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Last-Mile Fiber Optic
Johnny Mnemonic writes "The newsletter "The Town Paper" tracks the development of "traditional" new developments--developments with integrated shopping, parks, and that are pedestrian friendly. Their recent issue has an article that describes a new community in Issaquah WA that has, among it's interesting features: a wired LAN in every home, free community Intranet, and a choice for a fiber optic connection. It is probably no coincidence that Microsoft is planning on building 3 million square feet of office space there. How much is a pre-wired house worth to you? What will this do for community building?"
I swear you are a long cable arent ya?
While it would be cool to have fiber to every house, I hope that free Intranet(cough, taxes) has alot of good porn and mp3's. I doubt that the CO is going to have a few OC12's, so what good all that speed for the next ??? years(besides 1MS ping neighbourhood deathmatches)?
As long as no fuundimental religion is included, i'm all for a fiber connection that's free of charge, where can I sign up?
Hey, this is my sig, if you don't like it, STOP READING MY POSTS!
This is a pretty good plan--the "last mile" has always been the slow point in internet connections.
This will also do wonders for the local economy; having built-in fiber will be a massive attraction to tech businesses. I daresay we'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing from now on.
Not only will I be able to hear my neighbors through the walls; this means increased fps on the hidden X-10 camera!
I always wondered why urban comunities didn't have all the wiring and fiber available to the residents. Large apartment buildings next to eachother would probably find it cheaper to have one large connection into the complexes and hire a network technican, than to have separate service providers (DSL, cable, etc) for each resident..
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Free your mind.
If the Microsoft involvement means MSN has to be my ISP, I'd pass.
Since I have wired every dwelling I have occupied with cat5 and a patch panel since 1986, this doesn't seem so much forward looking to me as finally catching up. I wonder how the community Intranet will be administered, if it is anything like the "community parks" these developments usually include to sell the units, then chances are it is going to be left to virtually grow over with weeds (unpatched servers, slow hubs/switches) after the units have been purchased. Of course, since Microsoft is moving in, it might become yet another way to promote MSN.
Of course, it seems more cost-effective to just blanket the area with Wi-Fi...
The best way to do is to be.
This is a very common thing in Washington, especially in Issaquah. I'm not sure if I've visted this location, but I went to one like it in the same area... they had a little courtyard type deal with a little cafe, a couple restaurants, a grocery store, and a video rental place. There is also complete excersize and sports facilites, a community garden, a large playground, etc. The tie-in with Microsoft only makes sense... nearly everyone that lives there is somehow involved with them.
sig.
A pre-wired house isn't worth much, to a geek like me. To someone else it's probably worth a lot.
The reason? Well, being a geek I would want my wires in a very specific configuration just for me. I would be pissed off about having the jack in the wrong part of the wall. I wouldn't like having to modify my computing to match the house. I want the house to match the way I like to do things. Ideally I would have one room of the house with many computers in it and many cables. I would have an office with one computer in it, wired. Every other room in the house woul be accomodated by a single WAP.
If it's expensive fiber or a configuration I have to adapt to, rather than one that adapts to me I wont like it.
Non geek people would love it though, if they can get it to work.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Only the the high priced crips have the Internet hooked up. If you buy a 120,000 house, no connection. Damn, the WHITE MAN is always trying to screw me.
Did someone try this around the turn of the century with the works even being paid in company script to be used in company stores?
Of course, it seems more cost-effective to just blanket the area with Wi-Fi...
:)
Just picking! I know what you meant!
Blanketing the area with Wi-Fi misses the point behind this....ie:easily upgradeable last mile delivery. Current Wi-Fi speeds are great for small areas, but shared 11Mbit (or 54 or whatever) will only last so long. Fiber, however, has nearly unlimited capacity, for all intents and purposes.
Put Wi-Fi in, and you'll be replacing it in 5 or 6 years due to larger bandwidth needs. Use fiber, and in 5-6 years you'll STILL be thinking how to saturate that link. Oh, and BTW, Cat 5 hasn't been around since '86
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
For some reason people always mistake the word "fibre" for nirvana, computing paradise, the valhalla of networking. Fact is I've got cable internet and it can handle up to 10Mbps, far more than they actually give me. I'd kill for a 10Mbit link, let alone 100Mbit. The thing that kills you isn't the physical layer, it's the routing and throttling your ISP does -- fibre in itself changes nothing. Give me cable internet with fast routing and no bandwidth caps over fibre any day...
Duh. I ment the last last century. It's 21st now. Me fail english that's unpossible!
ugh, they should. would get rid of so much crap
you linux people are so funny... really, what a great and witty connection. except for the fact that microsoft doesn't own the place and microsoft doesn't own any of the stores in the place. bleh...
A pre-wired house, yes I'd love it.
But a whole intranet community? I don't like the idea of being LANned up with the whole estate. Surely there'll be plenty of people who have no idea how to secure their boxes and suchlike...? Could easily be a black hats heaven, especially in a corporate environment.
Mind you, it'd give the opportunity for the biggest beowulf-cluster-of-LAN-parties ever.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
That would be quite interesting. I'd have to say gaming would rock, but I sure hope all the Joe Windows users know how to use Windows Update...
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"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
Forget the long hair.. nevermind the tie-dye shirt.. I'm sure those wouldn't make any difference at all to my neighbors, but I don't have a single Windows machine in the house! I'd never fit in.
chown -R us
Working in the IT dept for the city of Isssaquah I have seen the MS campus scaled back and/or put on hold enough times to invite Duke Nukem Forever comparisons. I cant wait to see these million dollar homes go on the market without any real incentive for power geeks to move there.
The idea of building fiber to the home in new developments is not a bad idea in some locations. In others, it makes no sense at all. The issue for builders is going to be whether the item is a value-add for their buyers. Right now, there is just no compelling reason to have fiber to newly developed houses in most places. WiFi or cable or DSl are quite simply enough. In certain areas that are R&D hotbeds or technology havens, perhaps. In most of the rest of the US it just makes no sense.
A new 2000-2500 square foot house on a half acre costs about 150-200k here. Tack on a grand or even $500 for just 10 base T wiring, which is a feature that most people will not use, really eats into your margins as a builder. Why do it?
As I mentioned above, you have to look at your area and your demographics if you are a contractor/developer. There may be niches for this, but I just do not see it being standard for all new development.
FWIW, any house I build or do any significant renovations to will have more network ports than phone jacks. If I were building houses for others, there's no way I'd sink the money into it.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
Once you move in, they drop the price they pay for each basket of peaches you pick.
Your Microsoft money can only be "activated" at the company store.
And that free internet comes from the mandatory homeowners association fees.
On the first month of home sales, Red Hat should offer fresh boxed copies of Linux (yes, with the usual support) to each new resident. Just drop off the promotional crate with the sales agent; it's just like some laundry detergent, barbecue briquette or furniture coupons that other subdivisions offer their new home-owning residents.
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I've died? Gone to Heaven? Wow. Free Fibre. That's better than free soup from the Soup Nazi! I hope more towns do this, near my house in Kingston, ON. :)
no more than an unwired house.
It took me all of a saturday to run cat5 to four bedrooms, my wife and I's offices, the rec room (xbox/ps2/divx box), the living room (another xbox), the other living room, and the 'arcade' room thats just sort of an extra room in this fucked up house.
Short of that, there are 'power plug' networks, phone line networks, and wireless, all of which I've used successfully (and transparently). But 100mbit on my local lan (with gigabit in the future) is great.
A community intranet? I really dont want to see the beastiality incest porn that my hillbilly neighbours no doubt live on.
As for more b/w to the demarking point outside, that's all fine by me. But I doubt I'd be willing to pay any more than I do now for my plain jane cablemodem.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
or any other communist nation:
using the latest and greatest technology would be mandated by the state.
How horrible does communism sound now?
"We met at a Starbucks. She was in one that was across the street from the one I was in"
"We both feel so lucky to be living in a time of such wonderful catalogs."
"And this is my boy, Sherman. Speak, Sherman." "Hello." "Good boy."
10 yeara ago, fiber was the obvious best choice for high-bandwidth connections. Nowadays, though, a good chunk of coaxial cable seems to be a more practical choice.
A cable modem capable of communicating at 20+mbps goes for about $80. 100 of them can coexist politely on the same broadcast domain.
On the other hand, an optical transceiver costs about 10x as much, is very picky about how the connection is terminated, and doesn't compensate automatically for differing power levels (anybody who carries a bag of attenuators around a colo knows allllll about that:)
For linking cabinet c19.33 to the meet-me room at 1 Wilshire? Gimme fiber. Linking two POP's together across town? Single-mode fiber!
Connecting my house to the internet? Gimme copper. Preferably coax.
Fiber, implemented at the carrier level, is an incredibly efficient transmission medium; I lease OC48 wavelengths in the same physical fiber as half a dozen other companies, and I get a lot of bandwidth for a (comparatively) smaller price. But I don't use fiber in the office, or at home.
...is because of the excellent connection I get from my college dorm room. Reading this article reminds me of why I haven't opted to get an appartment in the city surrounding my University; I'd have to go through the hassle of getting myself a cable modem or other sort of broadband connection, or send myself back to the "Dark Ages" ;) by putting up with a phone line connection.
I see myself considering a house's connection as a definite bonus in the future. Admittedly, it isn't that hard to wire a home, but if the house is in one of those areas that still can't get a cable modem connection, it'll definitely affect my choices.
Besides wireless networks, we know that a fiber optic network is a real choice for firewalls.
With that in mind, we know that new businesses are going to be built that do not worry about "hosted internet service," but do offer localized file shares. For example, instead of those costly update times to the library repository for each individual user, we only have to update the community server. We can see that open source software has more potential as community binaries compose a unsuspected threat. Community police might have to investigate the source.
Another last mile fiber optic service is located in Sacramento, SureWest. Last time I called them, I recieved a good offer, but the cable ended about a block away.
that Bill Gates's house is very close (approx 19 min) by in Medina.
While a community intranet seems like a nice idea, I'm afraid it will likely be strangled by the unforgiving leash of community policy that's become so popular in modern neighborhood developments. As a form of legislation by contract, not usually subject to constitutional protections, neighborhoods could easily prohibit any but the most inoffensive content being hosted by servers connected to the intranet.
An anarchist intranet, on the other hand, would be a joy to see.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
I've lived about a half-mile north of the map on the highlands site for 15 years and graduated from Issaquah High School, so maybe I can help give an idea of the surroundings. Issaquah is in a attractive valley surrounded by Tiger Mountain and the Sammamish Plateau to the east and Cougar Mountain to the west, and the large Sammamish lake to the north. It's a generally wealthy mostly white area with some very wealthy communities. There are a number of Asian-Americans and a growing Indian-American population but very few African-Americans and not many Hispanics.
:) But it might be a while before they start using Linux. ;)
For me it's about a 30 minute drive to Seattle but for the Highlands with the new I-90 entrance I bet they could make it in 20. Traffic can be truly awful in downtown Issaquah but with their own entrance, they ought to have that taken care of. On the other hand they'll have to deal with the background noise of a freeway next door...
Issaquah has the second largest theatre in Washington State (last I heard), a movie theatre, actually one of the worst types with 10 minutes of advertisements before previews, and three medium to large shopping centers. If the new Highlands shopping center truly has the variety of the University District (as the site mentions, if I understand right) I would be amazed. Except for our theatre, and the first Krispy Kreme built in the Northwest (or something) I don't imagine too many people come to visit or shop at Issaquah. We're basically the last large town for a while on the way east out of Seattle, the edge of the serious suburban sprawl.
Probably like many others here, the coolest part of this seems to me like the internet connection and the intranet. We have MSN DSL and Comcast Cable here currently, at standard speeds. As a resident I wonder if this development will bring something new and interesting after the hundreds (really! a new one is being built 100 ft from my house right now) that have already gone up in this area. One thing I might hope is that the schools will indirectly become more tech-savvy.
I think municipal fiber or any other high capacity medium is a project everyone ought to be pressuring their city or town counsils for. There's currently two groups laying network cabling down, telephone companies and cable companies. Being commercial interest these groups will always do what is better or more beneficial to them than what is more beneficial or better for the communities they serve.
Being as their commercial interest is rarely in line with what is good for the people it should be the people putting up the lines and selling that space to people providing them service. I see it like this, if a town lays down some fiber they can put it just about anywhere without worrying about right of way issues or zoning restrictions. They are also laying out an infrastructure they are able to rent out to companies to offer services on. Renting out the infrastructure means they can issue bonds to pay for the line installation with a nice return. The line installation itself can be piggybacked on top of routine road, sewer, or power maintenance to keep man hour prices down.
Once the lines are in place and going out to homes it would be up to providers to rent space on the lines in a non-exclusive manner to sell services on. Without the overhead of upkeep a service provider can offer cheaper service than a provider paying the whole bill from head end to household. The rent goes to pay back the issued bond measures and commercial property and operating taxes go back into the municipal coffers.
By having really high bandwidth lines like fiber or high grade copper the municipality can offer bandwidth on a channel by channel basis. Want to offer internet access to the city? Rent out a couple data channels on the fiber lines and connect your head end to a top tier carrier. Want to have a public access television channel? Invest in some video equipment and rent a channel. All municipal services could have their own cheap and easy network access via such a set-up as well. Public and private schools could have dirt cheap network connectivity as could libraries and social services.
I think a lot of good could come from projects like this and with it being a local municipal issue a couple people writing letters and making phone calls might actually DO something other than give paper shredders a workout.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I live in one of these new developments - Mawson Lakes (South Australia) - which is located right next to technology park. (Motorolla, BAE systems etc are located there)
We were made all sorts of promises about cable tv & internet. We even had to have the house pre-wired. I recently got pay tv which had to be connected by satelite and our broad-band internet must be wireless because the developer (delfin) put in the cheapest exchange which is not capable of ADSL. Apparently the cable is even in the ground!
Although, reading up on some of the benfits of wire less it may turn out to be the best way to go.
my 2 cents
Perhaps this is something I should take to our local Council. Instead of Fibre or copper though we should really look at Wi-Fi.
The area I live in is right up against a pretty steep escarpment and we could quite effectively bounce the signals off the escarpment and back down onto the town.
How hard is it to run the last mile of cable when you aren't running cable at all?
It's sad that this sounds state-of-the-art. Fiber backbones have been around for a long time. I'm betting that their backbone is switched gigabit. Nice for the local intranet, but not noticeably faster than a good old 10Mbps CAT5 link. In fact, in my opinion, putting in wires has already dated the project. What would have really gotten me going is if Issaquah WA had installed 802.11.x (a, b, or g) access points and was offering Intra/Inter net via wireless access. Yesterday wires were in, wireless is happening today.
And don't even mention security; there are many good stream ciphers out there. (Does RC4 ring a bell?)
except to save some time. Truth be told, I'd rather wire the house myself. That's most of the fun of doing it, IMHO, is the hard part. But, it would be nice to have that fiber connection. I could run one helluva game server off that thing, plus a web server, etc....ok, I changed my mind...it would be pretty sweet!
Only part the really is unsettling is paying TAXES on that sort of thing being pre-setup. Speaking of which, what kind of value WOULD that add to the house?!?
Spread the RC luvin'
I believe that democracy only works when the people share common goals and outlook on life. When people have differences that cannot be reconciled, then democracy tends to allow those in the majority to overpower the others if they wish. Dividing the land into areas of relative "harmony" may help to reduce this problem.
Why stop there? Why not divide the country into relative areas of "harmony". As a native of California, I'm tired of the direction those Right-Wing Fascists are taking this country.
So, why not secede? Oh wait.... Maybe cause of the little incident known as the civil war?
Then again, people from um..."rural" areas seem to forget that they lost that little skirmish.
Moderators, do your worst. After all, I'm posting as an Anonymous Coward.
Actually, I remember hearing from my high school civics teacher that there were some efforts by northern Californians to split off from the rest of the state and form a state called "Jefferson". I don't think that got anywhere, obviously :P Northern Cali. is really rural, and feels more like a warm(er) version of Oregon or Idaho than what most people think of California as being. I don't think there's even much agriculture in the area, it's mostly forest land.
I suspect that the urban/rural split is felt in a lot of states, and it would be interesting what would happen to the domestic political scene if the urban(more liberal) areas became separate states.
Do any of you have any suggestions for how to go about getting your community access to pre-existent fiber lines?
I live in a small New Hampshire town with no options for high speed internet access besides a personal sattelite hook-up. We are just too far from commercial or population centers for cable or DSL infastructure to be feasible. The frustrating part is that according to some public records, there are already massive amounts of fiberoptic cabling running right through the town center...they just never physically pop up into an access box. It just seems to me that if there was a fiber junction box in the town center, it could easily be adapted to the existing copper (for DSL) or to the existing cable (for cable duh)
What methods would you reccomend to convince/force/help the regional telcos involved to give access to our community? There are a couple of local computer user groups...maybe an effort through them? Maybe a town-endorsed subsidy to help with the cost of creating access points?
Would fiber would have to worry about Downstream Signal to Noise Ratio?
Upstream SNR?
Transmit Power?
Receive Power?
Signal degradation due to splitters?
Bandwidth saturation on a DS3 at peak times?
Bandwidth sharing along nodes?
Electromagnetic Interferance?
Even if you have a cablemodem supporting speeds in excess of 100Mbs, most broadband internet companies cap your bandwidth at around 3Mbs which is subpar to a standard 10BaseT network. Hack the config file in the modem so it does not match the checksum on their servers and you find yourself permanently without service. The advantage of coax currently is the existing cable tree foundation already in place for cable television just needing an internet frequency to piggy back through. I wouldnt mind trying out fiber at all to see what the downfalls are besides needing a pocket book like BillyBoy Gates. But if fiber were more widely used and less of a special thing prices would fall like reliability with a M$ patch and OS.
-1 Overrated (Too many big words for me to comprehend)
More importantly, there is a Krispy Kreme right down the street!
Mmmmmm, Krispy Kreme... Actually, I think this would be a bad thing. Right now it's nice to stop at Krispy Kreme every few months when I drive through Issaquah, but if I lived next door, I'm afraid I would find myself morbidly obese and unable to leave the house. Of course, with sooper-l33t interweb access, I guess I wouldn't need to leave the house. Hooray!
-Sokie
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Where are the slash-groupies? I distinctly remember being promised slash-groupies!
wireless?
The biggest issue with wireless is 'bandwirdth' leeches, but if everybody has one, I don't see that this would be a problem.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Well, we were just looking at a new development here in Orange County. There are quite a few houses, and they go from the 300's up through the 600's (decent homes for those prices in this area). The development looks just like most others in the county, and is near to a new shopping center (that we now frequent).
All the homes feature Fiber-to-the-Home (FTTH). Basic "free" service looks to be 3,000 Kbps, with "Expanded Service" upwards of 31,000 Kbps. The service is being provided by Greenfield Communications (no, I am not associated with the housing development nor tGreenfield).
One of the areas/subdivisions/whatever in it just opened phase 7 yesterday, and it's already sold out. Just in case others were wondering if these units were moving.
Provide the infrastructure to create a top notch filesharing community! They could call it warez kiddie village.
Sure, you may be able to hold your virtual LAN party with V(oice/ideo)oIP at any time of the day or night, but unless the population is going to be 100% glued-to-the-screen geeks, how will the stereotypical Soccer Mom get community benefit from fibre optic?
Don't know, but I'm pre-wiring an empty apartment for the next tenants, with cat 5E and RJ6 in every room.
Is $500 extra per month for that and a washer/dryer/dishwasher too much?
That's what I'm hoping to get
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Did I really hear you say wired???
Fiber is a bit too late...by the time they shovel dirt into the trenches, 802.x will be the ticket, and all that work will be old news before you can say how much is that access point in the window...
> You can get FTTH 100Mbps service in and around Tokyo ... Aren't you just dying of envy right about now? ;)
He was, but then he looked around and realized he wasn't living in a shoebox with no tables.
Do the bums have insane Internet access too? :-D
:-/
**Slips his laptop into a backpack and prepares to hitch a ride up to Washington**
If not I can always hold up a "Will Code for Bandwidth" sign. Damn this backassward town i live in
I can count several developers where I live that offer prewired houses for new construction. Pulte Homes is one I have most experience with. They put in 10 or so network jacks all around the house, run two sets of ethernet cable from the closet to each jack (incase one fails or whatever). So you just stick your CM in there (there are cable and phone line jacks in the closet as well), buy a 8 port broadband router and now most of the jacks in the house are wired for internet. Its really easy for the technologically inclined.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Can I just say: yuck!
I've lived in Seattle for three years, and while the city in general has struggled to become "a real city" from a quiet town, the eastside is even worse. Redmond, the home of Microsoft, is an endless array of "nice, quiet" suburbs with SUV-driving families and anonymous strip malls from hell. It's beautiful with the trees, but there is zero public transport infrastructure, no sense of real community, and no proper public gathering places (apart from a couple cookie-cutter malls).
Even if you like the quiet life, there's no excuse for this urban sprawl, serviced by SUVs, that is just appallingly un-environmentally-friendly.
I want to live in a city that is sophisticated and vibrant - Vancouver up north is a great example, as is my home in Sydney, Australia. Pre-manufactured suburban living, even if it is broadband enabled, is my idea of hell. I wish a few more people would agree. I fear for the future of Seattle.
imagine a beowulf ddos attack on M$ (errr... i mean unintentional sql virus) of these...
Ok, regardless of the technical details regarding this "village", what about the social aspects? Do people really want to live in a "utopian society" such as this?
After looking at the brochures, I am startlingly reminded of scary sci-fi movies of years past, where the village residents all have the same prozac-happy, blank smiles, all work together for the same corporation, and all barbeque together on the weekends.
Again, maybe it's just me , but a place like this (whether wired or wireless or whatever) just doesn't sound like a place I'd want to call home.
Stepford wives, anyone??
The older I get, the less I like everyone else.
I don't know any builder these days that isn't running cat5 in the walls. My house has cat5e going to every room. The phone system is run off the cat5e also. So it easy to swap phone jacks into network jacks, just pull it out of the phone switch and plug it into the router. They also will be running fiber into all the houses. They are slowly working their way through the neighborhoods so currently I just have an orange tube sticking out of my brick but eventually that'll be the fiber coming from the curb. But the internet they are going to provide is going to suck. They just don't have enough bandwidth coming into the neighborhoods to give everyone the 10mbit or 100mbit (depending upon what you want) that they advertise.
...which is the real point behind such projects -- not only a computer in every room, but a server in every coat closet, and a business running out of every bedroom.
Port Blakely Communities is also drawing the high-tech work force by requiring that every home - from the upper-$100,000s carriage houses to the $1,000,000 single-family homes - be wired to accommodate their needs. Buyers get an in-home LAN, data outlets throughout the home, a fiber optic connection to a data panel inside the home, 100 Mbps network speed, free community Intranet connection, and the choice of DSL, cable, or even fiber optics for high-speed internet access.
This is all well and good. More communities should require this kind of thing. However, the hard problem is making the argument that builders should be required to do this. I'd really like to see a web page dedicated to this -- listing exactly what's needed, and what the costs really are. For example, each house needs this number of those jacks, so many feet of this wire, and a switch like this, all costing how many dollars. And for every so many houses, one of these big switches that cost that much, etc.
The thing is, it doesn't have to be fiber. Ethernet would suffice, and be a hell of a lot better and cheaper than most people's current broadband options. Sure it will be outdated someday, but it's so cheap to stick into new construction now, that it should be required by most communities.
Oh, wait, probably not this community, eh?
I will say, Issaquah is beautiful. No traffic, and the MS site is very nice.
They give their people free CHOCOLATE MILK at that site.
What is this crap? I'm on the verge of being charged to park in my company parking lot, and they get free chocolate milk.
Bastards.
My mom says I'm cool.
I used to live there. I was one of the first people to live in an apartment complex there. Pretty sweet place. You can have dual t-1 bandwidth for until $300 a month (if memory serves). Every house/unit in the entire neighborhood has fiber optics into the place. Every unit is firewalled from everyone else but if you want people to have access to your place you just asked and they hooked you up.
Silly Rabbit...Sig's are for kids.
I'll bet this is a way for Microsoft (or other ISP/connection providers) to place liens on homes for non-payment of bills.
So... What kind of fiber connection would these houses get me? Ethernet? PoSONET ?
OC-3?OC-12?OC-48? Single Mode Fiber? MultiMode Fiber? How about Two tin cans and fiber inbetween? or is the fiber just to power my phone line so I can dialup to the internet.
You can't always get what you want....but you can always get what you need, and where a fat pipe is a thing to desire, some people....many people...will take any pipe, and that means wireless.
I have VDSL at home, as well as 802.b, as well as wireless from the computer to the home theater, and while I'm always lusting for more speed, it's all 'round, not just for iso's. When it comes to communities, wireless will quickly surface as the public transportation equivalent.
Someone will always want to get there faster, and for those we have copper colored Porsches...and a premium that matches. For everyone else...wireless.
For countries the size of California, such as Korea and Japan, FTTH will be here soon, and I'll use it along with 802. In the US...don't hold your breath.
Look at all those shiney smiling white people.
Place looks like hell on earth based on the web site.
Anyone have good pointers on how to retrofit an existing neighborhood similiar in design to this neighborhood to enable fiber-to-the-curb?
I'd just like to point out that Issaquah not only has all the stuff listed in the post, but it also has the only Krispy Kreme in the Seattle area.
Mmmmm, donuts.
"I think I just logged onto my inter-net" - Carl
http://www.webula.net/dir/computers/internet/fiber _optics.php
A company called Fastweb wired most of Milan with fiber optic. I have a 10 Mb/sec connection at home, with unlimited calls to phone in Italy (no cell phones) at 85 euro/month. Without unlimited calls (just connection) it's 67 euro/month. :)
I also have it in my office too, though it costs more.
These are very competitive prices in Italy, but other companies offer just at most a 640K/sec ADSL.
And it's fast: it's full 10 Mb/sec in the MAN, and there is a p2p network with 1000s of hosts in which a full movie is downloaded in about 15-20 minutes.
In the rest of the Internet the connection is very fast, even if much less than the MAN. I generally download at 200K/sec from a decent server.
Almost everybody I know who uses Internet and can (some areas are not wired) has Fastweb.
There are some drawbacks: some problems with mail servers, no public nor static ip and other things. But you forget anything when you look at the speed of the connection
I am on holiday in Japan yet again,
Only, this time around I see adverts everywhere for.....
100 MBP optical fibre connections for 15 quid ($22?) PER MONTH with NO BANDWITH CAP!
Hmmmmmm, its times like these that the good old "living in an underdeveloped country" feeling kicks in again.
Really, the above story SHOULD be irrelevant.
If they can do it, why can't we? And I won't take the old horseshit about population density.
The UK is not Australia, and even if it were, I would at least expect Sydney et al. (that goes for New York etc too) to be comparitively connected.
Her in the UK, there are housing developments that were connected up with optical fibre for the phone service, and it all sounded terrific at the time.
Now the residents are up in arms because BT cannot/will not provide them with a broadband service over the fibre. ADSL is pretty much all they have to offer, and it has to run over a copper pair.
The private store stuff seems kinda creepy. If WA developments are anything like the east coast ones I've had the misfortune to have encountered, the stores probably revert to selling nothing but adult diapers, collectable figurines and lawn ornaments within a week of opening. And don't think I just made that up. I've been in that store. It's a combination gas station and crapmart. Possibly the most disturbing place I've ever seen.
This is becoming more and more frequent in new master-planned developments. The "FTTH Council" currenty lists 78 communities and municipalities that are already providing FTTH service. You can grab the list from the FTTH Council here.There are many other communities that are not on this list yet because service hasn't actually been turned on.
Having Cat5 home run from several rooms to a central panel has slowly become the standard for new homes in many areas. I began forcing this on our builders about 4 years ago. As someone else pointed out, builders are very conservative... but if you can show them that it will only take $500 more than they currently pay and that they HAVE to do it because all of the other builders are doing it, then they'll fall in line with only a little grumbling. Of course this is really only possible withing certain price ranges. Most of the homes in our developments are $250k and up.
The "Community Intranets" are also fairly common in larger communities. They range from small sites that the developer hires a high-school kid to put together, to specific sites built from "intranet packages" that are tailored for large developments. Examples of vendors include Neighborware and Resident Interactive.
~
I hate mornings.
Most geeks seem to forget that there are these rules known as "building codes" that regulate how houses are built and just what type of material is required.
Good luck getting THAT requirement inserted into local building codes. Most of these codes derive from what is known as the International Building Code (IBC). The electricity and wiring usually derives (in America) from the National Electric Code (NEC)...
Speaking of which... when you do have your new construction/renovation wired, be sure that your wiring is to code (plenum rated cable if appropriate, no drilling through fire breaks, no sharing conduits with romex, that sort of thing).
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
I live in a new apartment block (lovingly called a Mansion) in Fukuoka, Japan. Having being built less than a year ago I'm luckly to have NTT fibre to the building, and network ports in my apartment running at 100Mb. Okay, so I might not get LAN speeds, but it's the fastest I've seen since being at Uni. But the best part, it costs about USD$10 a month, unlimited.
-- Huh, what?
Fiber channel? Waaay too expensive. But I got a nice coax cable, up to 1 gigabit if they want to deliver that. What is the max? 180m cable or so without repeater? Should be quite enough for a reasonably sized apartment block. Kinda like all the student condos here are usually wired with, 10/100Mbit internally
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
There will probally be a stipulation that you can only run Windows ;)
"I bow to no man" - Riddick
Sounds like Heaven.
How few is 'very few' and how many is 'not many'?
Can you say Scorpio?
Oh wait. Bill Gates isn't that charismatic.
Best In Show was a great movie - you oughta credit your quotes so more people can be exposed to this little-known film.
The best part, however, is in the extra scenes on the dvd where the Pinenut guy is showing off his cabin full of beach balls.
-72
-Those who dance are considered insane by those who can't hear the music.
A new 2000-2500 square foot house on a half acre costs about 150-200k here. Tack on a grand or even $500 for just 10 base T wiring, which is a feature that most people will not use, really eats into your margins as a builder. Why do it?
In many sub-urban areas (Especially here in North NJ), there is a large demand for the ultimate community home with all the ammenities. Despite the recession, there are still a lot of people who are willing to pay premium money to live in a community with everything.
In other words, it doesn't eat into the builder's margins. They make it up, and then some, by charging people willing to pay for it.
You have to remember there is an entire (growing) demographic willing to drop thousands of dollars in exclusive fashion. Even practical people are buying into the active community with all the ammenities and are paying premium $ for the priveledge.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I didn't read your entire post that closely. You made it clear you understood my points, before I even made them. I really hate to be condescending/patronizing, and it wasn't warrented here.
"Communism is like having one [local] phone company " - Lenny Bruce
I just bought a new house in a new community and was so excited because the whole thing is wired for network, cable, satellite, and phone. The bad news is there was no broadband Internet available. I had a great in-home network that didn't go anywhere.
Just in the last month, we finally were able to get DSL service. Before that, the only option was to get microwave service from a local wireless provider with $500 in up-front equipment charges and about $60/Month for use.
I really wish all new developments would include broadband Internet in some form. I don't feel it would be that big of a deal to buy a few T1s (or better) and provide broadband to everyone in the community. They could just figure the costs into the HOA dues.
I'm the head of technology for a company that provides connectivity and management solutions to telcos/cable cos that are providing these sorts of services to neighborhoods and can clear up a handful of the issues that have come up here.
A lot of the benefit in these fiber deployments is the technology and ability to scale for the telco, so it's not just that everything else is equal except it's faster to the consumer. Accordingly, there's no need to have an OC12 or anything to realize the benefit of fiber installations in a community. In lots of cases, telcos which to provide a superior solution to the consumer/homeowner but still feel like they shouldn't be overly ahead of the competition (DSL, cable, etc), so speed is limited below 10Mbps. In many installations, although the hardware will ultimately scale up, the consumers are currently only receiving 10Mbps half-duplex ethernet to their router. Given the incredible scale and management issues of fiber installations to cable cos and telcos, it's not true that there's no incentive to build fiber into new developments.
Additionally, even if you were giving everyone 100Mbps full duplex to the home, it's not like it's going to require 100Mbps * [number of consumers] upstream bandwidth. 99% of people are still just hitting cnn.com, weather.com, etc. These fiber installations are less common in urban areas, too, so the population is generally older and less likely to be, say, Bearsharing. Given the cost of overbuilding (as opposed to new construction), there's not a huge motivation to upgrade from traditional copper to fiber at this point in urban areas or inside cities.
There are two main technologies right now -- FTTC (Fiber To the Curb) and FTTH (Fiber To The Home). With FTTC, most installations have fiber running to an optical unit in someone's front yard and eight people share that connection. With FTTH, there's a box outside everyone's home and the fiber is individually run to them. The huge advantage of FTTH is that there's limited overhead to a deployment until the homeowner moves in. With FTTC, you have to throw all your money down as soon as the first of eight (or whatever the hardware supports) potential customers moves in.
I disagree that residential services are not where the money is. It entirely depends on the overhead and your pricing structure, of course, but the statement just isn't true that you need to target businesses or apartments.
There's no reason why you should feel like a pre-wired house is lame because it won't meet your expectations. My experience has been that the telco/cable operator schedules a meeting with the new homeowner a week or so before they plan to move into the house. They go through with the homeowner and decide where they wish to have ethernet/phone/cable/etc jacks throughout the house. Additionally, most homes have a little hatch in the laundry room that's sized to fit a router, hub, etc. The cable techs are getting pretty clued and offer advice to homeowners on how to wire things, where they could put APs, etc. It's totally customized and there's no reason to think that you wouldn't be satisfied. After all, they just do what you tell them to and it's profesionally installed.
I don't see why security is an issue in a way that it isn't for DSL/Cable/etc. To the consumer, FTTH/FTTC (fiber to the home / fiber to the curb) installations are just the same as cable/dsl/etc. It's not like you just plug into Ethernet and you're on a subnet with a million other windows machines discovering domains and workgroups, etc. Everyone's connection is separate, it's all switched, there's no easy way to packet sniff, there's no fighting for bandwidth, and some communities even use PPPoE. Additionally, with most homes having more than one computer, practically everyone has a router in the little hatch in the laundry room.
Overall, it's a really great technology and getting better. I'm pretty jealous to not have our service at my home. We have thousands of homeowners online with the majority being FTTC in neighborhoods that we've had online for over two years, and FTTH being newer and those homes in the minority.
skip the wires to my house and go straight for the brain! STRAIGHT FOR MY BRAIN!!!
fact: microsoft > linux
How much is a pre-wired house worth to you? Nothing, there are many less troublesome, relative easy to implement, and low cost options.
What will this do for community building? The last mile is not in the interest of the telco's to implement. Telcos' control of the customer will be marginalized (maybe lost) by providing ATM-VPC, VPN, VoIP, .... However, if the third link concept (listed
below, Airship) ever takes-off, then the last mile problem will
quickly end in many locations.
Possible Solutions (what wire/cable are y'all talking about? Is there a problem in the house?:~):
14Mb/s Apartment/Condo linked to switched-hub to Switch in basement/attic.
http://www.homeplug.org/index_basic.html
11Mb/s Home/Apartment/Condo W-LAN (low power) linked to HomePlug Access point.
http://grouper.ieee.org/groups/802/11/main.html#Tu torial
Last Mile Connection to the internet/intranet/... is comming.
http://www.airship.com/prod/uses_telecoms_frames.h tm
OldHawk777
Reality is a self-induced hallucination.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
This place is a little tiny town that closes up at 9pm, and doesn't open until 10-11am. Closed Sundays.
:D
It does have some nice houses, and apparently a decent school system, but most people who live here are yuppies from hell.
Unfortunately, the Highlands is one of the common poor quality high expense communities that are all over the place here. Still, if it is anywhere as good as it sounds, maybe I'll turn into a yuppie myself
At a meeting in Provo this month of municipal utilities either already building FTTH networks or considering doing so, it was pointed out by more than one attendee that apartment building owners in fact became very interested in having their buildings wired with fiber first (before competing apartment complexes). This was once FTTH became a real offering in their area.
Al Bonnyman
Community Broadband Networks