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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?
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?
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?
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That will work great until the first plumber to rotoroot it turns your fiber lines to spaghetti. Of course when you say your internet when down the toilet, you will be mostly correct.
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
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).
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 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
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