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Fiber-to-the-Home Internet, TV, Phone in One Box
Brian Stretch writes "This looks like a really neat toy. Internet (PPPoE), CATV, DBS, telephone over one fiber optic cable to the converter box that breaks it down into 10BaseT Ethernet, coax, coax, and three POTS lines. I'd prefer more Internet bandwidth, and DBS and HDTV (from over-the-air broadcast) instead of DBS and CATV... but hey, these things could whack both
Ameritech and Comcast in one shot. Is anyone familiar with these or any competing devices?"
Can anyone say multimedia?!?
I stole this Sig
[PPPoE, CATV, DBS, POTS, DBS, HDTV, DBS and CATV.]
As Dilbert would say, Bingo!
El Karma: excelente(principalmente la suma de moderación hecha a los comentarios de los usuarios)
.... this is the technology, but well, where is the service provider? And how much they are going to charge? Honestly, if this really gives you satelite+cable TV, 3 phone lines and 10BaseT, I'm willing to pay up to $300 a month for it.
Of course, if I get the 10BaseT dedicated up to some reasonable backbone *inno*
Well, way to go...
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
Doesn't it still mandate that telcom's must invest in expensive fiber optic rollouts, where they currently only have analog lines? Last mile may be ONLY a mile, but multiply that by 1000 communities and you have 1000 miles of short-path, difficult to maintain fiber in the field. Currently, fiber while being more versatile is still more expensive than rigid or semi-rigid coax that typically populates last-mile carrier networks.
It took my cable company years and $$$$$$ to replace the splitters to go up to 1000 MHz so they could offer digital TV and internet access. And that was *just* the splitters in the outdoor enclosures. Imagine digging up or laying down new cable...(and it would be fiber so labour would be higher and cable would be more expensive).
This seems like a very good idea for fiber to the door, but without investors willing to inject money into telcoms so they can build their networks, this just doesn't seem in the near future. The specs also don't look too promising --current cable modems can already do 30 Mbps downstream and 10 Mbps upstream, but are capped.
The technology is there, the money just isn't.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
I heard *lots* of good things about Sprint's ION service (which has been shut down). Unfortunately, their timing launching it was off. This sounds similar, though not quite as cool. Interesting.
SSL Certificate
How can it possibly cost that much money per mile? I can't see fibre optic cabling within residential neighborhoods (for example) costing much more than the cost of putting up some telephone lines. The cost you are quoting is probably for heavy-duty longhaul cabling, the kind of stuff that 360Networks was doing. They were using train tracks across Canada and the had a train rigged with a large plow hanging off one side. They would then lay down some large pipes (I presume) which would house the fibre optics cables and maybe other things (like some power lines to power the lasers in the EDFA amplifiers). Then they would fill the trench. The costs of doing all of this was of course a huge undertaking, probably closer to the costs of building a gas pipeline rather than the costs of put some overhead wires in a residential neighborhood. The value you are quoting probably also includes the cost of laying oversea cables, which is also hugely expensive. I could be wrong on some of this, but I used to invest in 360networks, so I kind of know a little bit about what goes on. But I apologize if any of my facts are not bang-on.
http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand has a description of our real 100 Mbps Internet connected network (access also at 100 Mbps!)...
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
In parts of Japan appearently you can already get a 100Mbit connection through fibre cables to your house. (Those who cannot read japanese, see the image . Not informative, but you can imagine your house in place and have nice dreams.) The price: JPY6000/month. (about EUR 52, resp. USD 45)
I was wondering for some time if it was just a joke. Well, afaik fibre cables are about the same price as CAT5 cables. One big advantage is that a full duplex fibre segment over a really big distance seems to be less a problem. (A switch every 45km sounds easy)
Too sad that i live in a country that is currently struggling to have ADSL for a fair price.
This sig is a true statement, but I cannot prove it.
i can still download porn and talk to miss cleo at the same time right...
16, 17, 18, 19, 20... lame filter, you are so lame.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
It's a great idea. It combines all of your communincation services into a single package. It consolidates the cost of running all the lines, as well as the maintenance expense. It also has the potential to dynamically divide your bandwidth - if no one is using the phone you may be able to allocate it as extra broadband. If someone invents a new service, just re-allocate for it.
One big question though...
Can anyone find anything resembling a price tag? I Looked over the website and the only refference to money that I could find was an "Investors" link, LOL!
I really hope they succeed, but I wouldn't invest. Too likely to be vaporware.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Winfirst is a California based company that is offering last mile fiber internet connections to houses with a 10 meg up/down cap for $100 for install and $50 a month for internet service. They are also soon in line for the dot-death list but it can be done.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I think US$2k plus $10/month for services is a bargain for a connection that is about 100x faster than my US$30/mo ADSL here in Canada. You definitely have some advantages in terms of the design of your community (lots of straight-line trenches in soft earth helps a lot), but I'm sure the same approach could work in small towns around here.
You should be very proud (your community collectively and you personally) of this project. Now, perhaps I might visit sometime for a LAN party some time?...
I've got a bad attitude and karma to burn. Go ahead. Mod me down.
Actually, it would be considered friendly competition in most areas. In Sacramento, we have AT&T broadband, AT&T cable tv, and pacbell POTS. The only alternative to AT&T broadband cable modem is pacbell DSL (or in the northern sacramento area, surewest DSL). The only alternative to AT&T cable tv is satellite/dss.
The only alternative to pacbell POTS service is cellular/pcs - and the biggest player here? AT&T wireless.
Having another company that can provide TV, phone, and internet access in the neighborhood is quite welcome, and may drive prices down across the board for that area (why would the incumbant broadband/telephone company reduce prices otherwise?)
Any phone system provider is federally mandated to make sure the system is up 99.999% of the time. In fact, they face hefty fines for even ONE minute of downtime of a service area.
It's to their advantage to build redundancy into their distribution system or face the consequences later.
In the case of fiber-based distribution systems, they use a redundant ring (where a signal has a guaranteed redundant path) around their service area to accomplish this. When someone digs a trench and knocks out the service to a single home, it's still possible to run to a neighbor's house and use their phone in an emergency, so the federal regulations don't require complete redundancy on that "last mile".
Therefore, fiber-based telco services are inherently more robust than telco over copper. Not to mention the advantage fiber has in its resistance to electrical/radio interference lightning.
Here in Southern Europe (5 cities in Italy, plus some others in Europe - 10 to 15 cities total I believe) there's a company called e.Biscom (plus its subsidiaries Metroweb and Fastweb) which is engaged in a massive fiber roll-out. What do they sell? Phone (VoIP), pay-per-view TV, and 10 MBps flat-rate Internet Access (NATted), for 50 euros/month plus taxes (phone bills and TV shows not included of course).
They've been doing it for at least 2 years, and they've always used one integrated device with fiber in and 10BaseT/phone/tv out. The models have varied in time, but this is definitely NOT news.
I'm somewhat disgusted by the people who scream about cable providers who wouldn't share their lines yet they think this is "cool".
:: Of course the simple answer is that there is a provider who wants to collect on all the services. It's greed stupid! ::
Think about it. Sure, one service created to serve them all - but hell, one service to rule them all as well.
Are we asking for it when we say we want POTS and all the rest rolled into one? For example: I love my Time Warner cable. I wouldn't use a dish if it was free. If this service is rolled out will it kill my options [or limit them]?
Let's keep in mind that optical internet is awsome. Let's also remember that adding in TV, Phone and Cable could cause so many collisions that the internet aspect wouldn't be worth it.
IMHO we should keep these services seperate for now. Having our options open for 'net access is ideal. Telephone lines are fsck'n fine [I CAN call anywhere now can't I?]. Cable and Satellite is out there.
So why do we need this? Sure, I want fiber to my house. But why should I share the bandwidth with my phone and the rest?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Let's see... prices would be (including taxes...)
- $30 for the first phone line
- $40 for the additional lines ($20 each)
- $60 for premium cable
That leaves $170 to pay for the 'net access. It'll certainly get you a nice connection... but it'll be a while before that buys you 10-Mbit.Total: $130
My ISP charges $1200/month for 7.1-Mbit (down) & 768-Kbit (up), unmetered transfer DSL. Those speeds are only offered to 'business' class service, and thus include the right to run servers & host a couple domains. What it doesn't include is what our local ILEC (Verizon) will charge you for the circuit. Still, we can probably not consider that, as the cable company owns the 'circuit' anyway. Quite an eye-opening bandwidth bill.
Take a look at the Cisco uBR 925. It includes two RJ-11 POTS ports. Okay, so it's not three but I don't have teenagers. This device is capable of 10 Mbit/sec (limited because they installed 10-base instead of 100-base). Why aren't more of them installed? Why aren't we getting phone service over cable?
(I'm not going to address pay-TV service, since you're already plugging this thing into it!)
Ya got me. I'd say it's because the cable companies are in bed with the phone companies, and they both are milking things for all their worth. Just because something is available, possible, (both physically and financially!), and desirable doesn't mean it's going to happen.
Heck, look what happened to the XFL -- and they had Jesse "The Mind" Ventura!
But I'm cynical. I've pointed that out before. And it probably clouds my judgement.
"...America's great minds of today, teaching America's great minds of tomorrow. Poor bastards." -- A Beautiful Min
Some of us already have it.
http://www.fastweb.it
10 mbps to the home. :)
The only downside is that the router is a total blackbox for a gateway/router. Portscanning it from either side of the firewall reveals nothing and there seems no way into it to configure port-forwarding...
The gateway device Fastweb is using is here: telsey. Any ideas on how to make this thing more, erm, functional... would be appreciated.
The other terrific thing about the Fastweb service is that with our monthly tarrif, we also get 'free' national and local calls. They also gave some crazy webTV appliance (which runs linu, btw) but we don't have much use for it.
No, you can never be to political on slashdot :)
It is an absurd price. But even if you don't run an individual piece of fiber to every home, you have to have an individual port on a fiber multiplexer or fiber router(!) to branch out to the thirty houses you might find currently hung off the local junction box. That would be a cool $10,000 per port plus another $10,000 for the backplane supporting 24 houses. That would be 4166666 of these neighborhood units, 173611 more one level up, 7233 at the central offices. That's $1,086,877,500,000 in upstream termination gear. We can assume that these things cost at least $1000 for $100,000,000,000 on the downstream end (can you imagine the bean counters at seimens cackleing with glee). A hundred billion at the consumer end and a little over a trillion on the monopoly phone/cable cable end. And we haven't even laid the first inch of fiber, purchased right of way, gotten local building permits, cleared through the FCC cash cow, moved to IPv6 (look at the numbers, it's manditory), Beefed up the backbone, selected a standard, drilled holes through people's houses, dug up their 10 thousand dollar landscaping, contracted with the major content/isp/software providers, etc, etc, etc...
This is dead before it started, all to get 10mb/s to the desktop. 10 megabits per second. There are just too many major players who would not profit from it that could kill it in the blink of an eye. Or they'll support it on the interim, then kill the companies profiting from it in order to gut the infrastructure for their own petty plans.
We get this rolling we might as well give everyone a free $10,000 PC at home too. It would only add about 1% to the final cost.
Better to rely on wireless neighborhood networks and mesh routing to aggregate your 50 odd DSL and cable connections. Read Rob Flickenger's book to find out more about that one.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
Last I heard in IEEE journal a year ago, this kind of 1-fiber line to your house is more of what Ameritech and Comcast are going to use to thwack the telephone companies, and not vice versa.
After all, it's the cable companies that are already laying digital fiber lines to houses. They probably have some regulatory hurdles to overcome to offer POTS through the lines instead of having to go through the phone monopolies' networks, but with the backing of TW/AOL/etc. this no longer seems insurmountable.
The phone monopolies have limited deployment of digital lines to some prototype high-income (like, millionaire) communities, but even then, I don't think those lines carry TV signals. So the cable companies should be much closer to making this a reality.
I for one wouldn't mind cable taking over my communications, but I'm pretty sure that's just because I had good experiences with TWCNY's Road Runner service and pretty goddamn awful experiences with Verizon.
hard to see why they wouldn't put 100baseT in the box -- they can always soft-limit folks to 10mbit/s or 1 mbit/s but keep the option of selling bigger pipes to those who have the ca$h..
someone's pinching pennies and that will hurt them in the long run.
What does that mean?
Well if you live in a major city, you can sign up for B Flet, NTT's fiber service.
If you can read Japanese, check out NTT east's site at:
http://www.ntt-east.co.jp/flets/index_f.html
OR the NTT west site at:
http://www.ntt-west.co.jp/ipnet/ip/bflets/
On the west site, you can clearly see what is offered, with 100 Mbps big and bold! Of course, while this is the advertised speed, the actual performance is going to be between 20 and 50 Mbps.
They have 3 plans:
Business plan: 100Mbps for 40,000 yen ($300) a month
Basic plan: 100Mbps for 9,000 yen ($69) a month
Family plan: 10Mbps for 5,000 yen ($38) a month.
While the price is good, the installation and hardware costs are high. It costs 29,000 yen to hook up the basic plan ($223).
I'm living in the boonies of Nagoya now, but I look forward to moving closer to Nagoya to take advantage of this!
Alex
I just went through the process of having fiber installed to my office by the local cable monopoly in order to get a T3. That's not a cable modem, by the way, and they beat the crap out of the local telephone monopoly when it came to quality and price (cleaner line at a third of the price). Anyway, I watched as they did it.
Fiber is hard to work with. You have to run it all the way back to a powered node... Its not good enough to run it back to a simple splitter. You generally have to fusion-splice it for these applications. Fusion splicing requires special training, expensive equiment and expertise that simple coax does not. No more installation contractors whose "in" was ownership of a van and a $250 course.
You could conceivably run cable from the powered location out to subpanels and then run fiber from the home to the subpanels with jacks rather than splices. By sending out the installers with preterminated lengths in 50' increments and instructing them to coil the excess at the home, it could be done. But if the connectors get dirty, its toast, pulling preterminated fiber is significantly more difficult than pulling unterminated wire, and either way its several times as expensive as coax.
Coax has plenty of bandwidth. Do you have any idea how much bandwidth is available in 60 analog television channels? Any idea how little bandwidth it takes to make a phone call? With a rational combination of the various multiplexing techniques (FDM, TDM, CDM) and an upper bound around 100 for the number of customers served on a particular coax segment, you could easily accomodate enough bandwidth to play one DVD movie, multiple phone calls and high speed internet all at once in each home.
Add a second coaxial cable and you can triple the number served on a segment by moving the head-end transmissions to one cable and the subscriber transmissions to the other. But best of all: Joe in a truck can still install the service in a subscriber's home without costing the company a fortune.
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion.
I live in a condo complex. There are a few other large condo complexes surrounding us. We could install the gear (one-time charge), carry the entire Dish Network datastream (maybe they'd subsidize us?), maybe figure out how to retransmit the HDTV over-the-air datastreams (20Mb/sec each), have our Internet access plugged into a fractional DS3 feed, and if one of the local telecom companies wants to make use of the POTS ports to provide us with a competitor to Ameritech, that works too. If Earthlink or some other ISP wants to handle the Internet feed and customer support, groovy.
Of course, it'd be simpler to just do pure Ethernet, but it might be an easier sell to the community if we could do DBS TV too. Just plug in your satellite receiver, call Dish Network with your credit card number, and vegitate to your heart's content. Maintenance shouldn't be too big a deal.
Being fiber, extending the network to neighboring communities shouldn't be too big a deal, if this grand delusion works in the first place.
..I posted a link to www.winfirst.com. I wired their data center here in Dallas where they're running contracts to get fiber to downtown and some north dallas (along I75) locations. They used to have walkout maps showing where they were researching and potential neighborhood maps, after a redesign of their site they're gone. Anyway hit that site and get educated, these people will be a real competitor once their network is in place.
How about plugging it into an UPS? My UPS has saved me more than once. I even used one when we had a nationwide power outage (Aug 1996 Malaysia) to provide florescent lighting for three days (actually nights). We recharged it during the day with a gas poewered generator, and we were even able to work on our multimedia project. Now if we could have just found one big enough for the air conditioning we would have been all set.
There are several vendors building hardware in this space. For example, a bunch of my friends and former Packet Engines coworkers started World Wide Packets, which builds boxes that amount to the same thing. They're a two year old startup that is waiting for a market to appear for their hardware. Their stuff rocks, but they only make equipment and don't control the deployment.
FYI Packet Engines was acquired by Alcatel in late 1998. They managed to bungle their way through the acquisition of several companies in a short time, completely crushing out of existence some very promising technology through truly appalling corporate stupidity during what was the biggest boom time in history for ethernet and IP routing infrastructure manufacturers.
Alas, Packet Engines and nearly all of the others are now almost completely gone.
I don't mind you stalking me, but would you mind posting as a user? Helps me keep score.
It's already available in San Diego or Sacramento from www.winfirst.com..the mods haven't seen my post at the bottom yet I guess.
Passive optical networks (PON) are cool, but I think in the long run IP/Ethernet PONs are going to be more flexible than the Marconi stuff. While the standard for EPONs is still being worked out, Alloptic is shipping some gigabit PON equipment already.
This is great, except that fiber to the home just ain't happening. Last mile problem, stubborn telcos, competition between cable and telcos over infrastructure.. The only way this works is if there is a new player in the market willing to spend billions on new fiber to every home, and start a completely new service. There is NO WAY cable or telco gives up on their current technology and starts with this - and that's what it would take to get fiber into the home. We already have copper and coax in every home and this is good enough for the two big players right now. Their page says low deployment cost per home, but what do they mean? $2000? $4000? Compared to less than a thousand for a cable modem or DSL (including head-end equipment)?
Here in lovely Sacramento, we have one thing I've never seen anywhere else.. A choice.
1. AT&T offers cable modems
2. Pac Bell offers phone/DSL
3. A new company called WinFirst (now in Ch. 11, but still operating) offers FTTH.
Heres what I get for about $130/mo.
1 - Phone line with 100 minutes LD, voice mail, caller ID, etc, etc, etc.
2 - All the basic local & Cable TV + 26 HBO/Cinemax.
3 - 10 Mbps symmetrical Internet access. And if only I could find a server that could keep up! I'm limited to 30 GB per month, but you can buy more. But 30 GB goes pretty far.
4. All delivered on fiber by a company who answers the phone. The cable system is crystal clear. Has VOD services.. It's quite cool.
A million dollars a mile? Hmmmm... Then you only need fifty people per mile to cough up the price of a car. (Not that fiber *really* costs a million dollars a mile.)
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Kutztown PA. is currently in the process of installing Fiber-to-the-Home, and should be up and running within a few months. No prices have been announced yet, but seeing is this is a very heavily college student populated town (I being one of them), and all college students are bandwidth hungry, how could the Borough say no? More information can be found here: http://www.kutztownboro.org/TelecomWeb2001.htm
Doesn't it still mandate that telcom's must invest in expensive fiber optic rollouts,
Fiber is only slightly more expensive at this point than copper, and telecoms are scheduled to replace about 300,000 miles of copper this year alone. Furthermore, the upkeep of passive optical networks is less than copper due to no need for amplifiers and other electrics.
It took my cable company years and $$$$$$ to replace the splitters to go up to 1000 MHz so they could offer digital TV and internet access. And that was *just* the splitters in the outdoor enclosures. Imagine digging up or laying down new cable...(and it would be fiber so labour would be higher and cable would be more expensive)
The splitter wasn't the problem. The problem was rolling the truck. That is what cable and telecoms are truly concerned about, because a $2 splitter just doesn't compare to a $40 man hour and a truck. The idea that fiber is more exspensive to work with is quickly becoming a myth, and at the present time the added installation cost is almost immediately recouped from cheaper operating expenses. Can you imagine how much it cost to provide battery backed power to a remote amplifier station every couple of miles. A PON will span 30miles with no amplification.
Can anyone find anything resembling a price tag? I Looked over the website and the only refference to money that I could find was an "Investors" link, LOL!
Alcatel has been advertising to vendors (ie, the telecoms) that they can easily provide the "triple play" for less than what people are paying now and still have a 3 to 5 year recovery period.
Last I heard in IEEE journal a year ago, this kind of 1-fiber line to your house is more of what Ameritech and Comcast are going to use to thwack the telephone companies, and not vice versa.
Don't believe everything you read in IEEE then. Telecoms are testing PONs with plans to roll them out RSN. The big hurdle is regulatory (as usual). The FCC doesn't allow telecoms to send video. Hard to deliver a triple play that way. It is true that some of the cable companies are also looking at fiber, because it is cheaper than copper and coax has some realistic bandwidth limits. Once the fiber is in the ground, it doesn't react with water and can be upgraded with end equipment for pratically infinite bandwidth.
The real kicker right now is that the telecoms are running scared of the cable guys. ADSL can't deliver TV, phone and data. It just doesn't have enough bandwidth for the video. But the cable guys are getting into the phone business. This gives them a huge advantage. Once the FCC lets the big telecom guys sell video, watch for a huge rollout of PON systems.
Fiber is hard to work with.
Things. They are a changin'.
Coax has plenty of bandwidth.
And no one needs more than 640K of memory either.
Finally. This technology won't see much play. Telecoms won't pick it up until it complies with ITU G.983.2. Those guys just don't play with things that aren't based on a written standard because of the headaches involved with swithing vendors. The only company with a 983.2 compliant PON system is Alcatel (of ADSL fame). You might want to check them out for a system that you might actually see installed at some point in the future.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba