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?

Comments

But what about upstream connection?

[Doco]

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.