Muni Fiber and Politics

Wed Jul 23 15:13:04 UTC 2014

> On Wed, 23 Jul 2014, Jay Ashworth wrote:
>> IIRC, going from 1pr to 3pr raised my build cost about 12ish %, going to
>> 6pr would have been another 12%, cause you have term equipment costs to
>> think about in addition to the fiber cost, which is delta.

25% of a lot of money is a lot more money. You'd have to sell the
investment to voters who, for the most part, are a lot more worried
about taxing and borrowing for the ever-underfunded roads, schools,
fire and police departments.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 10:47 AM, Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:
> Isn't splicing cost a driving factor here? The above percentage points, do
> they include the cost of labor for fusion splicing of the fiber?

Not necessarily. If you wait to splice until there's an order (hence a
pending revenue stream) you can just lay the cable. This also means
you only build the last-mile cable to the neighborhood splicing point,
typically a small fraction of the distance all the way back to the
data center. Then you put in a fraction of that number of strands from
the splicing point back to the data center and add more later if
they're ever needed.

If you lay 6 fibers expecting an average use of 1.5, you'll probably
even save money in the long run this way. OTOH, this means you have to
have at least one qualified field splicer permanently on staff, which
could be a problem for a small system. 'Cause you really can't have
the service providers splicing your fiber... just look in your office
building's telephone closet if you want to see how that sort of
approach works out.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

-- 
William Herrin ................ herrin at dirtside.com  bill at herrin.us
Owner, Dirtside Systems ......... Web: <http://www.dirtside.com/>
Can I solve your unusual networking challenges?