Getting Fiber to My Town by Jared Mauch

Thu Sep 10 12:06:20 UTC 2020

I believe this belongs here:

Getting Fiber to My Town by Jared Mauch
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg (YouTube video of NLnog presentation)
https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf (slides for presentation)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910#24430901 (discussion on Hacker News with Jared participating)
https://washftth.com/ (project homepage)

I find this an interesting description of how to apply skills that we normally only use at work to solve connectivity issues at home. Quite timely too, as home connectivity is needed more than ever.

Highlights:
- location: just outside of Ann Arbor
- no fixed broadband since 2002 -> build own network
- pre-wire neighbors with fiber drops and feed them off WISP first
- lots of work to sign up customers, having to resort to snailmail to reach all
- 70% of homes passed signed up
- Have ASN, get IPv6 and IPv4 allocation, multihome and connect to local IXP
- purchase equipment: fusion splicer, OTDR, materials, directional drill(!)
- hire contractors, deal with all manner of problems, theft, stop work orders, unbudgeted costs, unmarked/badly marked utilities, hitting (own) utilities
- build own fiber blower(!) for blowing in fiber in ducts
- splice, OTDR, resplice, schedule installs ... which don't always go to plan
- Upstream very helpful, offered a Cisco 6500 as CPE, however respectfuly declined and went with Arista
- Link up! Network is now live with 17 subscribers hooked up. More waiting to be connected
- Mixed Active Ethernet and GPON
- latency drops from 30 ms to 8 ms, bandwidth from 20-30M to 730M, total commit 1.5G on 10G port, plans from 50M to 500M
- SPAM! IPv4 brokers and the usual unsolicited contacts from bottom of the baller IP transit providers
- Costs: $126k in 2020, $95k contractors, $32k materials and equipment. Total outlay ~$150k + years of sweat equity. Important to spread out costs over longer period of time to be able to afford. Offset costs by using pre-pay model (Can pay $5,000 up-front and receive $50 credit for 100 months)

All in all it was an excellent presentation. I only wish Jared had spent some more time on how he had to become a telco and how this got him better access to the public right of way. Of course, some more details on his directional boring and some nice video of him running the drill would have been a cherry on top :)

I'd like to congratulate Jared on lighting up his network and wish him success in running it. I did a similar build almost twenty years ago and regret I didn't have the forethought to document the effort better then. Not that there was a YouTube to put it all on then :)

You can find the other presentations from NLnog live September 2020 at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVz78FbsOJ6v6xb6S2GpvWQ

Jared, not the Mauch one