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?

Comments

There might be an alternative in the UK soon

[cheekymonkey_68]

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.

My experience in Milano, Italy

[kinkie]

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).

Upstream bandwidth, p2p apps, and fat pipes

[Zigurd]

The main question I have about fiber to the premises is that, with service providers being miserly about bandwidth on xDSL and cable modem systems, how will fiber make a difference? If your DSL provider has your bandwidth limited to 384k on a link that could go to 1.5 or 2Mbps symmetric, or even 9Mbps asymmetric downstream, why would fiber, which could take the last mile into gigabit territory, not have the same issues (other than that anyone running fiber would be a fool to be as miserly as the DSL providers are to this point).

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?

Re:Upstream bandwidth, p2p apps, and fat pipes

[kieran]

>The questions are:

>1. Why do cable and DSL providers limit bandwidth and restrict servers?

Because they pay for bandwidth, in one form or other. They can either charge for it or restrict it, but don't expect them to do both.

As for restricting servers, that doesn't work quite the same way - most providers have spare "outgoing" bandwidth because their users do a lot more downloading than serving. The main reason in this case is commercial - by allowing any old user on a cheap connection to host servers at decent speeds (and most non-multimedia servers don't use much bandwidth at all) they would be devaluing their own web-hosting, managed server and co-location products.

It'll happen eventually, of course, because it only takes a couple of companies doing it to bring the whole thing crashing down...

>2. Might there be some advanatge to not throttling last-mile bandwidth,
>such as a positive effect on peering economics for the ISP?

It would be a negative effect - more peering infrastructure (and quite likely transit costs) without more revenue - see above. Economies of scale only kick in when you're getting /paid/ for being bigger :-)

>3. Could Napster and other P2P applications affect service provider economics
>- for better or worse?

More bandwidth use is always going to cost the provider - although it costs them less per Mbps each year - unless the user is paying for that bandwidth. Bear in mind that providers usually base their own bandwidth requirement estimates on a certain contention ratio (it's different for different services), so greater usage due to Napster and such will either force them to alter the ratio or leave them with an over-subscribed network. Ouch.

Another lame and misleading Wired story

[pkj]

One thing curiously missing from this story is whether the fiber will be delivered directly to the door, that is, completing the "last mile."

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.