Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc (was: att fiber, et al)
This sharing can be done at a layer-3 or as you say at the time slot level or lambda level. It's no different than what is happening with the copper already. It's not like they have to give it away for free. They just have to offer it to other carriers at cost. This will hopefully provide more of a competitive market. But I don't see Verizon giving into it, nor Comcast or any other provider that has fiber. Verizon campaigned hard to have fiber removed from the equal access legalize so like most of these other large companies, they don't want to share their new toy with the other children. -John Keegan Holley <keegan.holley@sungard.com> wrote:
2012/3/22 Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net>
On Mar 22, 2012, at 11:05 AM, chris wrote:
I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their fiber which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the end of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and replace it with a unregulated one.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly does one share fiber? Isn't it usually a closed loop between DWDM or Sonet nodes? It doesn't seem fair to force the incumbents to start handing out lambdas and timeslots to their competitors on the business side. I guess passive optical can be shared depending on the details of the network, but that would still be much different than sharing copper pairs.
If it's done on a box owned by the incumbent then sharing has evolved into giving away free service to competitors. It's different when copper pairs into a house could be latched onto anyone's switch. Once you start requiring a carrier to give away capacity in it's network that's different. Also, diversity/redundancy becomes dodgy at this point. Not that the billions of dollars they are making didn't come into the discussion, but it seems like its more complicated to share fiber access than it was to share copper pairs. 2012/3/22 John Kreno <john.kreno@gmail.com>
This sharing can be done at a layer-3 or as you say at the time slot level or lambda level. It's no different than what is happening with the copper already. It's not like they have to give it away for free. They just have to offer it to other carriers at cost. This will hopefully provide more of a competitive market. But I don't see Verizon giving into it, nor Comcast or any other provider that has fiber. Verizon campaigned hard to have fiber removed from the equal access legalize so like most of these other large companies, they don't want to share their new toy with the other children.
-John
Keegan Holley <keegan.holley@sungard.com> wrote:
2012/3/22 Jared Mauch <jared@puck.nether.net>
On Mar 22, 2012, at 11:05 AM, chris wrote:
I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their
fiber
which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the end of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and replace it with a unregulated one.
Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly does one share fiber? Isn't it usually a closed loop between DWDM or Sonet nodes? It doesn't seem fair to force the incumbents to start handing out lambdas and timeslots to their competitors on the business side. I guess passive optical can be shared depending on the details of the network, but that would still be much different than sharing copper pairs.
----- Original Message -----
From: "John Kreno" <john.kreno@gmail.com>
This sharing can be done at a layer-3 or as you say at the time slot level or lambda level. It's no different than what is happening with the copper already. It's not like they have to give it away for free. They just have to offer it to other carriers at cost. This will hopefully provide more of a competitive market. But I don't see Verizon giving into it, nor Comcast or any other provider that has fiber. Verizon campaigned hard to have fiber removed from the equal access legalize so like most of these other large companies, they don't want to share their new toy with the other children.
Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
On 23/03/2012, at 4:51 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service.
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
And the country of Australia agrees with you (at least more than half of it). The current nature of FTTH makes it hard to do a layer 1-only service and the NBN has opted to provide layer 2 hand-off at POI's (points of interconnect) around Australia. jy
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
Are they? Last I saw they were building out a layer 3 network -- no wholesale access -- did this change? It sorta fit with their goals in that it meant they could build a faster/simpler network for less money and make a big/bold 1 Gbps to every home (not really true) statement, but it doesn't end up serving a very practical model for most of the world who believe the separation needs to happen at layer 2. Layer 3 is interesting, but is everyone happy with saying goodbye to the ISP entirely and accepting regional monopolies on that space?
It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate. Jared Mauch On Mar 23, 2012, at 12:45 AM, Kris Price <nanog@punk.co.nz> wrote:
Layer 3 is interesting, but is everyone happy with saying goodbye to the ISP entirely and accepting regional monopolies on that space?
Jared Mauch wrote:
It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate.
The difference is in how the services can be unbundled. Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant. For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine. So is optical fiber if single star topology is used. WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1. However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling. Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why PON promotes local monopoly. Masataka Ohta
2012/3/23 Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp>:
Jared Mauch wrote:
It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate.
The difference is in how the services can be unbundled.
Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant.
For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine.
So is optical fiber if single star topology is used.
WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1.
However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling.
I strongly disagree. If this were true, there would be no market for MPLS service: folks would simply buy Internet service and run VPNs. If you take my packets off at the first hop and deliver them to a 3rd party provider, I can buy service from that 3rd party with as many IP addresses as I want, I can buy service with BGP routing, I can buy non-Internet services and I can buy bandwidth-hungry services that aren't cost effective when they take a trip through the Internet backbone. Even if the cost for the unbundled L2 circuit was *identical* to the cost of the bundled Internet circuit it would enable a huge range of niche products that aren't practical now. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
William Herrin wrote:
However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling.
I strongly disagree. If this were true, there would be no market for MPLS service: folks would simply buy Internet service and run VPNs.
You agree with me. MPLS at L2 sucks because it is as expensive as, but less capable than, IP at L3.
If you take my packets off at the first hop and deliver them to a 3rd party provider,
If you are saying delivery as IP, your local provider is an ISP with monopoly.
Even if the cost for the unbundled L2 circuit was *identical* to the cost of the bundled Internet circuit it would enable a huge range of niche products that aren't practical now.
See the reality of your example of MPLS. Masataka Ohta
On Mar 23, 2012, at 6:21 AM, Masataka Ohta wrote:
Jared Mauch wrote:
It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate.
The difference is in how the services can be unbundled.
Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant.
For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine.
So is optical fiber if single star topology is used.
WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1.
However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling.
Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why PON promotes local monopoly.
It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services. If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer. Owen
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
On Mar 23, 2012, at 6:21 AM, Masataka Ohta wrote:
Jared Mauch wrote:
It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate.
The difference is in how the services can be unbundled.
Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant.
For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine.
So is optical fiber if single star topology is used.
WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1.
However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling.
Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why PON promotes local monopoly.
It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services.
If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer.
Hi Owen, Just for grins, I wonder: what is the minimal set of _structural_ requirements that could end the kind of abuses we see from the ILECs without relying on good behavior? The problem with regulatory compulsion is that it restrains the march of technological progress too. Minimum is good. Here's what I'm thinking: 1. Any company which provides more than "5%" of the OSI Layer 1 services in a given locality is prohibited from providing any Layer 7 services except those strictly incidental to the operation of the L1 service (e.g. billing or customer service web sites, internal corporate network). 2. Such a communications infrastructure company may vend L1-L6 services only in units suitable for connecting single customers. For example, they're not allowed to lease "a multi-customer coaxial cable in the King street neighborhood." The service unit is "a dedicated coaxial cable from 44 King street to the head end" or "A dedicated cable channel from 44 King Street to the head end" or "25mbps/25mbps from 44 King strreet to the head end" or "25 mbps / 25 mbps from 44 King Street to 888 King Street". 3. Such a communications infrastructure company is compelled to provide reasonable and non-discriminatory access too all who would interconnect. Charge whatever you want but no quantity or special discounts and if you bill any service provider at the head end of the connection then you bill them all the same. No settlement free peering for this guy while that guy pays. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
From my own experience in my $DAYJOB, separating capital decisions at the L1 and L2 layers would end up adding cost. As mentioned elsewhere, GPON and similar shared medium approaches do not lend themselves well to structural separation. The most practical approach is dark fiber runs from the customer to as few centralized places as possible. The CLEC would co-locate their equipment at those centralized places. The CLEC is then free to use ActiveE, GPON, whatever-the-next-gen-of-PON.
Structural separation works best when the cost to build to a customer are roughly the same. Wherever there's significant disparaties, those will be exploited and people will overbuild to the highest-margin/lowest cost customers to avoid the averaged cost of L1 network. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Owen DeLong [mailto:owen@delong.com] Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 9:28 AM To: Masataka Ohta Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) <snip> It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services. If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer. Owen
That is why I believe that the L1 buildout should be done by or under contract to the local authority (whether that be a municipality, county, special district, or whatever) and then leased to L2+ service providers on an equal cost per subscriber basis. Now it doesn't matter which subscribers cost more or less to build out, they all cost the same to serve. Yes, the more expensive subscribers are being subsidized by the less expensive ones. Overall, I don't really have a problem with this as I don't think that the discrepancies within a given authority area will be that large. I do think that we should require each authority to build out to all end sites within their jurisdiction not served by a smaller authority. For example, Contra Cost County, California would be required to build out El Sobrante (unincorporated area of the county), but, not Pinole, Rodeo, Crockett, Hercules, etc. (since they would be required to be built out by their cities). Yes, it's likely that the L2+ providers would have a higher cost per customer to serve El Sobrante than to serve the cities. However, since that increased cost would apply equally to all L2+ providers, it would easily be passed on to those subscribers and they would, therefore end up paying roughly the true cost of their choice to live in an unincorporated lower-density area. Yes, higher-density authorities would have a better chance of attracting greater competition and diversity in L2+ providers. However, nothing would prevent or exclude smaller authorities from working out colocation deals with nearby larger (or even groups of smaller) authorities and bringing the termination points of multiple authorities together in the same location. Likewise, nothing would prevent authorities from building inexpensive backhaul facilities to adjacent larger centers. If you cleanly separate the L1 infrastructure from the L2+ services providers, you really do have opportunities to do better for the subscriber base overall. Yes, the L1 buildout will cost slightly more than an optimal monopoly build-out by a service provider. However, that small increase in cost yields huge benefits on the other side in terms of reduced barriers to competition, increased diversity, and more price pressure on the L2+ services side of things. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:49 PM, "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:
From my own experience in my $DAYJOB, separating capital decisions at the L1 and L2 layers would end up adding cost. As mentioned elsewhere, GPON and similar shared medium approaches do not lend themselves well to structural separation. The most practical approach is dark fiber runs from the customer to as few centralized places as possible. The CLEC would co-locate their equipment at those centralized places. The CLEC is then free to use ActiveE, GPON, whatever-the-next-gen-of-PON.
Structural separation works best when the cost to build to a customer are roughly the same. Wherever there's significant disparaties, those will be exploited and people will overbuild to the highest-margin/lowest cost customers to avoid the averaged cost of L1 network.
Frank
-----Original Message----- From: Owen DeLong [mailto:owen@delong.com] Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 9:28 AM To: Masataka Ohta Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
<snip>
It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services.
If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer.
Owen
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kris Price" <nanog@punk.co.nz>
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
Are they? Last I saw they were building out a layer 3 network -- no wholesale access -- did this change?
No, you're right; that was me being flippant. ("He thinks flippant is the name of a dolphin...") Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) <snip> Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:
How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban?
In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers.
Frank
-----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
<snip>
Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John.
The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate...
offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all.
High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right.
As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint.
See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/
As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service.
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
Cheers, -- jra
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. Time to assemble some stats, I guess. -- jra -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:
How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban?
In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers.
Frank
-----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
<snip>
Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John.
The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate...
offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all.
High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right.
As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint.
See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/
As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service.
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
Cheers, -- jra
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose.
I agree. If a commercial company goes in to serve folks with fiber they expect a relatively short ROI, 3-5 years typically. This is why rural customers aren't "profitable"; they can't get money from a bank or wall-street for a longer time so they are trying to spread out the build costs over too short of a recoupment period. Fiber has a 20-50 year life. Munis could finance fiber with a 20 year bond at a much lower interest rate than any corporation. By spreading out the costs over 20 years these customers become profitable, often quite so. While in the CBD you might find more than one fiber provider passing a building, for 99.999% of residential users there will only ever be ONE fiber provider to the home. It's hard enough to make the first fiber cost effective, there's no way to go into an already served area incurring all the costs for < 50% of the customers up front. In many small towns muni-fiber in a single star topology to a central switching station where multiple providers can co-locate would bring competitive services at a very attractive cost for both the end user and the services (IP, telephony, video) provider. It's also a topology and technology that easily has 20-50 years of life. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
On 25/03/2012 16:56, Leo Bicknell wrote:
Fiber has a 20-50 year life.
most of the expense of laying fibre is associated with ducting + wayleave. Once you have that in place, blowing new fibre is relatively inexpensive. So rather than amortising the cost according to the lifetime of the fibre, it makes much more sense to amortise over the lifetime of the ducting. Nick
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 05:29:04PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
most of the expense of laying fibre is associated with ducting + wayleave. Once you have that in place, blowing new fibre is relatively inexpensive. So rather than amortising the cost according to the lifetime of the fibre, it makes much more sense to amortise over the lifetime of the ducting.
Maybe. In rural deployments it's much more likely the fiber is aerial, it's far cheaper to attach to existing poles with few cables on them than it is to bury the fiber. Even in urban areas where buried duct is the norm, being able to use old ducts varies a lot with the geography and how active the area is to other development. I've seen plenty of ducts where it had been cut and repaired several times before use that running a new cable through it was impossible and it simply had to be replaced. In other locations 20 years later a new cable goes through like butter. But I think it's all a bit of a tangent; when talking about _residential_ fiber it's prudent to run 2-6 strands to every home day one, and then, well, there's basically never a point in running more. The chance of blowing more fiber down the duct later is near zero. It's also why I'm not a fan of *PON schemes, eliminate the splitter and run a single star topology. 20 years from now Petabit optics will look different than today's GigE in some way, but I'll bet money they are tuned to run on single mode fiber. They may not like the splitters and the like though. By doing a star back to a wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Hmm even most urban environments aren't worth deploying in or are probably marginal profit. So I would expect 30-45% of population of the US to not be worth or marginally worth deploying. I am assuming most urban less than 250k and probably spread out. Not to mention to provide transit without services to residential is a margins game to begin with and without at least a 20-30% take rate it probably isn't worth the cost of l3 infrastructure. On the other hand for actual dense urban environments it makes perfect sense as long as the are willing to maintain it. I see the possibilities, but have a gut feeling it would become a political mess and unreliable, not to mention cost us more than we pay now. -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote: In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 05:29:04PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
most of the expense of laying fibre is associated with ducting + wayleave. Once you have that in place, blowing new fibre is relatively inexpensive. So rather than amortising the cost according to the lifetime of the fibre, it makes much more sense to amortise over the lifetime of the ducting.
Maybe. In rural deployments it's much more likely the fiber is aerial, it's far cheaper to attach to existing poles with few cables on them than it is to bury the fiber. Even in urban areas where buried duct is the norm, being able to use old ducts varies a lot with the geography and how active the area is to other development. I've seen plenty of ducts where it had been cut and repaired several times before use that running a new cable through it was impossible and it simply had to be replaced. In other locations 20 years later a new cable goes through like butter. But I think it's all a bit of a tangent; when talking about _residential_ fiber it's prudent to run 2-6 strands to every home day one, and then, well, there's basically never a point in running more. The chance of blowing more fiber down the duct later is near zero. It's also why I'm not a fan of *PON schemes, eliminate the splitter and run a single star topology. 20 years from now Petabit optics will look different than today's GigE in some way, but I'll bet money they are tuned to run on single mode fiber. They may not like the splitters and the like though. By doing a star back to a wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies.
yep, agreed - much more sensible, much more resilient to failure and only marginally more expensive. It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail. Nick
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 07:15:47PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
Only if it is your capital building the tail. Today's Internet companies are still trying to achive penetration to the 30-40% of households that are cheap to reach, and profitable as customers in commercial timescales (3-5 years). As we reach saturation in that market (less than 10 years from now, I think) they will have to look to the "unprofitable" customers as the only real source of new business. The economics then change. While it's better to have it be your asset and create a customer lock-in, when the risk is high enough it will be seen as better to have a municipality or other take on the risk even if it means unbundled competition. Phone provides the history here; telephone companies started out with only the most profitable companies. To reach the commercially unprofitable ones they turned to government, in the form of things like the Rural Electrification Act (governemnt backed loans to rural providers) and the Universal Service Fund. These government subsidies were also a _major_ driver in the argument that copper local loops should be unbundled since in a lot of cases government had paid for them, not private companies. Politically the makings of a similar situation already exist. Goverment has swung the USF funds to fuel rual broadband, strongly favoring FTTx where it makes sense. While companies like Verizon enjoy not having to share their fiber lines now, these same forces will conspire to drive unbundling in fiber, just as it did in copper. What they are getting now is simply a first mover advantage. Government at the end of the day will fund the 20-40% of America which is profitable in the long run, but not in commercial time scales. They will also fund the 10% of America which will never be profitable, no mater what. It happened with Electricity and Telephone, and I suspect the societal drivers to do the same with the Internet will be even stronger. Companies will have to accept an unbundled tail to get access to this 30-50% of the market; and while they aren't interested now, they will be very soon. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Politically the makings of a similar situation already exist. Goverment has swung the USF funds to fuel rual broadband, strongly favoring FTTx where it makes sense. While companies like Verizon enjoy not having to share their fiber lines now, these same forces will conspire to drive unbundling in fiber, just as it did in copper. What they are getting now is simply a first mover advantage.
It's a bigger first mover advantage. They've learned their lesson from the copper unbundling and they are being allowed to deploy fiber in ways that will make it hard (impossible) to sell it on an unbundled basis later.
Government at the end of the day will fund the 20-40% of America which is profitable in the long run, but not in commercial time scales. They will also fund the 10% of America which will never be profitable, no mater what. It happened with Electricity and Telephone, and I suspect the societal drivers to do the same with the Internet will be even stronger. Companies will have to accept an unbundled tail to get access to this 30-50% of the market; and while they aren't interested now, they will be very soon.
Maybe, but, if what is happening now is allowed to continue, it will: 1. Not encourage competition anywhere. 2. Allow existing monopolies to preserve and extend those monopolies. 3. Cost even more than it already has. 4. Continue to lag behind the rest of the world. 5. Result in an inferior solution. What is needed is for regulators to step up with a bold vision for the public good. We need to encourage (or even require) local authorities to deploy (themselves or by contract) independent L1 infrastructure (yes, I like the 4-8 strands per residence star topology idea) to every structure within their jurisdiction and make it available to L2+ service providers on an equal-cost-per-subscriber basis in each jurisdiction. Yes, this means that the cost per subscriber will be lower in denser jurisdictions than it will be in less dense jurisdictions. However, users in those jurisdictions should expect to pay more for services and the ability to attract L2+ service providers can be achieved in a variety of ways. The important thing is to make sure that if public money is being used to build infrastructure, it becomes infrastructure that is useful to said public and not just a subsidy to some corporation for extending its monopoly in a manner that is often contrary to the public good. Unfortunately, that is exactly where the money is going today. Owen
Nick Hilliard wrote:
wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies.
yep, agreed - much more sensible, much more resilient to failure and only marginally more expensive.
You should suspect cost figures provided by those who want to keep their monopoly. At least, if population density is below some threshold, SS is less expensive than PON, because the expected number of subscribers to share a fiber with reasonably short drop cables is small.
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
It is still possible to unbundle PON if regulators want to do so. See our paper: Competition Promoting Unbundling of PON http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1914349 Masataka Ohta
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Hilliard" <nick@foobar.org>
wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies.
yep, agreed - much more sensible, much more resilient to failure and only marginally more expensive.
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
A municipality hasn't much to lose; they can declare a monopoly. Which was rather precisely the point. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
True, but it's the one monopoly where you get a vote. I'm not sure it's fair to call a municipality a monopoly ... but that's just me. On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 3:46 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Nick Hilliard" <nick@foobar.org>
wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies.
yep, agreed - much more sensible, much more resilient to failure and only marginally more expensive.
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
A municipality hasn't much to lose; they can declare a monopoly.
Which was rather precisely the point.
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
-- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Soucy" <rps@maine.edu>
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 3:46 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
A municipality hasn't much to lose; they can declare a monopoly.
Which was rather precisely the point.
True, but it's the one monopoly where you get a vote. I'm not sure it's fair to call a municipality a monopoly ... but that's just me.
I wasn't clear (again; I have to work harder on that -- it made sense to *me* :-)... A municipality can declare a monopoly on the installation of fiber within its jurisdictional bounds, and *require* anyone who wants to connect its residents to use its fiber; it *owns* (or has easements on) all the spaces necessary to do subterranean fiber (and I believe it leases such easements to power utilities to erect their poles, and may therefore have control over that as well, though I'd have to research that point. Clearly, I think that's a feature, not a but (if you've been following the thread)... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
I don't think a muni can prevent the ILEC from installing fiber in their RoW.... Frank -----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 2:59 PM To: NANOG Subject: Re: Muni Fiber ----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Soucy" <rps@maine.edu>
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 3:46 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
It'll never be done though. Too much to lose by creating a topology which allows you to unbundle the tail.
A municipality hasn't much to lose; they can declare a monopoly.
Which was rather precisely the point.
True, but it's the one monopoly where you get a vote. I'm not sure it's fair to call a municipality a monopoly ... but that's just me.
I wasn't clear (again; I have to work harder on that -- it made sense to *me* :-)... A municipality can declare a monopoly on the installation of fiber within its jurisdictional bounds, and *require* anyone who wants to connect its residents to use its fiber; it *owns* (or has easements on) all the spaces necessary to do subterranean fiber (and I believe it leases such easements to power utilities to erect their poles, and may therefore have control over that as well, though I'd have to research that point. Clearly, I think that's a feature, not a but (if you've been following the thread)... Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Frank Bulk <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:
I don't think a muni can prevent the ILEC from installing fiber in their RoW....
First off, IANAL, Secondly, I've had a reasonable amount of experience with Village and Municipal Law. In short, the statement above is incorrect, in so much that the RoW is not that of the ILEC, but rather the ILEC's ability to use the Muni's RoW. So, if the Municipality wanted to prevent the ILEC, or any company with RoW use rights, they certainly can. Unfortunately, a lot of the terms of the arrangement between the Municipalities and Telco's were written back in the 20's and 30's. So, the "restriction" would have to be put into terms of that agreement. But in the end, it's up to the Municipality to set the guidelines (as with any local law) within the borders of their Municipality. charles
Charles; Wouldn't Federal and State laws preempt Municipal law in this area? I agree YANAL. regards, Fletcher On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 1:06 AM, Charles Gucker <cgucker@onesc.net> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Frank Bulk <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:
I don't think a muni can prevent the ILEC from installing fiber in their RoW....
First off, IANAL, Secondly, I've had a reasonable amount of experience with Village and Municipal Law. In short, the statement above is incorrect, in so much that the RoW is not that of the ILEC, but rather the ILEC's ability to use the Muni's RoW. So, if the Municipality wanted to prevent the ILEC, or any company with RoW use rights, they certainly can. Unfortunately, a lot of the terms of the arrangement between the Municipalities and Telco's were written back in the 20's and 30's. So, the "restriction" would have to be put into terms of that agreement.
But in the end, it's up to the Municipality to set the guidelines (as with any local law) within the borders of their Municipality.
charles
-- Fletcher Kittredge GWI 8 Pomerleau Street Biddeford, ME 04005-9457 207-602-1134
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 7:56 AM, Fletcher Kittredge <fkittred@gwi.net> wrote:
Wouldn't Federal and State laws preempt Municipal law in this area?
Hi Fletcher, State laws yes. State legislatures tend to narrowly define what laws a municipality is allowed to independently enact. And they tend to be very open to the proposition that standards for utility construction should be uniform across the state. Federal, maybe. The FCC has overstepped its authority and been overruled by the courts many times. And municipal laws can be carefully enough constructed that preemption would unambiguously exceed federal authority. Even if preempted, a state or municipality can make it make it *very* uncomfortable for a communications provider who doesn't want to play ball. Consider, for example, DC's repaving requirements: if you dig up the street, you're required to repave the whole street all the way from the nearest intersections. Completely repave, not just cold-patch. That's pretty expensive. Unless they waive the requirement on a case by case basis. Where the basis has a habit of being whether or not your digging is in line with a government policy objective. This is one reason FIOS deployments lag in DC. Verizon doesn't want to deploy conduit down every street lest they be compelled to open it to competitors and the DC government won't waive the repaving requirements for direct burial fiber. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
William Herrin wrote:
Even if preempted, a state or municipality can make it make it *very* uncomfortable for a communications provider who doesn't want to play ball. Consider, for example, DC's repaving requirements: if you dig up the street, you're required to repave the whole street all the way from the nearest intersections. Completely repave, not just cold-patch. That's pretty expensive. Unless they waive the requirement on a case by case basis. Where the basis has a habit of being whether or not your digging is in line with a government policy objective.
This is one reason FIOS deployments lag in DC. Verizon doesn't want to deploy conduit down every street lest they be compelled to open it to competitors and the DC government won't waive the repaving requirements for direct burial fiber.
Flip side of this - a street cut, on average, take a year off the life of a street. Street patches tend to lead to potholes, ice dams, and so forth (and from there to lots of car repairs). Doing things in the street disrupts traffic - you don't want it to happen too often. (Things you learn consulting to local governments.) It's not a matter of "making things uncomfortable for communications providers" - it's a matter of getting them to pay the full cost of digging, rather than passing it off to others. It's been my observation that MOST municipalities let providers do whatever they want, don't do anything to coordinate right-of-way work (even by their own water departments), don't have the budget to repair or repave roads all that often, and hence have absolutely horrid roads - particularly in areas where water infiltration and freezing is an issue. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Charles Gucker wrote:
I don't think a muni can prevent the ILEC from installing fiber in their RoW.... First off, IANAL, Secondly, I've had a reasonable amount of experience with Village and Municipal Law. In short, the statement above is incorrect, in so much that the RoW is not that of the ILEC, but rather
On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 12:45 AM, Frank Bulk<frnkblk@iname.com> wrote: the ILEC's ability to use the Muni's RoW. So, if the Municipality wanted to prevent the ILEC, or any company with RoW use rights, they certainly can. Unfortunately, a lot of the terms of the arrangement between the Municipalities and Telco's were written back in the 20's and 30's. So, the "restriction" would have to be put into terms of that agreement.
But in the end, it's up to the Municipality to set the guidelines (as with any local law) within the borders of their Municipality. (Talking US only...)
Guess you weren't around when the Telecom Act hit... "you mean anybody who wants to can dig up our streets to lay cable???!!!!" And today's cable franchising exercises have become almost a joke - given the restrictions implied by Federal and State laws. Re. terms that were "written in the 20s and 30s"... where it gets really interesting are places like Texas, where there are perpetual ROW grants that predate statehood, and can not be rewritten or renegotiated. Also some interesting legacies from ROW grants associated with building the transcontinental railroads (e.g., the City of Abilene, TX has to pay the Southern Pacific Railroad, or its successor, to run fiber along underpasses where their tracks bisect the City). -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk@iname.com>
I don't think a muni can prevent the ILEC from installing fiber in their RoW....
"Their": pronoun without a referent. The municipality's right of way? I should think they would be able to; the property, or the easement, is theirs, not any utility's. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Jay Ashworth wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Frank Bulk"<frnkblk@iname.com> I don't think a muni can prevent the ILEC from installing fiber in their RoW.... "Their": pronoun without a referent. The municipality's right of way?
I should think they would be able to; the property, or the easement, is theirs, not any utility's.
Think again. -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Most rural GPON deployments I see today are homerun back to the CO or a hut -- there's few that have passive splitters in a cabinet. They also want their GPON to be future-proofed. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Leo Bicknell [mailto:bicknell@ufp.org] Sent: Sunday, March 25, 2012 12:58 PM To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Muni Fiber In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 05:29:04PM +0100, Nick Hilliard wrote:
most of the expense of laying fibre is associated with ducting + wayleave. Once you have that in place, blowing new fibre is relatively inexpensive. So rather than amortising the cost according to the lifetime of the fibre, it makes much more sense to amortise over the lifetime of the ducting.
Maybe. In rural deployments it's much more likely the fiber is aerial, it's far cheaper to attach to existing poles with few cables on them than it is to bury the fiber. Even in urban areas where buried duct is the norm, being able to use old ducts varies a lot with the geography and how active the area is to other development. I've seen plenty of ducts where it had been cut and repaired several times before use that running a new cable through it was impossible and it simply had to be replaced. In other locations 20 years later a new cable goes through like butter. But I think it's all a bit of a tangent; when talking about _residential_ fiber it's prudent to run 2-6 strands to every home day one, and then, well, there's basically never a point in running more. The chance of blowing more fiber down the duct later is near zero. It's also why I'm not a fan of *PON schemes, eliminate the splitter and run a single star topology. 20 years from now Petabit optics will look different than today's GigE in some way, but I'll bet money they are tuned to run on single mode fiber. They may not like the splitters and the like though. By doing a star back to a wiring center you enable all technologies. GPON today, direct GigE or 10GE where necessary, and all future technologies. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
Nick Hilliard wrote:
most of the expense of laying fibre is associated with ducting + wayleave.
Another important expense of FTTH is at the last yards of dropping cables fro the laed fiber, where SS needs simple closures and shorter dropping cables than PON. Masataka Ohta
On Mar 25, 2012, at 4:14 PM, Masataka Ohta wrote:
Nick Hilliard wrote:
most of the expense of laying fibre is associated with ducting + wayleave.
Another important expense of FTTH is at the last yards of dropping cables fro the laed fiber, where SS needs simple closures and shorter dropping cables than PON.
These enclosures (including all electronics but SFP) are around $350. SFP is another $110 for 10km bidi optics w/ DOM. The cable cost to reach the home with connectors can run around $1-2/meter, excluding pole attach or burying costs. The cable cost quickly comes to rival the cost of the enclosure. - Jared
Jared Mauch wrote:
Another important expense of FTTH is at the last yards of dropping cables fro the laed fiber, where SS needs simple closures and shorter dropping cables than PON.
These enclosures (including all electronics but SFP) are around $350.
What? What do you mean "including all electronics" inside closures of PON or SS?
SFP is another $110 for 10km bidi optics w/ DOM.
The cable cost to reach the home with connectors can run around $1-2/meter, excluding pole attach or burying costs.
What costs is not material but installation. Masataka Ohta
Active Ethernet solution outdoor enclosure sfp+2xGE+2xPOTS is about 350 without optics Inside device is closer to 150-160. ... Certainly agree on install costs. Jared On Mar 26, 2012, at 8:23 AM, Masataka Ohta <mohta@necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:
Jared Mauch wrote:
Another important expense of FTTH is at the last yards of dropping cables fro the laed fiber, where SS needs simple closures and shorter dropping cables than PON.
These enclosures (including all electronics but SFP) are around $350.
What?
What do you mean "including all electronics" inside closures of PON or SS?
SFP is another $110 for 10km bidi optics w/ DOM.
The cable cost to reach the home with connectors can run around $1-2/meter, excluding pole attach or burying costs.
What costs is not material but installation.
Masataka Ohta
On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose.
It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines.
If a commercial company goes in to serve folks with fiber they expect a relatively short ROI, 3-5 years typically. This is why rural customers aren't "profitable"; they can't get money from a bank or wall-street for a longer time so they are trying to spread out the build costs over too short of a recoupment period.
Fiber has a 20-50 year life.
The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is. Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless. This is why most modern build-outs have to show a ROI of under 5 years. We just don't know what new technology breakthroughs might happen, which could make a project that requires a 10-30 year payback schedule go bankrupt when a new technology makes the prior one obsolete. jc
On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:37:24 -0700, JC Dill said:
*feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless
And that would be using what spectrum and what technology? Consider what the release of one Apple product did to the associated carrier's wireless net. Then consider the current tendency for "unlimited wireless data" to mean 2-3G per month. Where's the economic incentive for all these carriers to build out enough capacity to move "all consumer data" (or a large fraction anyhow), and lower their prices to match? Sure, it may happen *eventually*, but for it to happen in 5-10 years, it would have to be in motion *now*. So who's already in motion?
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. On Mar 25, 2012 1:01 PM, <Valdis.Kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:37:24 -0700, JC Dill said:
*feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless
And that would be using what spectrum and what technology? Consider what the release of one Apple product did to the associated carrier's wireless net. Then consider the current tendency for "unlimited wireless data" to mean 2-3G per month.
Where's the economic incentive for all these carriers to build out enough capacity to move "all consumer data" (or a large fraction anyhow), and lower their prices to match?
Sure, it may happen *eventually*, but for it to happen in 5-10 years, it would have to be in motion *now*. So who's already in motion?
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard <shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.
Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline" they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Ignoring the fact that we haven't reached our limits with fiber yet ... If you're talking broadband, I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that a fiber plant will last 20 years with minor maintenance just given the history of how long we've used copper. When its 2012 and you have people who are still on DSL with 768K "broadband", it's nice to toss around the theory that technology moves fast and that 20 years from now everyone will have Terabit to the home over wireless, but I really don't see it. Back in the 90s I was sure everyone would have 100M to the home by now. The next major speed boost for broadband will be over fiber. And because the bottleneck at that point becomes equipment, we'll continue to see a healthy round of upgrades in speed over the same fiber plant. If people got serious about FTTH, I think a _very_ optimistic timeline would be something like: 2015 - First communities coming online, 100M to the home (probably Gigabit line rate, but throttled). 2020 - Gigabit to the home starting to become common 2030 - Gigabit to the home "typical" 2035 - 10G to the home starting to become common 2040 - Newer optics require better fiber for back haul, minor upgrades to middle-mile needed to push speeds. 2050 - People finally agree to invest in those upgrades after "suffering" 10 years of "only" 10G to the home. On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:45 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard <shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.
Hi Jacob,
The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline" they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now.
There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business.
20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
-- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/
Ray Soucy wrote:
If people got serious about FTTH, I think a _very_ optimistic timeline would be something like:
Not optimistic at all, technically or operationally. Politically and legally are another matter:
2015 - First communities coming online, 100M to the home (probably Gigabit line rate, but throttled).
There's been quite a lot of FTTH for quite a few years now. In addition to the Verizon FIOS stuff - up to 135mbps down/ 35mbps up available where I am (though I've been quite happy with lower speeds). Municipal electric utilities have been deploying fiber right and left. Probably 200 systems operational. The two that come to mind immediately are: Chattanooga, TN - GigE FTTH Today - http://chattanoogagig.com/ - Grant County PUD (public utility district), OR has had the fiber in for a few years, selling wholesale - not sure what specific retail services are available There'd probably be a lot more available if the big telcos and cable companies weren't doing everything they can to block municipal bids. -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
"Politically and legally are another matter" being key ;-) It was a long hard fight even in Maine to get a dark fiber utility (over a year of going before the legislature). The ILEC lobbyists are very influential and want to maintain the status quo at all costs. A lot of the examples you listed are pilot projects that providers do mostly for PR purposes so they can say "we provide FTTH" with a "* in select areas" footnote. They rarely see any large scale adoption and are usually operated at a loss. I think the key problem is that building out fiber doesn't make business sense if each provider in an area has to build out identical infrastructure and doesn't have the safety of a monopoly. As mentioned, providers are also concerned with the time it will take to realize ROI. The result is that we need to subsidize this infrastructure if we want it, but we end up with no competition and poor service if the service provider is the one getting those subsidies. Aside from very urban areas where the density can support the investment, the only solution becomes to create an open access public utility to maintain the fiber plant, cans, huts, etc. and prohibit them from offering any lit services over that fiber. As for rural areas not needing broadband; I think it's a matter of national interest that everyone has access to broadband. Just like power. When we make an effort to lift everyone up, we all do better. The Internet, like the Interstate highway system, is a time machine. It shortens distances between people and makes us more productive. Even better, it allows businesses to locate anywhere. On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Miles Fidelman <mfidelman@meetinghouse.net
wrote:
Ray Soucy wrote:
If people got serious about FTTH, I think a _very_ optimistic timeline would be something like:
Not optimistic at all, technically or operationally. Politically and legally are another matter:
2015 - First communities coming online, 100M to the home (probably Gigabit line rate, but throttled).
There's been quite a lot of FTTH for quite a few years now. In addition to the Verizon FIOS stuff - up to 135mbps down/ 35mbps up available where I am (though I've been quite happy with lower speeds).
Municipal electric utilities have been deploying fiber right and left. Probably 200 systems operational. The two that come to mind immediately are:
Chattanooga, TN - GigE FTTH Today - http://chattanoogagig.com/ -
Grant County PUD (public utility district), OR has had the fiber in for a few years, selling wholesale - not sure what specific retail services are available
There'd probably be a lot more available if the big telcos and cable companies weren't doing everything they can to block municipal bids.
-- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
-- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/
On Mar 27, 2012, at 10:02 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
2015 - First communities coming online, 100M to the home (probably Gigabit line rate, but throttled).
In most cases I've seen, the 100m fiber hardware is more expensive than the 1G, or the same price. The challenge here is getting the fiber there. One can use an inexpensive media converter that takes a SFP for $20-25 (RJ45 <-> SFP). Two and bi-di optics run around $220 (10km). Further distance (20/40/80km optics) increase the cost some, but not significantly. Some CPE hardware can be had for as low as sub-$200 (indoor unit). You may spend more for the pedestal than the hardware on the end. I would like to see part of any road reconstruction projects the requirement to install conduit or other fiber optic cabling. This would cause most areas to organically receive this upgrade along the way. I'm not actually opposed to the current incumbent having access to it or realizing the lower cost in conjunction with another project. What I do take issue with is winter time construction of cabling that is not fiber, even if part of service restoration. Extending the reach at that time can only provide value long-term. I'm not seeing the incumbents making those decisions. - Jared
In a message written on Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:47:10PM -0400, Jared Mauch wrote:
I would like to see part of any road reconstruction projects the requirement to install conduit or other fiber optic cabling. This would cause most areas to organically receive this upgrade along the way. I'm not actually opposed to the current incumbent having access to it or realizing the lower cost in conjunction with another project. What I do take issue with is winter time construction of cabling that is not fiber, even if part of service restoration. Extending the reach at that time can only provide value long-term. I'm not seeing the incumbents making those decisions.
I could get behind road construction, at least in urban/surburan areas. For rural I think pole attachment is likely better all around. That said, what I'm more baffled about is that FTTH is not standard in greenfield housing developments. Even in FIOS territory many developers install copper (as the developer installs it, not Verizon). I've seen at least one story of Verizon retrofitting with FIOS a neighborhood that hasn't been finished yet, and ripping out copper that was never used in the first place! Updating building codes and requirements is a slow process, so now is the time to start. FTTH when digging for water, power, gas lines, cable, and phone is dirt cheap. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell@ufp.org> wrote:
That said, what I'm more baffled about is that FTTH is not standard in greenfield housing developments. Even in FIOS territory many developers install copper (as the developer installs it, not Verizon). I've seen at least one story of Verizon retrofitting with FIOS a neighborhood that hasn't been finished yet, and ripping out copper that was never used in the first place!
Hi Leo, You don't need $20,000 worth of equipment per installer to install twisted pair cable, nor special training nor sophisticated and time consuming testing and validation. That's a pretty good reason not to install fiber in greenfield construction. If you were clever, you'd install microduct during greenfield construction from each residence to a community telecom hut. That's about as easy to do as installing twisted pair. Then the communications provider blows in fiber strands at need, a cheap and fast process compared to trenching cable. For those not in the know, microduct is a bundle of flexible airtight plastic tubes, each a few millimeters in diameter. Once installed through all its twists and turns, you blow compressed air down the tube and "jet" a bundle of 1 to 12 fibers from one end to the other. Decades later, remove obsolete fiber the same way and jet new. Unfortunately, few general contractors even know that microduct exists and to the best of my knowledge there are no standard termination kits for establishing a residential microduct network. Maybe that's a product idea for when construction picks back up. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ray Soucy" <rps@maine.edu>
Ignoring the fact that we haven't reached our limits with fiber yet ...
Not close, and we're at 100G already.
The next major speed boost for broadband will be over fiber. And because the bottleneck at that point becomes equipment, we'll continue to see a healthy round of upgrades in speed over the same fiber plant.
And, much more to the point, ONTs will go over the edge of the Consumer Pricing S-curve. Bet *cash* on this. But another more interesting point being missed here is this: Assuming pointopoint fiber, *you can provision different classes of service appropriately*. If some client wants to pay for 40G fiber? Cool. You can do that. That in itself seems to positively skew the potential for muni layer 1 installs, to me. And it doesn't *preclude* the muni operating a standardized layer 2 for those carriers who don't want to do that part themselves; economy of scale will actually be productive there, I suspect. Anyone want to start Level 1 Communications? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard <shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.
Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an "optical wire" or "optical fibre" or something. no, it'll never catch on... Hi Jacob,
The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline" they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now.
I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells. As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*. One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site. You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul.
There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business.
20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Hi Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul at present 2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number. I agree it would be a significant difference from busy street in New York to less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos provision per tower? On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites? Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere? If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high contention? Thanks! (Sent from my mobile device) Anurag Bhatia http://anuragbhatia.com On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, "Alexander Harrowell" <a.harrowell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard <shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.
Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an "optical wire" or "optical fibre" or something. no, it'll never catch on...
Hi Jacob,
The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline" they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now.
I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells.
As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*.
One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site.
You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul.
There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business.
20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
While I can't provide an average, I can say we generally have anywhere from 2-5 microwaves on most sites (with a few exceptions that only have 1, and a few that have more.) Our MWs go up to 1.6gbps. The sites aren't provisioned a set amount of bandwidth, they can use as much as they want (up to the capacity of the aggregate of their links), which almost never puts our BH anywhere near capacity, unless the ring gets cut near the pop and we have to move lots of data through just a couple of sites. (Sorry for the crappy formatting, small and barely usable phone screen.) Thanks! -Jacob On Mar 28, 2012 1:45 AM, "Anurag Bhatia" <me@anuragbhatia.com> wrote:
Hi
Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul at present 2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number. I agree it would be a significant difference from busy street in New York to less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos provision per tower?
On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites? Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere?
If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high contention?
Thanks!
(Sent from my mobile device)
Anurag Bhatia http://anuragbhatia.com On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, "Alexander Harrowell" <a.harrowell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard <shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.
Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an "optical wire" or "optical fibre" or something. no, it'll never catch on...
Hi Jacob,
The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline" they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now.
I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells.
As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*.
One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site.
You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul.
There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business.
20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Thanks Jacob and Alex. Appreciate your reply. On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Jacob Broussard < shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
While I can't provide an average, I can say we generally have anywhere from 2-5 microwaves on most sites (with a few exceptions that only have 1, and a few that have more.) Our MWs go up to 1.6gbps. The sites aren't provisioned a set amount of bandwidth, they can use as much as they want (up to the capacity of the aggregate of their links), which almost never puts our BH anywhere near capacity, unless the ring gets cut near the pop and we have to move lots of data through just a couple of sites. (Sorry for the crappy formatting, small and barely usable phone screen.)
Thanks! -Jacob On Mar 28, 2012 1:45 AM, "Anurag Bhatia" <me@anuragbhatia.com> wrote:
Hi
Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul at present 2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number. I agree it would be a significant difference from busy street in New York to less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos provision per tower?
On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites? Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere?
If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high contention?
Thanks!
(Sent from my mobile device)
Anurag Bhatia http://anuragbhatia.com On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, "Alexander Harrowell" <a.harrowell@gmail.com> wrote:
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard <shadowedstrangerlists@gmail.com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.
Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an "optical wire" or "optical fibre" or something. no, it'll never catch on...
Hi Jacob,
The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline" they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now.
I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells.
As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*.
One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site.
You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul.
There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business.
20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it.
Regards, Bill Herrin
-- William D. Herrin ................ herrin@dirtside.com bill@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/> Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
-- Anurag Bhatia anuragbhatia.com or simply - http://[2600:3c01:e000:1::5] if you are on IPv6 connected network! Twitter: @anurag_bhatia <https://twitter.com/#!/anurag_bhatia> Linkedin: http://linkedin.anuragbhatia.com
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:37:24PM -0700, JC Dill wrote:
their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless.
You have offered a two part problem. The initial question is, will fiber put in the ground today still be able to do something useful in 20-50 years. I believe the answer to that is yes. There is fiber that was installed in the early 1980's that is still in use today. It's predecessor technology, copper wires to the home, has been in use far longer and with today's DSL technolgy has done far more than ever intended. High quality transmission media in the ground has long life, and new, well designed fiber would be no exception. The second part of your question is really "might fiber be replaced with some disruptive technology?" That is always a risk, but I actually think the avenues for advancement are few. Wireless of some type is probably the only viable competitor, and it's anything but cheap at scale. The real way to address the second part is to look at the outgoing technology, copper/dsl. Even though phone lines were designed to just carry 8khz voice, we've found it far cheaper and easier to design DSL technology around those properties rather than replace it with fiber or wireless. The reason? Build cost mostly. Diging to bury new fiber is expensive, and even with wireless permitting new transmitter locations and spectrum are very expensive. Can I _guarantee_ no better technology will come along? No. However I would posit even if it does come along the life span of fiber is still 20 years just due to the build cost and timeframe of the new tech. It's if it doesn't come along the timeline grows to more like 50 years. There's risk in any technology investment, however I think having a high bandwidth, high reliability, cheap to operate pipe into the home will always have enormous value, and right now fiber is the best tech to that and thus the best place to invest. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
----- Original Message -----
From: "JC Dill" <jcdill.lists@gmail.com>
On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose.
It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines.
Yup; that's what I said. But it cannot be privately financed; *it must be the property of the municipality*, legally. I don't care if they sub out the actual trench and splice, or even the operation of layer 1... but they have to own it; that's the whole point.
Fiber has a 20-50 year life.
The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is. Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless.
His assertion wasn't economic life, it was *functional* life; I think we're pretty close to 50 years from the first deployment of optical fiber, and I think it's still serviceable. The question here is: did you design layer 1 properly, so as to make it cost-competitive for a long time (see the other thread on this). Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities -- Sent from my Nokia N9 On 25/03/2012 15:47 Jay Ashworth wrote: Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. Time to assemble some stats, I guess. -- jra -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, "Frank Bulk" <owen@delong.com> wrote:
How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban?
In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers.
Frank
-----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
<snip>
Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John.
The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate...
offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all.
High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right.
As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint.
See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/
As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service.
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
Cheers, -- jra
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink owen@delong.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.muninetworks.org/ 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://www.muninetworks.org/ +1 727 647 1274
----- Original Message -----
From: "joshua klubi" <joshua.klubi@gmail.com>
But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities
Well, "deserve" is a strong word... but the underlying thought is my primary reason for believing that municipal fiber is a good solution, and I'll expand that thought one more layer: The Public Good is not often all that cost effective; sometimes, it's a money loser. That's why corporations can almost always be depended on *not* to be working in its interest, absent regulations to force them to do so, such as the Universal Service Obligation, imposed on AT&T in one form or another all the way back to the Communications Act, and expanded in TCA96. This is one of many things that seems to militate in favor of municipally owned and operated layer 1 fiber builds -- is *is* the obligation *of a municipality* to operate in favor of the Public Good: it *is the Public*, in a very real sense. And the members of that body politic, properly informed, can make sure that such a build will be, by direction, equally accessible to all in their area: it will be a bond issue, and such items are generally ballot questions. Or at least, they can try; you can't make people vote. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
-----Original Message----- From: joshua.klubi@gmail.com [mailto:joshua.klubi@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 2:10 AM To: Owen DeLong; Frank Bulk; Jay Ashworth Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities
I grew up in a rural area served by dialup for the first 15 years of my life, so please don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. No, they don't. Living in a rural area is a different set of value propositions than living in the Big City, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Do people living in the big cities reap the benefits of living in the country? No ambient noise, no air pollution, low crime rates, neighbors you know and can trust your children with? No, they don't. That isn't to say that broadband technology won't (or shouldn't) find ways of serving people in rural areas with increasingly usable levels of throughput while decreasing jitter and loss; it already is (and should), and the situation is constantly improving. But I think it's a mistake to say that people who have made the decision to live in the Big City should expect to enjoy the same benefits as people who have made the decision to live in rural towns, and vice versa. They'll never be the same, and unless I'm very much mistaken, that's actually OK. Nathan Eisenberg
Nathan Eisenberg wrote:
-----Original Message----- From: joshua.klubi@gmail.com [mailto:joshua.klubi@gmail.com]
But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities
I grew up in a rural area served by dialup for the first 15 years of my life, so please don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. No, they don't.
Living in a rural area is a different set of value propositions than living in the Big City, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Do people living in the big cities reap the benefits of living in the country? No ambient noise, no air pollution, low crime rates, neighbors you know and can trust your children with? No, they don't.
That isn't to say that broadband technology won't (or shouldn't) find ways of serving people in rural areas with increasingly usable levels of throughput while decreasing jitter and loss; it already is (and should), and the situation is constantly improving. But I think it's a mistake to say that people who have made the decision to live in the Big City should expect to enjoy the same benefits as people who have made the decision to live in rural towns, and vice versa. They'll never be the same, and unless I'm very much mistaken, that's actually OK.
There's truth to what you say, but there is another side that often gets missed. The rational for universal telephone service isn't just that rural residents need access, but that folks in denser areas need to be able to reach them - the value of a network connection lies not only in who can reach you, but who you can reach. A similar argument applies to broadband. In today's economy, supply chains are spread all across the map - extending networks into rural areas, is not just for the benefit of those who live in those rural areas. Miles Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
Actual public financed non-muni fiber is skipping the easy parts and deploying only a few of the hard parts. (current actual results of USF) How is that an improvement? Owen On Mar 25, 2012, at 8:47 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose.
Time to assemble some stats, I guess. -- jra -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote: Who cares?
It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments.
It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural.
The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done.
Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid.
Owen
Sent from my iPa d
On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk@iname.com> wrote:
How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban?
In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers.
Frank
-----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
<snip>
Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John.
The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate...
offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all.
High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right.
As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint.
See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/
As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality suppli es (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service.
I believe Google agrees with me. :-)
Cheers, -- jra
Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
participants (24)
-
Alexander Harrowell -
Anurag Bhatia -
Charles Gucker -
Fletcher Kittredge -
Frank Bulk -
Jacob Broussard -
Jared Mauch -
Jay Ashworth -
JC Dill -
Jeff Young -
John Kreno -
Joseph Snyder -
joshua.klubi＠gmail.com -
Keegan Holley -
Kris Price -
Leo Bicknell -
Masataka Ohta -
Miles Fidelman -
Nathan Eisenberg -
Nick Hilliard -
Owen DeLong -
Ray Soucy -
Valdis.Kletnieks＠vt.edu -
William Herrin