Rollup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Jay Ashworth jra at baylink.com
Sun Feb 3 21:58:49 UTC 2013


----- Original Message -----
> From: "Scott Helms" <khelms at zcorum.com>

> > And flooding doesn't affect pure glass, does it?
> 
> Not directly, so long as the cladding stays intact. The problem with
> flooding (for your scenario since your electronics will be centralized) is
> mainly that it causes things to move around inside the cable runs and
> depending on water flow you can end up with a lot of problems with
> increased scattering if the cable gets stretched.

Yeah.  The cable has like 2 or 3 more layers, including a strength 
member, above the cladding, though, right?

> > It would appear that opinions vary on this point. You've clearly
> > had your hands on some of the gear, so I'm not discounting your opinion
> > by any means, but it seems that this may vary based on, among other
> > things, how well one engineers the plant up front. This will *not*
> > be a lowest-bidder contract. Or I won't do it.
> 
> Its not just the initial install. Its that every time you do anything new
> like adding in a new L2 vendor or technology or hook up a new end user.

Since I plan to drop and terminal all the tails on the initial install, 
"hook up a new user" amounts to "plug an optical patch cord into a wall
jack".

Assuming the termination of the fiber in the wall jack was tested for 
level and blur at install time, that will hopefully not be too big
a deal.

> Glass doesn't suffer from ingress noise like RF driven systems but the
> plant itself is just as sensitive to physical damage and is more
> sensitive to stretching than coax or twisted pair.

I thought all that stuff had been mitigated by now to make aerial plant
practical; no?

> > As Owen notes, their hot-potatoing it will simply cost them more money,
> > so they have incentive to be cooperative in finding these problems, and
> > that helps almost an order of magnitude.
> 
> Respectfully the guys that will be doing the hot potato shuffle won't
> be the owners or even people who have that much technical understanding.

Well, in my particular instance, I don't actually think that will be true;
I expect to be dealing with either the guy who cuts my check, or the
technical lead who works for him, most of the time.

I would be pretty surprised to find that the ISP I have in mind as my
first mover has more than 10 employees.

> They'll be installers that work on the end user and their skill set is
> on par with the guys who do contract installs for security systems and
> Dish Network/Direct TV. They don't care if their boss loses money, they
> don't care if you lose money, all they want to is keep their install count
> up since that's how they get paid. If a given install is problematic and
> they can shift the responsibility to someone else they (as a group) will.
> I'm not suggesting that everyone who does that kind of work is unskilled
> or uncaring but as a group that's what you get.

In general, I think that's true.  In a city of 11000 people, I am not
sure that I think it will actually work out that way in practice.

> > No, but I'm pretty sure my Fluke rep will be happy to sell me boxes that
> > *will* test for that stuff, and I will have a contractor to back me up.
> 
> No, actually they won't because Fluke doesn't sell a DOCSIS analyzer
> (for RFoG) nor a PON analyzer. You'll need a separate meter (for several
> thousand dollars) for each kind of technology you want to be able to
> troubleshoot. For example, to handle modulated RF (RFoG) you'd use a
> JDSU (or Sunrise or Trilithic). Fluke is a very basic OTDR tool and they
> don't address the various layer 2 technologies.

Well, my snap reaction to this is "what the city's responsibility is
for dark fiber pairs is spelled out in the contract, and things past
that test regime are the responsibility of the L2 provider", but I 
gather you don't think that will be good enough.

Why is protocol my responsibility? 

*It's a dark pair of glass fibers*.  If it meets level and dispersion
specs, how the hell is it still my problem?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274




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