Fiber Network Equipment Commercial Norms

Wed Sep 22 17:47:39 UTC 2021

If they're regularly sending people out to maintain the gear, and saying
it's part of a "ring" that means it's probably part of their
infrastructure and not just a local customer edge device for the building.
If you opt to bill them and they decide to pull out, they're still "on-net"
meaning at any point in the future if someone adds their services at the
building, they can re-install gear or just deliver it directly over the
fiber; they're not gone permanently.

I see this a pretty much a mathematical cost equation for the billing:

Have an electrician come out and perform a power audit on the circuit
you're using. It'll cost you $300-ish and you'll have a baseline number you
can use for billing.
The electrician will give you a wattage for the rack, and it's
non-intrusive so they don't have to shut everything off. It's up to you if
you want to notify the telco or not, but it would be courteous to do so.

Multiply that wattage by 0.001 (convert to KW) times 24 (hours per day)
then by 30.5 (days per month).
Now you have their monthly KWh usage, which is what your electric bill
uses. Divide out their proportion of the total KWh on your monthly electric
bill.
Then, multiply that figure by 1.5 to account for cooling costs being
roughly half of the rack's load (assuming a 1.5 PUE, which is high, but not
unreasonably so for billing purposes)
Next, take your standard price per square foot rate and multiply that by 6
per rack of equipment they have to account for their physical footprint in
the building. This is not necessarily needed depending on how generous
you're feeling, as footprint in an MDF doesn't particularly "cost" you
anything unless space there is tight.
Finally, average out the number of dispatches they do per month and what
that costs you to pay someone to escort them. Figure 2x the person's wage
to account for possible overtime and administrative overhead.

IMO this is an incredibly fair way to go about this. You're essentially
billing them power/cooling at rough cost and charging them what you'd
charge anyone else for presence in the building.
You're right, you shouldn't have to pay for their electricity, especially
if neither your client, nor any tenants are using them as a service
provider.
Take this opportunity to codify their use of the space in writing, citing
that they're guaranteed that space for X number of years with this
agreement. Make sure there's a provision where the power piece of the bill
can be adjusted if they add or remove equipment.

On Wed, Sep 22, 2021 at 11:05 AM Grant Taylor via NANOG <nanog at nanog.org>
wrote:

> On 9/22/21 10:45 AM, Lady Benjamin Cannon of Glencoe, ASCE wrote:
> > Half-penny pinching “mah powah” landlords are especially annoying in a
> > cosmic sense
>
> I know someone who had a bit of a different experience.
>
> Someone, purportedly the telco but I'm not sure who, had telco equipment
> in a building and the batteries hadn't been serviced in the better part
> of a decade and there was a strong smell of battery acid in the room.
>
> I heard that building management put a hard line of something like 36
> hours for the equipment owner to address the problem, or at least
> respond with an acceptable time line, lest the building electrician
> would remove the batteries as a health and safety concern.
>
> The equipment owner materialized and removed the batteries within 72
> hours.  The bulk of the equipment was removed the following month.
>
>
>
> --
> Grant. . . .
> unix || die
>
>

-- 
Matt Erculiani
ERCUL-ARIN
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