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In-Home Fiber Connections, Out West
BillyZ writes: "A Denver billionaire has started laying fiber and setting up the infrastructure to deliver fiber optic connections to residences in the southwest. Wired has the story. They hope to be offering the services to the public by the middle of next year. Now if only someone would be doing the same thing in the northeast." Tell me again why I moved out of Austin?
All is not lost...
The register had an article a while back about Psion are bringing out a Digital Radio which will have the potential for fast internet access
Allegly the BBC here in the UK, according to this article in the register will be doing just that in the not too distant future, hook the radio to your PC via its USB port and forget phone lines becuase in theory you could recieve data at up to 1.5 Meg per second.
The UK has been slow due to companies like BT trying to milk everything it can out of the last vestiges of its dying monopoly. I can't believe how much they have the cheek to demand for their DSL [dis]service. For 500kbs (max), BT Openworld customers get to pay 3 times what I pay for 1mbs connection here in Canada.
Right now in Milano, Italy, something good is going on.
With the recent liberalization in the phone network (it used to be a state-controlled monopoly), many new companies sprung up offering phone services.
One in particular, named e.Biscom and mostly owned by Milano's most popular power and gas utility company, a couple of years begun aggressively cabling in optics the whole city.
Now the first offerings using this extensive optic network are beginning to spring up. A company called FastWeb has recently begun marketing a residential offer for 10 MB/s Internet access, plus phone (free to all other Fastweb subscribers, some discounts for local and long-distance calls), and Video-on-demand. The cost is less than the equivalent of US$ 50/month flat, including taxes. They'll bring the fiber up to the doorstep free of charge, and the 10 MB/s limitation is handled by the splitter device (Notice: the whole network backbone is over IP, including phone and video).
I read it. I'm just wondering if WINFirst is one of the companies that planned ahead, or one of the new startup that is finding itself left out in the cold as fiber goes to bigger, more established customers.
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- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
A while back I was looking at Voice over IP programs for Linux and with compression at 28.8 they weren't too bad. With advances in compression and DSL or Cable Modems, I'd expect them to have much better quality. Will CU-Seeme kill the long distance carriers?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Fiber to the home is coming. From the reading in the Wired article and other places, I have been able to gether that the WIN system is specifically using a 100base-FX type ethernet technology to supply data connectivity to the home. These fiber drops get aggregated via ethernet switches, and eventually ATM switches. Voice and Data services go over the 100Mb fiber based Ethernet, with a separate coax cable laid in for cable TV. I would guess that while that last mile is 100Mb - the Internet connectivity is very over subscribed - so don't bet that it will improve web surfing much beyond what a good DSL or cable modem provides.
Fiber to the home really doesn't cost much more than doing new copper lines to a home. The cost of the cable when you buy it in multi-mile spools is about the same for fiber or copper. With fiber you do not have to put amplifiers or other electronics in the field - just at the side of the house and in the central office. This saves the provider money. The big cost of deploying any telecom infrastructure is the people leaning on the shovels burying the cable, and paying the city for the right-of-way to bury this cable. (or paying to put in aerial cable right-of-way).
SO - for those service providers who are putting in new infrastructure anyway - it makes a lot of sense to put in fiber. The cost is the same, and we know the bandwidth limitations of the copper. The bandwidth limitations of fiber are 1000 times higer.
Disclaimer - I work for a company that delivers Fiber-to-the-Home systems providing, Voice, Video, and Data over the same fiber. We are currently shipping systems to customers.
I work on customer applications for WINfirst, and I can clear up a little confusion.
1. Yes, we are terminating fiber on the sides of people's homes. If you are a WINfirst customer, you will have fiber all the way to your house.
2. We're providing voice, video, and data. You can get about 300 channels of cable tv, 10/100/Gigabit ethernet connections to the net, and phone service.
3. Our prices for phone, cable and Internet on a standalone basis will be comparable with the competition but offer more features. Examples include Video on Demand for cable service and included long distance minutes with the local phone service as well as awe-inspiring speeds internet connection.
4. Price for the internet service will be in the same range as other residential services (DSL, cablemodem), but it will be low-latency, it won't be shared bandwidth, etc. etc. etc. It's the real thing. All prices are discounted when you bundle service.
5. When Wired talked about installation costing $2000, they were talking about WINfirst's cost, not the customers.
6. I'll be working on all kinds of cool applications to take advantage of our speed.
7. These are my words, not my company's. I could be wrong about details of the above. Please don't sue me.
One of the big advantages of fiber is that you can upgrade the bandwidth of the system without replacing the fiber. Just upgrade the transceivers as demand, technology and price warrant.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I wonder how well this article coincides with
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this article on MSNBC?
- JoeShmoe
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
Less attenuation, higher bandwidth, etc... of course yo ushould know that the coax is a shared bandwidth.
The $1000 figures are what it will cost the company, not the customer (I think the business term is acquisition cost, or something like that). I don't think they'd have much business if they expected consumers to pay that kind of money.
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Jeremy in Las Vegas, willing to don a hard-hat and help the construction workers get the fiber laid.
The questions are:
1. Why do cable and DSL providers limit bandwidth and restrict servers?
2. Might there be some advanatge to not throttling last-mile bandwidth, such as a positive effect on peering economics for the ISP?
3. Could Napster and other P2P applications affect service provider economics - for better or worse?
I wrote parts of this stuff
There is a company doing such a rollout in the northeast. According to the article:
"Princeton, New Jersey's RCN has been building a network concentrated in Northeastern United States that offers a combination of phone, Internet and cable service."
The companies aren't hyping their activity for one very important reason: they don't want expectations to be too high for a technology they are not positive will take off. A silent flop is less painful than a loud one caught on camera and displayed on the 11 o'clock news.
Well, I hope it wasn't to get away from Taco Cabana, HEB, and BBQ. :)
Anyhow, I've been checking where the test neighborhoods in Austin are, and they're all down southwest around the Mopac/360/290 triangle.
One group is in an area bordered by Town Lake, Barton Creek, 360, and the south edge of West Lake Hills, in the Barton Creek Mall area.
The other area is bordered by Mopac, Slaughter lane, Brodie Lane, and William Cannon, with a small extra area northeast of Brodie and William Cannon.
All areas are apparently within the Austin city limits. This makes sense, as they only got approval with the city of Austin.
Anyone who is planning to move down there to get in on the trial run had better either have a southside/360 job or plan for a fun-filled Mopac commute twice a day!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
In my experience, most DSL implementations go up to 4.5km, or 15,000 ft. There are people connected up to 7km, but 4.5 it gets to be hit or miss (they also get affected by other factors - according a local ISP, Sympatico - such as line expansion in the summer). Another technology called IDSL allows lower speed connections even further out.
Rather than relying on line cards in the CO, my local ISP has started deploying remote DSLAMs. These are in neighbourhood boxes (like the current small green wiring boxes already out there) which operate in the same way as the line cards in the CO. Thus they can extend xDSL far beyond the CO.
Last mile connectivity is the biggest difficulty in getting high-speed connectivity to residential consumers. The cost to switch and deliver fiber to the home is *extremely* expensive and revenue will likely never cover the expense.
However, a hybrid system of fiber to local access points combined with some existing form of "last mile" connectivity can provide all of the benefits at a remarkable reduction in cost. This is certainly not a new idea. In fact, this is the scheme implemented by the cable modems that have been in operation for three years now.
For those unaware, the bandwidth used by cable modems takes up just one channel of the 500 channels that can be encoded on coax. And that one channel provides 30 Mbps for the user on that segment. This, combined with the ability to move the fiber closer and closer to the user provides an incredibly amount of flexability with remarkably little up-front costs.
Love or hate your local cable company or cable modem ISP, the scheme is sheer brilliance on the technical side. If your service sucks, there is no *technical* reason for this. That is to say that even if you had fiber to your door, your service could suck just as hard.
I really, really wish that someone would start whacking Wired authors with the clue stick...
-p.
The delay is due to the fiber -> fibre conversion process. This isn't so bad with white light, but when you have to convert colored light to coloured light, things get tricky.
I'm in the Southwest, but I'm in Phoenix...not one of the cities scheduled for initial implementation.
This is good news, as I'm really not in the mood to pay $1000 installation and $1000 a month for bandwidth, when my DSL is serving me just fine.
I do think, however, that within a few years we'll be reminicing about the good ole days when we connected to the net via standard phone lines (hell, I still joke about the days of 300 baud modem surfing... of course, that was til I got an MPE 1000c on my Atari 800. That sucker went to a whopping 450 baud!!!)
The question is, would this type of technology have a price decrease rapidly, or would it remain pretty high for years to come? Businesses would be fine with $1000 a month, for some high speed connections, but that's pretty damn ridiculous for residential, no?
Did you even READ the article you posted?! You said:
"'...Now if only someone would be doing the same thing in the northeast.' Tell me again why I moved out of Austin?"
Neither the person who sent it in, nor the person who approved it apparantly read the article.
From that article I quote:
"At the same time, American Broadband -- based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and founded in October 1999 -- is planning a similar service starting in Rhode Island, and eventually crossing 2 to 3 million homes in the Eastern United States. "
"Winfirst is not without direct competitors. Princeton, New Jersey's RCN has been building a network concentrated in Northeastern United States that offers a combination of phone, Internet and cable service. The company also plans to build a competing cable network in San Diego. "
Another fine example of Slashdot's journalistic abilities.
*sigh*
yacko
-- There is no sig line, only Zuul.
I have a friend in my country's national telephone company who I recently persuaded to arrange a lecture for me and a few others about a technology they have been testing: ADSL.
It's supposed to be able to connect your PC directly with the telco's ATM network. It uses normal copper lines for the last 1000m to your home and optical fiber for the rest of the ride (which is the existing infrastructure in most PSTN networks these days). It gives bandwidths between 640 Kbps and 8 Mbps, depending on how much you pay.
Does anyone know how does this compare with in-home fiber connections?