Muni Fiber and Politics

Tue Jul 22 18:39:45 UTC 2014

On Tue, 22 Jul 2014, Scott Helms wrote:

> One of the main problems with trying to draw the line at layer 1 is that 
> its extremely inefficient in terms of the gear.  Now, this is in large 
> part a function of how gear is built and if a significant number of 
> locales went in this direction we _might_ see changes, but today each 
> ISP would have to purchase their own OLTs and that leads to many more 
> shelves than the total number of line cards would otherwise dictate. 
> There are certainly many other issues, some of which have been discussed 
> on this list before, but I've done open access networks for several 
> cities and _today_ the cleanest situations by far (that I've seen) had 
> the city handling layer 1 and 2 with the layer 2 hand off being Ethernet 
> regardless of the access technology used.

Stop doing PON then. Use point to point fiber, you get 40-48 active 
customers per 1U. I'd imagine there might be newer platforms with even 
higher densities.

Yes, there are many examples of L2 being used but in order to deliver 
triple play the L2 network won't be purely L2, also BCP38 needs it to 
start doing L2.5+ functions, meaning it's harder to deploy new servies 
such as IPv6 because now the local network needs to support it.

It's cleaner just to do L1 and aggregate thousands or tens of thousands of 
residential properties in the same place.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se