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?"

Comments

Interesting...

[Gortbusters.org]

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..

Re:Interesting...

[guacamolefoo]

In Japan, almost all large apartment blocks being built these days have either FTTH or CATV Internet connectivity as standard. You'd be surprised what can happen when enough people ask for it. Your attitude is self-defeating.

One: Japan is not the United States. What works there may or may not work here. First, the Japanese have density of population that is incomprehensible to the average American. This makes costs much lower per home passed, and it makes FTTH feasible. There are not too many "average" Japanese who live in sprawling subdivisions. Politics of development aside, the simple fact is that their living arrangements are comepletly different, and it is an apples to oranges comparison.

Two: The views in my prior post are the general consensus in the real estate and CLEC world. I'm not sure what you mean by the "Your attitude is self-defeating" comment. If there's money to be made, I'm more than happy to be the onne to make it.

On the other hand, I do not exactly see spending thousands of dollars to pass homes with fiber in the hopes of making maybe $25-30 gross per month as being a path to riches. YMMV. Nobody is stopping you from trying to do it with your money, pal.

GF.

Oh boy, and look at the beautiful duck pond!

[rdewald]

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...

Not much

[Apreche]

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.

Fibre is just a network cable, relax guys...

[coupland]

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...

Security...?

[MrNemesis]

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.

Re:Security...?

[jbolden]

How would that be a problem? You have one point of access to your own home network, you firewall it off and use NAT. That's not that big a problem to deal with.

The neighborhood intranet

[miketang16]

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...

Neighborhood Intranet

[Adrian Lopez]

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.

Re:Good thinking

[madfgurtbn]

The problem with having incredibly fast last mile is that you need incredibly, incredibly fast upstream connectivity

Uh, yeah, isn't that the point?

Not to be glib, but the network doens't grow symmetrically. There are always going to be bottlenecks, but there are always going to be improvements. When you build a new apartment complex, it makes sense to assume that the permanent network infrastructure in the building should, where economically feasible, be overbuilt as much as possible.

It will be a while, if ever, before they can use all of their bandwidth, but when the time comes they are ready, eh.