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Welcome to the Fiberhood

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the wont-you-be-my-neighbor dept.

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."

5 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Look at Korea by AdamInParadise · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.
  2. Re:Fiber to the door is plain silly by autopr0n · · Score: 4, Informative

    You can get a gigabit over fairly long runs of cat5 copper

    I don't think many people live less then 100m from the phone office

    why do you need fiber? Do you actually anticipate having more than a gigabit of traffic to your house? It costs too much to terminate the stuff. People who buy a house just because it has fiber are missing out on reality.

    Does anyone anticipate ever having more then 640k of ram? Think about how long a home is going to be around.

    --
    autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
  3. Re:Marketing Over Practicality by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
    Really?

    Well here's a few reasons why they went with the ATM of Fibre solution:

    1. Distance - fiber doesn't suffer from the same distance limitations. Especially in this case, where it is being run to 45 homes.
    2. QOS - There are other services besides their Internet connection, including telephone and digital cable. Both of these require the QOS levels that ATM can provide.
    3. I'm sure that it is not an ATM to-the-desktop setup. Most home would have a media converter in the basement that would put the ethernet frames over ATM.
  4. Re:Marketing Over Practicality by dwkunkel · · Score: 3, Informative

    The reason for fiber: cat 5 is limited to cable runs of 100 meters but fiber's limits are measured in Kilometers.

    Pulte Homes built a new 52 home developement here in Santa Clara, CA and contracted to FiberRide to handle connecting them to the internet. Each house is wired inside with cat 5 to each room. The houses are then connected to a central data center by fiber. This data center houses a Ciena optical switch which is directly connected to the internet.

    Bandwidth is rate-limited at the data center and each house gets as much symetrical bandwith as the owners are willing to pay for. $29/month gets you 200kps. I'm not sure about the upper limit, but I think it's in the 8MB/ps range.

    The initial cost of installing the cable runs and the data center is included with the purchase price of the house just like other utilites. FiberRide has wired a number of other new communities using the same layout and they have several competitors which are in essentially the same business.

  5. Re:It's one thing.. by jhereg · · Score: 3, Informative

    and in this case you might want to check out
    the service terms:
    http://www.openband.net/pdf_files/Internet _t_and_c .pdf

    Note the part about how they reserve the right to
    collect info on your browsing habits.

    And of course even though that have all this acces
    you still can't host any services.