Muni Fiber

Sun Mar 25 18:14:32 UTC 2012

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.
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Leo Bicknell <bicknell at 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 at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/