Muni network ownership and the Fourth

Wed Jan 30 06:15:28 UTC 2013

On Jan 29, 2013, at 20:36 , George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Leo Bicknell <bicknell at ufp.org> wrote:
>> In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 07:46:06PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
>>> Case 2, you move the CO Full problem from the CO to the adjacent
>>> cable vaults. Even with fiber, a 10,000 strand bundle is not small.
>>> 
>>> It's also a lot more expensive to pull in 10,000 strands from a few
>>> blocks away than it is to drop a router in the building with the MMR
>>> and aggregate those cross-connects into a much smaller number
>>> of fibers leaving the MMR building.
>> [snip]
>>> But what happens when you fill the cable vaults?
>> 
>> It's really not an issue.  10,000 fibers will fit in a space not
>> much larger than my arm.
>> 
>> I have on my desk a 10+ year old cable sample of a Corning 864
>> strand cable (36 ribbons of 24 fibers a ribbon).  It is barely
>> larger around than my thumb.  Each one terminated into an almost-full
>> rack of SC patch panels.
> 
> It's more than just terminating it; the bulk fiber is not free.  And
> it's not the customer end where you see congestion; unless you
> (expensively) splice out in the field at intermediate aggregation
> points, for a say 10,000 customer "wire center" you have 10,000 x the
> individual cable cross section area at the convergence point.  Which
> you have to provision end-to-end unbroken as splicing is likely to
> screw with your overall cost model in an atrocious way.  Unlike all
> the other media.
> 

This can be addressed by the fiberoptic equivalent of Telco "B Boxes"
out in the neighborhoods. You run a large fiber bundle to the "B Box"
(or series of B Boxes) and run the individual fiber bundles from the
B Box to each house in the immediate neighborhood.

Same model as the current Telco F1/F2 cable bundles, etc.

> It's a pain in the ass to provision in a way that you can centralize a
> L1 dark fiber service, because of splices.  If you're providing L2
> then you don't splice, you just run to a pole or ground or vault box
> and terminate there, and have a few 10G or 40G or 100G uplink fibers
> from there to your interchange point "wire center".  If you're
> providing L1 then that's an amazingly complex fiber pull / conduit /
> delivered fiber quality / space management problem at the wire center.
> 

I don't think this is necessarily true if you include the possibility of
passive LC patching at the neighborhood level.

Owen