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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.
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.
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.
Fiber has the advantage of lightning protection. Its a favorite for industrial applications and makes sense for residential installations.
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
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.
Sure, run a lot of copper through the house. But what you can also do is run fibre to certain parts of the house, like the attic or something. You don't have to do wall mounts or anything, just have the fibre in the walls. Then, when it does come down to actually needing fibre, you have it run, you just need to hook it up in the right places.
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
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.
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