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Optical Fiber for a Small Community?
wildsurf asks: "I live in a small community of about 70 homes, which has been on a septic-tank system for many years, soon to be replaced with a sewer system. Not too exciting, except that this opens up the possibility of laying fiber-optic cable alongside the sewer lines, which could add significant value to the properties, as well as ultra-broadband. (It seems a shame to dig up all the trenches and NOT lay cable.) DSL doesn't work out here, and the cable provider is a bit sketchy, but there's an ultra-high-bandwidth pipe running nearby that we could possibly tap into. Anyway, I figure this would be the perfect audience to ask for recommendations, since I'm not quite sure how to approach this. The homeowner's meeting is next month, and I'd like to know what to suggest to them. Thanks in advance!" Well, if your local media company isn't going to wire your community, the community may just have to foot that bill itself. What would it need to do: what forms would they need to complete; what contractors would they need to hire (especially when piggy-backing on other municipal works); and most importantly, how much would something like this cost?
... is that you would have to attend so many County Commissioner meetings, and get appointed to so many subcommittee advisory panels, that it would take a couple of decades to pull it off. The easy ways to do something like this are more nefarious: Either bribe the sewer contractor, and get him to lay the cable as he's laying the pipe [and tell everyone to keep their mouths shut - remember, it's always easier to be forgiven than to get permission in the first place], or bribe the County Commissioners in the form of campaign contributions.
First, there's the cost. Fiber optics can cost anywhere from $50 to $500 per linear foot so a typical community will require something like $750,000 to wire it properly. That's money that could be spent on playground equipment or a safety officer to watch the kids.
Second is the issue of fresh air, exercise and family values. Which is better for Little Billy? Playing touch football with his friends outside? Or fragging monsters in one window while obsessively reloading porn sites in the other?
No, I'm afraid the Internet is tearing apart small-town America and I want no part of it.
Well, I don't know any of the specifics (it'll be province/state specific anyway), but in the interests of starting a discussion of it: you'd have to at the very least:
;)
First, find out who owns everything involved: The trench, the land it's going through, the pipes, the trunk you want to join, etc. If all are small enough entities you may be able to deal with them directly in which case it may be as simple as hiring a lawyer to write up contracts and hammer on the details of service/etc.
You may need to start up a company/corporate entity to handle the ownership/etc of everything.. this might also help with your smoke-and-mirrors convincing of those involved.. if they're approached by "Waterloo broadband services" (or whatever you call your company) for permission to use their trench/backbone, they may react better than to your community council (which may well be a corporate entity, but still sounds.. well.. grass rootish
Anyone know specific details on any of the above steps?
That optical fiber can probably be threaded through the pipes. After all, they're only filled with, uh, "liquid".
Optical fiber can't be much worse than some of the tree roots that can infest septic lines.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
This guy uses AOL?
If you lay fiber in your subdivision, you're going to have a faster network than AOL themselves!
Laying fiber isn't cheap, neither is the switching etc equipment...
You need to finance this stuff. Fiber optic cable in conduit form is not the same stuff above the cieling in your office. and a town of 70 people? Is there demand for high speed internet? also the nearby 'pipe' you could tap into, are you allowed to?
If you want to do this, it will take a LOT of effort. But, if there is demand, then you should have no problem running fibre to a termination box at each person's house. Finanaces: you pay? who retains the rights for the fibre, and the equipment at the end? Do you want to become an ISP?
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
lay a conduit with a piece of nylon thru it or some other strong wire. you call pull the fibre through AFTER they finish the sewer system so those sewer contractors dont break the fibre cable. :
note that you will have to get lots of permissions from lots of government entities which takes forever. good luck.
for cost figures
The Town of Morrisburg (population 2000) is in the process of deploying a
25km dark fiber network connecting all of their schools, hospitals,
libraries and businesses. They are also building a carrier neutral hotel
across the street from the local telephone company central office.
The total cost - less than $CDN 250,000.
In terms of paying for it -- Can you resell the excess capacity to cable or phone companies? They might appreciate your excess capacity...
How will this network affect property values? Often times it will drive them up... Which is good if you are selling, and not so good if you are paying property taxes...
For more technical details on the Morrisburg fiber build please contact Max
Thomas of Prophet technologies, the company who is building and managing the
fiber network for the town of Morrisburg - mjtoms@prophettech.com
To learn why the town considers fiber networks critical to their future
economic survival contact Roy Brister who chairs the town's
telecommunications committee - insurance@bristergroup.com
And to learn what other communities plans for dark fiber in Eastern Ontario
please contact Birket Foster at birket@mbfoster.com
For costs - you could use these very rough numbers to guess what it will cost you.
Start with around 40 cents per foot for your fiber. (my number on that might be a little old)
What do you want to hook up? Ethernet over single mode fiber will cost a couple of hundred $ per end point. You want more than point-to-point Ethernet? Maybe doing voice, video, etc? Then you are talking significantly more.
You do know that this almost has to be single mode fiber don't you? Single mode fiber is more expensive, and the connections to it are more expensive, but multi-mode fiber has too much dispersion to be usable beyond a couple of hundred meters.
Then there are some installation costs. You may need to pay the city for the right to put the fiber in the trench with the sewer pipe.
The big question is who is going to put up the money to buy the fiber, build a place for all the fiber to go to? How are you going to get a connection to the Net? Just because there is a fiber bundle running down the main road near you doesn't mean that it is that easy to tap into. The owner may not want to talk to you, the fiber may be running highly WDM traffic that makes it cost $100k+ just to install a add/drop multiplexer.
Now - please don't get discouraged by this - I my current employer builds Fiber-To-The-Home equipment, so my livelyhood depends on things like this. It will however take a significant amount of effort to build something like this. It's not as easy as stringing some CAT5 in the dorms to make a floor network.
The Small rural arts town in southern Oregon did this. They made the Ashland fiber network. Provides Internet access to homes and businesses plus cable TV. It is all community owned. See http://www.ashlandfiber.net
lizard boy
Put in conduit. Run fiber/copper/chilled-beer-lines after the construction company has concluded all their digging.
However, it might not be a good idea, because future trenching, sewer work will have to cut the conduit and fiber. That's why then tend to have right-of-ways for things like phone and cable on one side of the road, and the other side for things like water & sewer.
But the cost of running fiber and/or conduit isn't that horribly high if you hire the correct contractor.
This probably has a very simple answer, but for some odd reason, everytime I read about someone installing fiber or having a problem with fiber (like a backhoe cutting something), they talk about where the fiber is underground or in underground piping. I know a lot of new developments, both residential and commercial, have their wiring (cable, television, electrical) all below ground. But can you run fiber above ground, e.g. strung along telephone poles and then run them into buildings, or are the reinforcing strands and jackets of the fiber cables too fragile to handle high wind and storm situations? I guess I'm talking about single mode fiber, the stuff that can run 12 km (some 20 km, some even much further than that).
I don't think that this is quite the golden opportunity you might think it is. As several people have said, the goal should be to put in a conduit now, not the fiber. That is a fairly small project, and wouldn't have a huge impact on the primary project.
However, the trenching for a sewer line isn't quite the same as an ideal layout for coms conduits. They will have a 16" bucket on a backhoe (or thereabouts) for doing a sweer line. Another major concern is slope... "shit don't go up hill!" Logistically, you would end up needing to put the conduit above the sewer pipe. This would forever be a problem with maintaining the sewer. Also, because of the small bucket, it would be significantly more trenching effort to lay the conduit to the side.
Last big concern is manholes and pulling points. For residential service, these things work better in the sidewalk than the street. (Sewer having the opposite preference.)
If you do go ahead with it, I would recommend a 4" conduit with 4-bore innerduct so there are multiple pulling compartments. Costs might limit you to a copper solution for the short-term, but longer-term fiber might be viable.
All aspects of fiberoptic networking are expensive. It's expensive to lay, terminate, splice, repair, utilize, and maintain.
;)
Cable companies, these days, have fiber all over their network, but not to people's homes - the "last mile" is still done with coaxial copper wire.
From what I recall of my visit to the new Time Warner building here, my home town of ~30k is split into 6 nodes. Which is to say: Six fiber runs, for thousands of coaxial drops. It works well.
Coax is cheap. It's cheap to lay, cheap to terminate, easy to splice and repair, and networking gear to utilize it is readily available from consumer-oriented companies like Linksys and Toshiba. It can be serviced by mere mortals with tools available from Radio Shack or Wal-Mart. It can carry DC current to power any amplifiers which are needed in-line, while fiber is completely non-conductive. It is more versatile than fiber; I have a number of devices, from my stereo to my cable modem, which can interface directly with the coax network. I have -zero- which have a fiberoptic port. My apartment building is wired for coax, with fiber nowehre to be seen. So on, so forth.
It is also readily able to stretch the relatively small distances encountered in your community with coax. Single-mode fiber is made to go for tens of miles, and for your application, it's just not needed. Add to this the high cost of plugging people in, and you'll soon find that, beautiful though it may be sitting there underground, your fiber network is completely unused.
Just what the world needs. More dark fiber.
A coax network will also let you install a community antenna for people to use, in the original spirit of cable TV, in addition to providing the financially-dubious service of internet access to a mere 70 homes. It would be an excellent way to supplement the DirecTV dishes which are undoubtedly common where you live, get rid of ugly roof-mounted antennas, and probably be financially feasible to provide for free (built into property taxes or somesuch).
That all said, if all you want to do is put people online, it'd be so much cheaper and easier and, most likely, better to construct a tower large enough to see the entire community, and spray the area with 802.11b. Wireless ethernet, even properly implemented with cellular-style antenna arrays at the head end, parabolic grid antennas mounted on houses, and high-end Cisco Aironet gear all 'round, is still vastly cheaper than anything involving fiber for the masses.
If, having given that some serious research, you still have your heart set on laying cable, it'll be in the plan's best interest to do something with it which might -actually- get used at some point in time -- which is to say, lay anything but fiber.
Consider burying some 500-pair telephone wire and installing a DSLAM at the fire station or other appropriate public structure. You'll have far better luck offering high-end SDSL service than trying to interest people in spending thousands on fiber gear.
Kid-proof tablet..
I won't comment on the business aspect of the project, although I think that installing coax for CATV at the same time could be a nice way to finance the whole thing. Even without the cost of the trenches, it won't be cheap. On the technical side, install single mode fiber : the plain vanilla 10um kind. Basic 1310 nm GBICs for Ethernet 1000BASE-LX routinely are qualified for 3 miles and reach more than 6 miles without a glitch and quite often much more (I get 12 miles routinely in my lab, but, well, yeah, it's a lab environment so it doesn't really count). Beyond 6 miles, you should look at dispersion shifted SMF with 1550nm.
:-) Bidirectionnal optics and PONs are in the work but not there yet. So you always need 2 fibers for a connection.
But in any case, DO NOT INSTALL MULTIMODE FIBER !!! It's more expansive than SMF with for a given conditionning and every single interface standard defined over MMF is moving to SMF. The most important, 100BASE-FX Ethernet, is being reformulated right now by the IEEE 802.3 EFM committee as "100BASE-LX" (not a definitive name), 100Mbit/s duplex over SMF at 1310 nm and will become available in 2003. Equipement pricing will in the same league than 100BASE-FX. So no MMF, no matter what the vendors say. MMF is worthless and has no future.
Ah, and of course, every time you lay down fiber, make sure they come by pairs
SNS Not Sig
I work for the Government and in our County the County is laying Fibre everytime it opens a hole on a major road. I got out of a meeting, today, where the county is looking at expanding it's fibre infrastructure. They are considering making new developments and new business parks lay infrastructure.
DO NOT let anyone talk you into laying COPPER over FIBRE. The cost of fibre should be at or below the cost of copper. And the Fibre equipment is dropping in price. The cost of the fibre is basically the trench.
I would overbuild the fibre or lay conduit. I would also look at forming a CO-OP or a "Non-profit" and then do an RFP(Request For Purposal) to find a LEC or CLEC to provide you with the internet bandwidth. Be sure to put inthe RFP
the TOC that you want to see, I.E. allow the use of VPN's, No DL cap, the ability to run a webserver or what ever.
There is an optical technology called POND which costs approximately $800/port (source and destination) which provides Phone, cable & Broadband.
If you want any more information please send me an email and I will talk to the Network engineer here and send you more information.
-- Tim
TKrabec Pahh
Old Slashdot Article.
All of two seconds with Google. Really.