FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband

Fri Aug 28 14:00:21 UTC 2009

Perhaps the most practical service for both broadband and ALWAYS-on voice
service is one pair of copper (POTS) and one pair of fiber everything-else
per house.

Does anyone have a ballpark guess on the incremental cost of a strand-mile
(assuming the ditch is going to be dug and the cable put in it, how much
does the per-mile cost of the cable go up for each additional strand in it)
?

If the fiber pair goes all the way from some reasonably concentrated
location to the house, then excessive locations with batteries should not be
required.

-Dorn

On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Jack Bates <jbates at brightok.net> wrote:

> Robert E. Seastrom wrote:
>
>> The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that
>> it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build;
>> the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the
>> "cost of the NID" or anything like that.  Nobody cares whether you
>> saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project.
>>
>>
> Errr, I've yet to meet a rural ILEC that doesn't take the cost of the NID
> splitter vs inline splitters into account. ILECs will argue over a single
> $1/customer, and rightfully so. The cost of the FTTH NID adds considerably
> to the price per customer. In addition, it generates additional maintenance
> costs maintaining batteries. I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not
> have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages. Batteries
> have shelf lives, and maintaining one per household is definitely more
> costly than maintaining the batteries to power the remotes.
>
> Getting rid of costs, FTTH uses more power, and most of the people I've
> talked to said we can't feed it from the remotes even via copper mixed with
> the fiber. This creates issues when we need to provide service. Everyone
> always badmouth's the whole emergency phone thing, but we take it seriously
> in the rural areas where power outages are not uncommon, natural disasters
> are expected, and we are the ONLY utility that continues to function.
>
>
> Jack
>
>
>  One of the cool things about the infrastructure that is now in place
>> (copper pairs) is that it turned out to be relatively future-proof -
>> lots of 50 and 70 year old OSP still in use.  In order to get
>> similarly long life out of newly installed fiber assets, the only real
>> solution is home runs to either existing or newly constructed
>> concentration points (not just a box at the side of the road, that's
>> not what I'm talking about here).  Distributed splitter designs force
>> forklift upgrades when the Next Big Thing comes along, rather than
>> upgrading the service only for folks who are willing to pay for it.
>> The Next Big Thing is always coming, and 2.4 Gbit/sec down per port
>> GPON is gonna look awfully slow 10 years hence when everyone's
>> demanding gigabit ethernet to the desktop, not to mention 20 years
>> from now with IPv6 multicast of 2000 channels of 4320p pr0n.
>>
>> I used to believe in the FTTC (fiber to the curb) model too - it's the
>> "obvious" solution.  That was before I started cranking the numbers
>> myself, playing with some of the new splicing solutions that are out
>> there that require *far* less finesse than the cam-splice stuff I was
>> using 10 years ago.  Now I believe in the "other" FTTC (fiber to the
>> couch).
>> Get it as far out into the field as you possibly can, right up to,
>> or even inside, the house.
>>
>> -r
>>
>> Jack Bates <jbates at brightok.net> writes:
>>
>>  heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's;
>>> different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the
>>> OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the
>>> way back to the office.
>>>
>>> Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments
>>> concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or
>>> draw too much power.
>>>
>>> Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul
>>> redundancy on fiber rings
>>>
>>> Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID
>>>
>>> Jack
>>>
>>> Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
>>>
>>>> CON:  active devices in the OSP.
>>>> On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> jim deleskie wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to
>>>>>> the home.  If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to
>>>>>> homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
>>>>>>
>>>>> I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the
>>>>> home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house
>>>>> which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
>>>>>
>>>>> Pro's for copper from curb:
>>>>>
>>>>> 1) power over copper for POTS
>>>>> 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more
>>>>> resilient to splicing by any monkey.
>>>>>
>>>>> Jack
>>>>>
>>>>>
>