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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?"
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.
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.
Eh? Who was talking about subdivisions? Your earlier post was about apartment buildings, as was mine. Now who's comparing apples to oranges?
Even in apartments, the densities are dramatically lower in the US. Unless you in hardcore center-city areas, you do not see US apartments that even remotely resemble Japanese apartments. An average apartment offered by residential REIT, you generally see nothing less than 1000 sq. ft. for a one bedroom plus grounds. Nothing even remotely comparable exists in Japan, and certainly not in any areas where FTTH may exist.
The fact is that population densities in Japan are much, much, much greater than all but a handful of areas in the US.
FTTH will not work in the US just because it works in Japan. Demographically and culturally, the two countries are tremendously different. The value proposition has to be there on both sides -- consumer demand and investors' return. Without both of those componenents being in place, it is not going to happen. I don't see both of those pieces being in place yet.
GF.
Lots of petrified grits
The problem with having incredibly fast last mile is that you need incredibly, incredibly fast upstream connectivity.
The solution could be to keep people from going outside, giving them as many local services as possible. In Milan, Rome and other Italian large cities and surroundings last mile fibre (10 Mbps) is available from an ISP called Fastweb. I have it at home paying about 60 Euros per month, unlimited traffic. The Internet bandwidth is about 2 Mbps on average, but I usually work/play inside the Fastweb network. That's a large Intranet with private IPs and lots of internal services, even managed by other customers who put on-line their systems as internal servers for the community, something like old BBSes. There's also a large OPENNAP community sharing almost anything.
The "script kiddies problem" someone else pointed out does exist, indeed. I'm also the network manager of my company and we experienced at least one mail bombing episode from Fastweb. We had problems dealing with it, given that the attacker was behind NAT and he/she had so much bandwidth.
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
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.