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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?"
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.
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!
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...
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
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
>besides 1MS ping neighbourhood deathmatches? You need internet speed for anything else?
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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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!!!!
"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.
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 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.
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.
all this wireless talk.
.and why should I if there's an alternative. I'm looking at replacing my 100MB/s switch & nic's with gigabit stuff for just that reason. It'd be nice to VNC into a box and get near-realtime ability. Granted, not everyone is like me in this respect, but alot are, and the way the internet community is going, alot more will be.
Sure, wireless is a great system for some things, but it nowhere near approaches the speed of fibre. This kind of shortsightedness in the past has cost us, why let it again?
(640k anyone? 32MB harddrive? those are just a couple that came to mind right away)
With a wireless solution, you're looking at buying it, and implementing it, then upgrading every couple/few years if you want to keep the bandwidth up to what other areas will (probably) be using. With fibre, lay it, and maintain it and you still have enough left over to keep you going for ages. Even when that slows down, divide the network in half, each their own network with their own uplink. Boom. Doubled your available bandwidth.
Don't kid yourself thinking we (as a people) won't want more and more bandwidth. If I had the bandwidth I have today (DSL) at home 7 years ago, I would have thought that it was the cat's meow. Now I get by, it's decent. Actually thought of getting a cable modem as well so I could have two *decent* pipes here.
Warez trading, p2p, and porn asside, even legitimate usages have been getting bigger all the time.
(SUSE 8.0 anyone? 8 cds for the full release. Even slackware, my distrib of choice is 3 now for everything).
Couple this on the fact that one day the mpaa/riaa might get it right and we could have huge content delivered to our homes via these pipes. I'd rather be able to watch a movie (and save it for later) while it's downloading, then wait a couple hours. Sometimes it's just a spur of the moment... "hey, wouldn't it be cool to see this?"
Even 802.11g won't bring us this. Fibre will put it alot closer (altho it's not a miracle answer, it is a step in the right direction). We probably won't have wireless that can compare until like 802.11zz894t Rev. 3 or something.
I won't even run wireless at home just because I'm such a speed freak, I don't want to wait..
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
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.
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.
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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 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.