[NANOG] Roport on internet business
David Barak
thegameiam at yahoo.com
Thu Dec 24 02:46:46 UTC 2009
>----- Original Message ----
>From: Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net>
>I know, watching my local incumbent they are not replacing damaged copper with fiber. I think they must have warehouses of it someplace. I can't imagine that it is good to replace buried copper w/copper during the wintertime. If you're out doing it, might as well *actually* install fiber in the conduit.
>(Unless it's about unions/job protection for the copper guys).
>- Jared (not saying unions are bad, but when you operate two assets and have a different union for each, it can limit your potential significantly).
One of the very hard things about running a large, geographically distributed layer 0/1 organization is managing the various and sundry physical cables from point to point. Replacing one bad span with a good span which is qualitatively different introduces a level of version control and management headache, and if done in a haphazard fashion can reduce the overall availability of the network. I don't know who your incumbent is, but it's reasonable to assume that they have some strategy for cable plant management which includes overall technology refresh at some point, with like-for-like replacement until then.
Also, last I checked, the specs on "how to build a good layer 0/1 fiber infrastructure" were different than those for copper - because the capabilities are different, the network architecture has different optimizations available.
This doesn't mean that the provider shouldn't be moving toward a large-scale fiber rollout - far from it! I just wanted to provide a reason why they might not want to do said rollout in a piecemeal fashion.
David Barak
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise:
http://www.listentothefranchise.com
More information about the NANOG
mailing list