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Welcome to the Fiberhood
cpfeifer writes "According to this article in the Washington Post, high-end subdivisions are running fiber-optic cable to each house and rolling the cost of broadband, digital cable and local phone service into the home owners association cost. Apparantly home pre-wired for broadband have a better resale value and higher demand in the market."
Fibre to the door has been on my wishlist for *years*!
Awsome.. I wish they would've done that to my house!
At Celebration, Florida. That's the perfect town that Disney created. My neighborhood is just starting to do this, thanks to me :). It really does increase resale value in the suburbs, though, as the computer programmers working in the city move out to research labs and cushier jobs in the suburbs, they want their broadband. The initiative in my neighborhood is expected to increase housing values five percents (about $10,000!). We also expect the neighborhood to gain reputation as a home for high-rolling techies, which should increase values further. A very big gain in money for small investment. I highly recommend it.
To roll the cost of infrastructure in, but it's another to tie the service in. What if it quite simply sucks? You lose the option of finding another provider.
Well, I guess this is part of the reason I'd never live in one of these "communities."
The only problem this poses is a lack of competition by local companies. If the costs are all rolled into the association cost, then this wouldn't allow the homeowners to actually choose their cable and phone providers. Although many places already have instances where there is not much choice, there are many others where several companies are competing, and allowing the subdivision to decide this for its homeowners could be a bad thing.
I want to see the day when broadband or better runs side by side electrical cables(so long as they don't interfere with each other) and internet bills are just another household bill When can we see this happen? or will anti competitive behaviour get the better?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
After reading this article, I have one question, "Why fiber?"
Give me a new house, smartly wired with high quality cat-5, and a well designed termination closet. I'll add an 802.11[a|b|g] access point or three and its looking like a dream setup to me.
I can get an entire switched ethernet setup for a fraction of the price it will cost me to get the ATM switches and nics for this place!
Fiber has a theoretical bandwidth in the Gbps if not Tbps range. This seems like overkill for all my Quake, P0rn, and recipe archival needs.
This wonderful article from Wired (the mag, not the website) shows that fiber is already part of the sales pitch of any modern realtor. Way to go, Korea!
Nobox: Only simple products.
...I'd just be happy to see a situation where broadband is actually available in this area. At the moment, despite the fact that I'm happy to pay for it, there's no company which will actually supply it to this area. :/
Bah, the UK can really suck sometimes
talk about expensive to do! The contractor has got to subcontract to a fibre installation company to get the work done and hope that the worksers don't sut it with the back hoes!
Sounds Like a mess, but probibly worth it.
Dude, you need a new nickname. How about "MeAndMyTinFoilHat" ??
I have the opposite view: More broadband spread around everywhere, even though currently in "upscale" areas is a Good Thing(tm). The trend only needs to start somewhere... if they can make it viable (and all the neighbor's kids aren't running 0-day warez fests) then more power to them.
For every user?
While the maximum throughput can easily be that fast, the total bandwidth they are getting through those lines can't be more than usual 10-30Kbps/user in most of shared systems. They pay $135/mo for that plus digital cable TV + phone, but phone and cable TV are dirt cheap, so they pay $60-80/mo for the network connection -- comparable with high-end DSL, but this is a shared environment, it's supposed to be cheaper just because they buy the bandwidth for everyone at once. And what are the limitations -- can they run servers, do they have mandatory proxies on that?
Also $100/mo just to "maintain" security and web-controlled sprinklers is insane -- those things are just devices, they run themselves, why the monthly fee?
I doubt that good HOA (if it's HOA maintaining that and not just some company that is getting a hefty profit from that) will jack up the fees that much.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
As a non american can someone tell me what a subdivision is ? Sounds like a failed football team to me.
These neighborhood nazis control how your property looks or what you can do on your own property (learned the hard way) Will they have the same control on the usage of your broadband connection?
My cable bill is $85 a month, that's $40 for TV + $45 for cable modem. I only get ~80 channels, if I wanted digital cable that's another $11 so that's $96 a month. My phone bill is ~$35 for just local service.
That's a total of $131. These people are paying $135 and they get a fiber connection. I'd gladly pay $4 extra for a fiber connection.
Not to mention, given that cable providers are going to metered bandwidth on measly 1.5mbps connections, DOCSIS cable modems provide MORE than enough bandwidth for the forseeable future. (That's maxes of 45mbps non-shared down and 11mbps shared up.) But soon enough you won't even be allowed to use that at peak all the time, at least not without paying a lot more money, to the point where you might as well get your own T1, which is... you guessed it, carried over copper.
Want to do me a favor when you wire my home? Run a LOT of copper, and a couple chunks of coax. The fiber would be cute but I doubt I'll ever need fiber to my door, and more to the point, I doubt anyone will ever provide me anything via fiber which wouldn't be better (and more cheaply) provided over copper.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If the AOL Gestapo hears you, you and your entire family could disappear, never to be heard from again!
a beowulf cluster of these?
Obviously it is better to have more than less capacity, no one is denying that.
It occurred to me the other day that the natural gas companies are in the perfect position to become the sole utility provider.
They have to bury their pipes anyway. It's dead easy to also run fiber at the same time. Goodbye telco. Add in some efficient fuel cells for electricity, and the power companies are toast. Heck, they could do damage to auto gas stations by figuring out how to refuel electric cars.
What I particularly like about this scheme is that power poles would disappear. What an eyesore they are!
(well, i can dream, anyway...)
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Don't forget these houses could be there for the next 50 years or more. Are you saying they will not want more than 1 Gigabit per second, over the entire life of the building?
-Ian
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Wonder if the home owners associations will try and regulate the content that goes over those fibers next.
First of all, change comes to the home builders market about ten years after the decision is first raised. It's only within the last couple years that home builders are defaulting to CAT-5 cable..maybe in a few years we'll have CAT-6e or whatever, but anyway...the point is that people have been telling these developers that they are idiots for giving away last-mile easement rights to the local monopolies.
These developers just assume that they HAVE to do it, or that no one will buy their homes without PacBell/AT&T service (insert your appropriate local monopoly here). This couldn't be further from the truth. One of the deciding factors in choosing where I lived was the availablility of CHOICE. Note I said choice, not alternate carriers.
What happens if you only have an alternative carrier who runs only fiber to the home, and then setups a boilerplate EULA with terms that you don't agree to? The monopolies have to get permission from the Public Utilities Commission before they change any of the long standing rules and regulations. And, in theory, if they tried to do something devious, like charging you extra for modem versus voice calls (which they tried) we can cry loudly to the PUC and get it defeated (which fortunately we did or the Internet might not have grown at the rate that it did).
The best thing a developer could do is lay smurf tubes all over the place and then leasing them to whatever provider is interested in setting up service. Then, fill one set of tubes with fiber infrastructer and lease that to whoever wants to provide service (be it data, video, VoIP, whatever) over that fiber. Free open access to whoever wants it. Heck, the local monopolies might even use one of their business-class subdivisions to provide those kinda of services to home level consumers for once. They might even do it at a price consumers can afford.
But the point is you need choice. Where I live, we have fiber to the home service. But the company went bankrupt and it now my fiber to the home service is being run by the company who purchased them. So far, nothing has changed, but I'm glad that just in case they decide to do somethign stupid...I can always come crawling back to the local monopolies because this development just happens to have wiring for both.
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
This is a good thing even if it ends up burning a few people or doesn't "fit" with some people's own style.
People have complained already "lack of competition." Hello? With access to Cable Internet as well as DSL? It's simple for business people to understand that when there are obvious options, and obvious interest in the product, it's an obvious market zone to install services if they aren't already present. The only possible reason I could imagine they [cable and DSL] wouldn't want to enter that market is that the competition would drive prices lower and they wouldn't make "as much" money. Eventually, demand for the service at a reasonable and acceptable price will be met. This is just another step in that direction.
So evidently one has to be able to afford a McMansion in order to get a broadband connection -- all because of monopolies on the last mile (Cable and telco).
Homeowner's Associations are corporations that, by virtue of you owning a home in a certain area, have total control over your property, require annual fees, and can take away your home if you don't pay those fees.
As a corporation, Homeowner's Associations actions aren't limited by a constitution or bill of rights. If you publicly disagree with them, the officers of the corporation may decide to hire someone to paint your house and send you the bill.
Though things are slightly better in fully-sold neighborhoods (ones where the shares of the corporation belong entirely to the residents of the neighborhood), they're still vulnerable to abuse by the officers. Woe to you if you live in an area with even a few homes still owned by The Developer, who typically has four votes for every one you have.
Do you really want a company with this much power already to have control over your phone lines, cable, and Internet access? Remember, if you miss a bill, they can get a lien on your house and forclose.
For a time, I worked in the construction racket, doing fiberglass insulation. Yeah, seeing the homes wired for broadband is neat, but then again, the quality of the homes I insulaetd lacked HEAVILY. S&A Homes is the biggest culprit. They build homes with warped 2x4s, particle board, and other cheap materials. And then they sell these shacks for somewhere in excess of $200G or more. I swear that the fibre is the most expensive part.
If you want to go this route and are building a new home, make sure you DEMAND that your home is at least framed in 2x6s (2x10 is optimal, IMHO) and covered in strong plywood. If I were the homeowner, I wouldn't be happy to know that someone can break into my home with a super soaker and a pocket knife...
Be careful which builder you choose, and make sure you supervise the construction at every step. Otherwise, the resale value won't be shit, fiber or not. Just another case of buyer beware...
Now, let's see how many ACs flame me because they know better. Seems to be a curse of mine lately...
Blog Prophyts - Right On, Man
Amen.
The last thing anyone needs is their homeowner's association to be the Friendly Neighborhood Monopoly.
Most of these people are not even using most of the connection. Most of them said that they just check their email and go to online newspapers. Cable/DSL would be more than sufficient for these people. Give the fiber to me!
All my posts got modded down when I wrote that I'm a Mensa member.
People probably did not believe you were a Mensa member when you could not even get the tenses of verbs to match in your sentences. Now go into your profile and edit the sig line so that it reads:
All my posts got modded down when I wrote that I was a Mensa member.
First, language is about communicating first and foremost. Dogma, grammatical or otherwise, should always take last place behind simple, straightforward, interhuman communication.
Second, I find absolutely nothing wrong with the tenses as used in the original.
The sentence communicates the idea that his posts were modded down when he wrote that he is and remains a member of mensa.
This to me actually communites more information, in a more compact form, than your "corrected" setence, which makes no implication as the writer's current status. Indeed, the corrected version could be read to infer that he is no longer a member of mensa.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of mensa, so judge me as you will, but I find the colloqual use of tenses in the original statement to contain more information than the corrected version, however much the original may fail to adhere to the orthodoxy of grammaticians (who, let us not forget, replaced the English gender-neutral use of 'they' and 'their' when it was in common usage with the male dominance promoting HE and HIS to denote gender neutrality in the early 20th century, not out of any love of the language, but to promote a misogonist political agenda at the time. This has since been somewhat reversed, but only somewhat, in common colloqual use and, as yet, remains in place as a grammatical 'rule' in the formal language. In other words, the grammaticians (I wish to avoid the term grammar nazi, though I know any number of women who would feel extraordinarilly justified in using that term) wield far more "authority" over a living, changing language than they should rightfully be entitled to, and I, for one, have no trouble ignoring them when it suits me. I suspect our (erstwhile?) mensa member feels similarly).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
A customer-owned, fiber, "last-mile" and a carrier-neutral colo is as important as the technology itself. Otherwise the fiber loop will be prey to monopolistic behavior and society will lose.
Fortunately, the majority of our roads are not toll roads and they are not controlled by private monopolists. Our information links need to meet these same standards. Municipal or customer ownership of the last mile and a carrier-neutral colo are musts for progress.
PS. Connect our schools and libraries first.
The could deside to install filtering "for the children. Luckly, there are enough legal issues involved in filtering at the neighborhood level that the home owners association would likely just offer a filtering proxy as a service.. and (unfairly) make everyone pay for it.
The good news is that your neighbors are likely a lot of ignorent baffons when it comes to technology, so the few people who (a) are tech savy and (b) are willing to contribute the effort to the neighborhood could exercise enough power to prevent bandwidth caps. Hopefully these people would be honest enough to bill the extra bandwidth to the right people.
Anyway, the classical home owners association nazis are not a major threat here. Assuming they actually vote on things you should be able to manage things like cost quite effectivly. Heck, I say do this for phone lines too and cut your monthly phone bill in half. The real risk here is that the developer would maintain significant control over the homeowners. You could end up paying more for internet if the developer was taking a cut off the monthly service.. or taking a kickback for forcing the development to stay with a specific provider.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
Dude, you need to stop getting yourself trolled all the time.
Learn to use punctuation correctly. If you had half a brain, perhaps you'd also be able to avoid the moronic neo-republican cliches.
As usual, I'll post the URL to the page where my parent's 100 Mbps FTTH project is described.
It has been slashdotted before (it could stand the load, thanks to http://www.acc.umu.se) and have had over 70 000 visitors (not all unique).
Anyway, the page is at http://www.acc.umu.se/~tfytbk/mattgrand and on the page in my signature.
I have 1 Gbps Internet access@home
Mensa is a circle-jerk for wanna-be-intellectual tools.
This isn't really new. This has been happening in downtown Vancouver for 3-4 years now. If you live in any one of the numberous high rises, you can get fiber for US$20/month. 10mbps. Used to be unmetered but I think they have soft restrictions in place now. It was great when I had it, but alas I moved out of downtown.
Emily Kemp, a telemarketing consultant who works out of her home, said she and her husband moved from a non-wired townhouse in another part of Broadlands to the wired Southern Walk neighborhood for space reasons...
"Telemarketing Consultant" and really good Internet connection
Mensa is a circle-jerk for wanna-be-intellectual tools.
That is my feeling, too. That is the reason that I turned down an invitation to join after attending one meeting as a guest.
What is a surprise is that it doesn't appear to be just geeks who dig this stuff.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
Check out http://www.winfirst.com. They're pioneers in this field and it's available in a few towns already.
If Max Kipfer does the same kind of job running OpenBand that he did while he ran Cablevision of Loudoun (bought by Adelphia a few years ago), homeowners can expect overpriced service on a poorly-maintained system.
And since nobody else will likely be able to bury anything in that neighborhood, they'll be stuck with them for POTS and Internet access. Verizon may suck at a lot of things, but they're real good at making sure you have a dial tone when you need to call 911 in the middle of the night. (Fortunately, they can't restrict DBS dishes, so at least there's an escape route for TV.)
First, language is about communicating first and foremost.
;-)
Why does that sentence remind me of Spinal Tap's song Tonight I'm Gonna Rock You Tonight?
Second, I find absolutely nothing wrong with the tenses as used in the original.
Your inability to recognize the error does not mean that it does not exist.
I am not, nor have I ever been, a member of mensa, so judge me as you will
I won't judge you, but rather what you write.
I don't know much about the copper vs fiber stuff, but I do know that I've got fiber between my house and the CO and I can't get squat for good Internet access. DSL is right out, since it's a copper-only solution. The local cable company doesn't offer Internet access and the satellite company won't think of offering Internet access to anything that's not Windows. (Though I'll admit that these last two have nothing to do with fiber.)
So, I've got fiber. Yea. Big whoop. What does this matter? How can I turn this situation around without going broke?
-sig
I find this article to be about four years too late. Four years ago, a community (Pheasant Run Crossing) in the town of Blacksburg, VA (home of Virginia Tech) already was running fiber to the home. Before they even started the foundation, they had already carved up the roads to lay in the two pairs (4 separate for redundancy) of fiber from the little communication building they had built next to the central mail kiosk. They had ran these pairs of fiber to all the proposed lots that they were building and allowed outside ISP to bid for the contract to provide the internet access. When I was there before graduation, the company that was providing the service was Floyd Communications. A small ISP that much to my surprise was running a serious network and provided some bad ass uptimes. I don't ever recall our network ever being out. With the exception of our own power outage which was only 2 times during 2.5 years that I lived there. Though at the time my friends and I ran a colocation center and also at the time, home of darksideresearch.com.
:-) Each room had its own RJ45 jack so it was straight plug and play. We ran the old Linux kernel hack that provided the original IP Masquerading! LOL :-)
The price was great! $30/month for one single static IP. Not DHCP! If you wanted more than one, they provided awesome deals. $27/month for two and even less if u wanted more.
Each town home had its own Fiber to 10base hub. Yeah I know it's only 10base, but hey, I was still getting 100KBps (not bits)on many IRC dcc bots
When I graduated from VT in 2000, and moved up to Northern Virginia (some dubbed the silicon valley of the East Coast) much to my surprise cable modem was not a common thing, and when I asked around about ppl putting in fiber into the home, all the builders gave me the strangest look.
Go hokies!
The future of fiber-to-the home is Ethernet-like passive optical networks.
where is the reply button for your rants!
What is a journal good for if people can't discuss your opinions?
Perhaps he doesn't want to hear from you. Though he may very well be wrong, that doesn't obligate him to listen to you. Just as you're not obligated to read his "rants". Funny how that works.
Maybe english is not his native language.
There are plenty of Mensa's around the world
(I think you should have added another possibility:
All my posts get modded down when I write I'm a Mensa member
)
Avery Ranch in Ausitn Texas is a 4500 home master planned "community". I'm building there. All homes have fibre. Service is from Clearworks. I'll get a 10MB ethernet drop, plain-ole-telephone, vide entertainment, and security monitorying for about $150/mo. Not bad.
I can upgrade to a fast-ethernet link for another $100/month. As far as I know, there are no restrictions on the kind of servers I can run on the net. This is unlike TimeWarner which has all kinds of restrictions.
Jibe!
What is a journal good for if people can't discuss your opinions?
It's like a book -- you know, where the author expresses their views and you read them. I'd be happy to discuss them with you, but I don't want everyone to be able to permanently leave their opinions in my journal. At one time, I thought about allowing discussion, but after seeing some of the unpleasant, insulting, and rude comments that appear on Slashdot, I thought better of it.
With all the former customers for fiber hardware gone south for an extended winter, how many adjacent homes with a common interest in fiber would it take to make it economical, using hardware that ought to be presently available cheap? I'm not talking public right-of-way, but private, if say I and 20 of my neighbors can work out to string a local fiber net between our properties. So the cost would be fiber plus hardware plus leasing a line in plus some Linux boxen for routing and whatever local services the co-op wanted to run. What would the local fiber plus hardware come to? How many ways would a fiber line into the block need to be split before rent on the thing got under $100 a month per co-op member?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
(I think you should have added another possibility:
All my posts get modded down when I write I'm a Mensa member)
A very good suggestion. Another option would be:
Every time that I have mentioned being a Mensa member, my post was modded down.
Your point about English perhaps not being his native language is well-taken, however, from reading his other posts, and taking into account their U.S.-centric nature, I'd be very surprised to learn he was not a native English speaker.
What I have to wonder is this: If writing that he is a Mensa member causes his posts to be modded down, why is that automatically tacked on to each one as a signature?
Knowing the way my assosication operated, and all the stories I have heard about various ones around the country, these are the last people I would want controlling my internet. In my experience in condo living, the oldest retirees' are the ones controling it all, since they have nothing else to do. Within houses and new communities, there is one out here in south orange county, CA, that doesn't even allow people to park in their own driveway overnight. Anyone that parks on the street needs a pass from a homeowner. Anyone in violation get a ticket with an actual cash fine, although I think it's only for the homeowners, not for everyone else.
So what are these associations going to do with my internet access? It will be too expensive, manditory, slow, controlled, serverless to the extreme, with an EULA that will be so restrictive you can't get it out of the envelope it came in.
Oh well, I hope I am being pedantic and paranoid.
-Tom
Not to be too harsh, but saying you were invited to join mensa is as big-headed as saying your in mensa.
Not to be too harsh, but saying you were invited to join mensa is as big-headed as saying your in mensa.
I did not used to mention that until some Mensa member started publically attacking me and saying that I was just jealous of her superior intellect. It's a no-win. If I don't mention it, Mensa members assume that they are superior and that I would never qualify for membership and, if I do mention it, then some people assume it to be bragging.
is it just me, or is the quality of digital cable terrible compaired to normal, coaxial service?
One night, he was out hitting golfballs into the riverbed (yeah, the clue that the development is built in a riverbed in the Phoenix area, where flashfloods are a rarity during monsoon season - no clues here) from his backyard - when he hit one and it hit a fence post...
Bounced off the fencepost (and missed him) and hit the house! Went THROUGH the wall, clean through - leaving a golf-ball sized hole, damage on the inside of the house (golf ball bouncing around). There was nothing in between the stucco on the outside and the drywall on the inside - just insulation and some styrofoam board!
My wife and I, well - we bought a home made from block, in an established neighborhood. Our house is much older (going on 30 years), but it has better construction, looks nice, great neighborhood, and best of all...
NO DAMN HOA!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
So you've moved into a house tract or condo complex with fiber providing cable television, your telephone service, and internet connectivity. How much is it going to cost to make sure your telephone service meets the federal requirement for uptime?
The law says your primary telephone service needs to have a full time backup in times of emergency and otherwise shouldn't be going down like a drunken prom date. If you look up many fiber provider's terms of service you'll notice you HAVE to pay for supplimentary copper lines from a regular phone company to meet said requirements. Are these fiber lines going to have backup generators and all that redundant fanciness or will these home owners need trditional copper lines?
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
What I have to wonder is this: If writing that he is a Mensa member causes his posts to be modded down, why is that automatically tacked on to each one as a signature?
...you see a car parked away from all of the other cars and you park right next to it.
I took it for a joke, a call to 'downmod', the first time I read it.
As for your journal, I think may be you're right not to open it... it's true that some people are vandals and would ruin it.
So let me ask you here what I would have asked in your journal if it were open:
Not that I do that, but what's wrong with
Is it a habit in the US to do that? I never saw that and would not care if it happened...
Not that I do that, but what's wrong with ...you see a car parked away from all of the other cars and you park right next to it.
Is it a habit in the US to do that? I never saw that and would not care if it happened...
Some people park their car in an distant, open area of a parking lot because they are trying to avoid door dents. In other cases, drivers with, or drivers transporting people with, bad backs, arthritis, or other medical problems may park there so they can fully open the doors to be able to get in more easily.
If someone wants to avoid damage to the car, or parked out there because of a medical problem, I think it's rude to park right next to them.
"...home owner association..." -- that's the deal-breaker. There's no way in hell I'm buying a house in an HOA community and paying US $50 - 250 a month for an organization that, based on past experience, does nothing but tell me what I can't do with the house I just spent several hundred thousand dollars for. "Oh, you want to fly a flag? Nope, can't do that." "Oh, you want to put up an outdoor light that's brighter, clearly illuminates the house number, and turns on and off with the daylight? Nope, sorry." "Oh, you want to build a deck with railing that runs vertically or diagonally so that your children can't fall through? Nope, it must be horizontal. But we do offer bitchin' broadband!" No, thanks, it's not worth the cost or the aggravation. I could put those monthly HOA dues towards my own broadband that doesn't come with those gargantuan strings attached, or I'll get together with the neighbors in our non-HOA -- THANK GOD! -- neighborhood and roll our own wireless coop or something of that ilk.
if video and 2nd voice line are seen as necessities to make the dollar equations come out right, does that force the choice away from ethernet-over-fiber?