Rollup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Mon Feb 4 20:46:57 UTC 2013

Frank,

I certainly agree that fiber plant is in general easier than copper plant
to maintain.  My main concern is that in this case Jay is considering
allowing not only different vendors but different technologies on the same
fiber plant.  That, in a small system without a ton of technical
experience, is a very difficult scenario mainly because the city will
almost invariably under price their wholesale (layer 1, 2, or 3) rates and
the ISPs that operate in these situations are also usually quite shallow in
terms or technical skill set.  Its not a matter of it being impossible, but
its much more difficult to just break even in this scenario.

I'd personally advocate taking the approach that San Diego took when they
built their network (which IIRC they don't offer access to) several years
back.  The buried all their fiber plant but in trenches that allow easy
(relatively) access and they lease space in those runs so if private
operators want to pull their own fiber to some or all of the places the
city reaches they can without having to worry about
supporting unfamiliar technology on their plant.

Our maintenance costs, in order of greatest to least, have been locating,
> cable moves (i.e. bridge project), monitoring digs, and damage to fiber
> (rodents and vehicles that hit peds).  We have had many more ONT issues
> than
> fiber issues, and most fiber issues can be resolved by cleaning both sides
> of the fiber (customer and head end).  And we've had to replace the 50'
> patch cable between the OLTG and optical splitter a two of three times.
>
> While finger-pointing is always a risk when multiple players are involved
> in
> delivering any service, I don't perceive that as being as much of a problem
> as you think it will be.  With the right fiber testing gear, any suspected
> problems can pretty quickly be identified.
>
> Frank
>

Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
--------------------------------
http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
--------------------------------