If you're marketing to business customers, or home office professionals, of families with multiple users that consume upstream bandwidth, AE gives you a lot of room for upside growth (assuming you provision the right kinds of fiber).
Are you referring to the dedicated bandwidth between the CPU and the AE equipment? Or the fact that bandwidth feeding the GPON and all subscribers is aggregate?
I have attributed the asymmetry in my speed tests to be that most people on my GPON are predominantly downloading, thus consuming aggregate download bandwidth. Conversely, few are uploading more than requests, thus using relatively little of the aggregate upload bandwidth.
Do I see asymmetry? Yes. Is it truly asymmetric? I don't think so. I think is just based on consumption of aggregate bandwidth.
I have no idea if this is normal for GPON or not. Hence one of the reasons that I'm finding this thread enlightening.
-- Grant. . . . unix || die
On 2/9/19 1:13 PM, Baldur Norddahl wrote:
GPON is 2.4 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream.
Okay. I guess I've not thought about the fact that the GPON itself might be ~> is asymmetric. From my naive point of view, I see a 1G/1G symmetric Ethernet hand off from the ONT to my equipment. Hence my uninformed understanding.
Residential users are download heavy and more than 1:2. However there is a big difference between average, peak and micro burst. The conclusion is not simple.
ACK
We typically have 60+ users on each port. We sell 1000/1000 internet. And yet we only get good ratings for the speed.
I've learned that people are quick to judge harshly and slow to complement. Or that good or better speeds ratings are lost to other things like price and / or other services offered, like native IPv6 or not.
I find that many, that are sceptical about the shared bandwidth of GPON, forget that a typical POP might only be fed by a 10 Gbps uplink. Usually this has much lower bandwidth per user than the GPON link.
I remember having these discussions in the early 2000's about ADSL vs Cable Modem. I wonder if some of the earlier horror stories are unconsciously biasing people's opinions. Or if people quite literally only look at / think about the directly attached network segment. -- Grant. . . . unix || die
On 2/9/19 2:51 PM, Grant Taylor via NANOG wrote:
On 2/9/19 12:12 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
With early PON designs, upstream bandwidth was horrible. Not particularly useful if you're doing things like remote backup, or video chatting, or running a server (business grade service). GPON does better on upstream bandwidth, but it's still asymmetric.
Intriguing.
I would have not considered my municipal GPON to be asymmetric. Well, not as such. Routinely, when I do speed tests I get better upstream speeds than I do downstream speeds. (More below.)
If you're marketing to business customers, or home office professionals, of families with multiple users that consume upstream bandwidth, AE gives you a lot of room for upside growth (assuming you provision the right kinds of fiber).
Are you referring to the dedicated bandwidth between the CPU and the AE equipment? Or the fact that bandwidth feeding the GPON and all subscribers is aggregate?
I'm thinking about the backside. Generally there's a lot more downstream bandwidth to distribute, and not a lot of upstream bandwidth. Makes a lot of sense if you're a content provider & expect your customers to be passive consumers (also, considering that a lot of that bandwidth might be used for things other than IP packets).
I have attributed the asymmetry in my speed tests to be that most people on my GPON are predominantly downloading, thus consuming aggregate download bandwidth. Conversely, few are uploading more than requests, thus using relatively little of the aggregate upload bandwidth.
Probably the case. But if you're in an area with a lot of home office users, or gamers, or business grade customers running servers, your experience might be different.
Do I see asymmetry? Yes. Is it truly asymmetric? I don't think so. I think is just based on consumption of aggregate bandwidth.
I have no idea if this is normal for GPON or not. Hence one of the reasons that I'm finding this thread enlightening.
The SPECS are asymmetric, as is the technology when you take into account allocation of bandwidth between downstream video & IP services. Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
On 9/Feb/19 21:12, Miles Fidelman wrote:
If you're marketing to business customers, or home office professionals, of families with multiple users that consume upstream bandwidth, AE gives you a lot of room for upside growth (assuming you provision the right kinds of fiber).
Agreed - we generally do not recommend the use of GPON for our Enterprise customers. However, in cases where a 3rd party partner discloses their use of GPON to deliver our tails, we dumb down the SLA's and technical capabilities and advise the customer accordingly. Mark.
In New Zealand we have a mostly (any town of about 20k population or more) nationwide FTTH rollout underway (government/private partnership) that is mostly based on GPON. Both Point to Point and Dark Fibre are available as well. The service is layer 2 QinQ delivered to the retail service providers, (1/16 split on the GPON) while the fibre infrastructure provider is barred from retail service sales. GPON speeds generally delivered are 100/50, 200/200 and 1G/500. In general the real world result of this is a network that performs fantastically for both retail and SMB. Larger businesses are often delivered over single strand dark Fibre, but in practice the 1G/500M service works extremely well for most situations. 10G over the PON network is about to start a trial phase, but the ready availability of DF significantly reduces the urgency of this (8x10G over cheap CWDM fibre mux's makes for a nice solution).
Agreed - we generally do not recommend the use of GPON for our Enterprise customers. However, in cases where a 3rd party partner discloses their use of GPON to deliver our tails, we dumb down the SLA's and >technical capabilities and advise the customer accordingly.
Mark.
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I want to work in a ISP environment and all the input here has helped. Thanks! On Thu, Feb 7, 2019, 6:46 PM David Ratkay <djratkay79@gmail.com wrote:
I am not sure if this is a easy question to answer. But I am wondering what ISP's do for their residential and business customers for designing POP's that they usually access to get theur traffic into a given ISP and beyond. Is it usually a L1/L2 connection from the CE to the last mile POP? Or L2 even within the last mile POP. Do you just have POP's delegated to residential users and a separate POP for business users. Or is it done on a geographical basis. So for this region of City-A we manage both residential and business customers at this same POP.
participants (23)
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Aaron -
Aaron Gould -
Alain Hebert -
Baldur Norddahl -
Ben Cannon -
Brandon Butterworth -
Brandon Martin -
Chris Gross -
Clayton Zekelman -
Colton Conor -
David Ratkay -
Eric Kuhnke -
Fletcher Kittredge -
Grant Taylor -
Howard C. Berkowitz -
Mark Tinka -
Mikael Abrahamsson -
Mike Hammett -
Miles Fidelman -
Sander Steffann -
Thomas Bellman -
Tony Wicks -
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