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

Re:Interesting...

[doktor-hladnjak]

I used to live in a large student co-op and this was something pretty much every house (as far as I know) did. At some point, our ISP went bankrupt and whoever bought it at that point decided not to continue their DSL services. As a "temporary" solution we ended up on a standard SBC residential DSL line. Divided 37 or so ways it was quite cheap, but there were some issues:

- when somebody switched on Kazaa, everyone's connection came almost to a standstill
- we had to wire the house ourselves to make it cost efficient
- somebody had to maintain everything

To me it seems like the biggest problem in an apartment complex or neighborhood would be the last issue. Who maintains it? For us, it was essentially somebody's job to tend to it (just like it was somebody's job to wash dishes on Sunday morning). Anybody know how this happens in these cases we're talking about? Is there a benevolent net admin (dictator) or do people pay a fee to some 3rd party?

Re:Good thinking

[Michael Hunt]

The problem with having incredibly fast last mile is that you need incredibly, incredibly fast upstream connectivity. For a stub system (i.e. a system which won't allow transit across itself,) the usual figures quoted are 16:1 contention; that is, sum(CPE bandwidth)/16.

For a transit system (a system which provides connectivity between other systems/networks,) peering bandwidth should not exceed intra-system bandwidth, but also needs to be great enough that systems who use you as a transit network actually do wind up getting the fastest path, as BGP has no concept of 'speed' as a metric.

Given that this idea is proposing to deploy fibre at (i would assume) at least 10Mb to the home, the upstream bandwidth will almost certainly need to be in the gigabits for this to be useful. Transit infrastructure will likely also need to be upgraded if too many smaller ISPs start rolling this out.

I don't think the networking infrastructure we have necessarily has the capacity right now. Perhaps when DWDM becomes more commonplace, with each run of Single mode carrying 100s of gigabits, but for now I think it's really only a pipe dream.

Another idea worth considering is the 'script kiddie terrorist' argument. If you give uncapped 10Mb access to every script kiddie on your block, you'll need to make sure that everything else scales proportionally, or script kiddie targets will suffer an exponentially worse fate.