Last Mile Design

Mon Feb 11 13:55:48 UTC 2019

On Mon, 11 Feb 2019, Mark Tinka wrote:

>> someone else" they will say "huh? what do you mean". There is an
>> unfortunate common conflation between the fiber optic cable and the
>> services offered on it.
>
> I get what you're saying, but sadly, someone has to take the risk to
> build out a network. Unless you are a large incumbent like Telia,
> chances are it will be company whose sole focus is just fibre network
> construction, and anything higher up in the layers is of no interest to
> them.

The problem here is that it might be an energy company or someone who 
isn't really into datacom. Now they're going to have to operate an active 
network to provide this "bitstream access" with DHCP relays, BCP38 support 
and all that comes with it. The result is that right now, most of these 
networks do not support IPv6 and they do not support > 1 gigabit/s speed 
(some don't even support more than 100-500 either).

If they had just stayed at the L1 level and provided dark fiber for the 
amount of money mentioned before (for instance 10-15 EUR a month) then a 
lot of the problems wouldn't be there. They could have used the same 
organisation as before that now could do fiber as well, and that's that. 
Simple product, can't go wrong in a lot of weird ways.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se