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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."
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.
ok great, so you have fiber to your house. That doesn't mean you are going to have MONSTER bandwith to your house as well. At least not yet.
So you're still waiting.
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.
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.
... and personally, I'd buy a house without the wiring and do it myself. Most of the "several thousand dollars" to rewire the place after it's built is labor costs. This sounds like an easy way to increase a house's value with via sweat equity, and there was a lot less sweat involved with running CAT5 than with the kitchen cabinets & tial in my present house!
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
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.
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!
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!"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
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-- 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).
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.
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
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 orginal post suggestted that fiber was overkill, and I'd have to agree. A fully switched 100MBPS network with 802.1a WAP in the house and 1 DSL or even cable modem pipe up to the house would do fine. Right now I work in a building setup like this, except with a T1 to the home office, and it supports >100 people.
Though your certainly right. I might pay to get fiber into the house, depending on cost, but take it from there myself.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
Wow... how much does 8MB/ps cost? That's like 8x10^6 TB/s!
Anyway, I wish my neighborhood did something like that. We had a hard enough time trying to get AT&T to put in regular cable TV, let alone cable internet (and this is in a middle- to high-end Dallas suburb).
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
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.
Check out http://www.winfirst.com. They're pioneers in this field and it's available in a few towns already.
I know lots of people with fiber to their house. None of them have DSL. The telcos are not spending the money on providing fiber bandwidth to homes.
Fiber means shit, if the telco does nothing with it.
Most people live in areas where they can get high-speed Internet access, the problem is the Telcos/Cablecos do not want to spend the money! Man, I hate reading this crap about high speed bandwidth options, there is no options, you get what your local companies give you. Most of us get squat.
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.
and in this case you might want to check outt _t_and_c .pdf
the service terms:
http://www.openband.net/pdf_files/Interne
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.
The future of fiber-to-the home is Ethernet-like passive optical networks.
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
You probably have a copper loop from your house to a box nearby in your neighborhood, with a fiber line from that box to the phone company's Central Office. The phone company can install a remote terminal at that box, and connect the end of your copper loop to that, so you can still get DSL. The actual DSL part of the line is just from your house to that box; from there the data is encapsulated in ATM cells and sent over fiber, and everything else works as normal. The good news is, your copper loop is under 2,000 feet, so you should have a fantastic connection. The bad news is, a remote terminal may be less reliable (and harder to service) than a DSLAM in the CO, so it may go down from time to time. The other bad news is, the phone comapny is probably too cheap to install one in your neighborhood, but it doesn't hurt to keep asking.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
So what happens when an "email marketing consultant" moves in next door and gets the /24 blocked for all eternity? Even the bloody baseball bats won't fix that problem.
You make a good point, and certainly if it makes economic sense for me I'd get the fiber. However:
1. I work for an R&D organization so it isn't just a 100 people browsing the web & emailing, it's mostly engineers moving schematics, board designs, code, & binaries between us & contractors, customers, & other company sites.
2. I downloaded the RedHat 7.3 ISOs on my cable modem at home (Comcast) in about 5 hours. That's after they started capping rates.
Considering the comments you've made, I'll certainly investigate & compare my options carefully before deciding the route to go.
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." --Napoleon Bonaparte
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.