Starting a Local Fibre Co-Op?

swordsaintzero wonders: "I have seen several articles mentioning local co-ops implementing fiber. I am moving to a smaller town to take a position as a Solaris Administrator for a large university. After calling around, I found out the fastest bandwidth package available is half the speed of my previous package. For all of you Slashdot readers, who have worked on getting fibre implemented for your town through a co-op, what was involved in presenting it to the city government? What would be the best way to get the ball rolling on getting fiber for home use implemented?"

Comments

Re:Move to a bigger city...

[EvilMagnus]

My parent's home town in the UK (pop. 60,000) has fiber to the premises. They have a nice little drop box on the wall of their house where the demarc is. It was put in about six years ago, for free, by a private cable company.

It's kinda weird to see a set-top box with a fiber line running to it.

Re:Move to a bigger city...

[moosesocks]

Wiring a big (huge) city like NYC for fiber would be prohibitively expensive for even the biggest of companies.

The infrastructure of these cities has been gradually implemented over the past 100+ years, and redoing it all from scratch would quite literally be impossible.

That's why verizon has been wiring suburban communities for fiber. Even though the rural areas of my (very small) town don't seem to have been wired, all of the residential neighborhoods have been wired, and as of last week, turned on. I'll have a 5mbps fibre connection next week for less money than my DSL service. For $10 more, I could upgrade to 15mbps.

Oh, and I was one of the last to get DSL/Cable available to me. I suppose this is verizon's apology. If you're doing a complete rebuild, you can't beat a small suburban community. The population density is reasonably high, almost all utilities are above-ground and relatively simple to replace.

NYC and the like are stuck with an inadequate infrastructure from the 1920s. I think we may reach the point someday where high-desnsity urban areas are unnecessary. The reasons they existed in the first place are really no longer practical. Even though NYC is located in a prime location for ocean transport, the cost of living there is certainly higher than in a landlocked state like nebraska.....

Look to history.

[bluGill]

I get my power from a co-op. Back in the 1930s the farmers in my area realized that they would not be served by any utility because there was no profit in them. So they got together and started a co-op and wired the county. We are now one of the fastest growing utilities in the nation (Minneapolis is growing right into our territory).

There are likely to be some old laws on the book in your state that you can fudge to help you. Have a lawyer look them up. You will need a lawyer before you get very far, so best is if you can find one to be a partner now, and hire him.

Neighborhood Fiber

[jaredmauch]

I've considered installing a local fiber loop on my street. We have 11 homes on my street on lots roughly 1-3 acres. There are two homes that are somewhat close and adjacent to our private road, and one lot that is presently undeveloped for a potential total of 14 homes. The two streets (one is a court) provide enough distance for roughly 1km of fiber if you create a entire loop. This isn't that much fiber, but the cost of burying and other "restoration"/boring could cost up to $10/ft, or roughly $30/m. These are likely a lot higher than the true cost as they're based on a utility cost, but give you an idea of the up to $30k that might be necessary to build a simple 1k loop.

That being said, one could easily provision linear fiber (non-ring) for a lot less, and if you and your neighbors care about speed, etc.. (sharing that mp3 server in your basement, or those trees keep getting in the way of the wireless) a short fiber run put in PVC or similar conduit outside buried not that far down (depending on how you want to do it) would provide high reliability over that short distance. A 3com 100BaseFX card costs roughly US$90, and cabling is not *that* expensive even for multiple pairs or outdoor/aerial cabling. Most of the cost is seen in adding connectors which range in cost as not anyone can go to home depot and get a cable crimper, connectors, or polisher. You may find the cost comparable to some more expensive wireless bridges or cheapos with nice cabling/antennas, but for reliability it's the way to go, and you're not too likely to need more expensive cabling unless you're going to do some fancy DWDM or other stuff over the short distance.

That being said, I may be soon using a power washer to dig a trench, or just doing it by hand with a shovel between me and my neighbor to deal with crappy wireless gear reliability.. This will let us communicate over a wired link without fear of the growing trees causing a problem. And the call to miss-dig is free. It also means that we can do fancier stuff in the future at faster than 100M and not have to worry about the limits of copper cabling as much.

Reminder to our readers, if you're going to go more than 2KM, you need single-mode fiber, you can't do it with multimode. You may also need to watch the type of optics you use (SR vs LR, etc..)

Re:Move to a bigger city...

[pyros]

I worked at Optical Solutions from 2000-2002, developing a fiber-to-the-home product. Your best bet is actually rural and independent telcos. They get more federal subsidies to upgrade their infrastructure and have less invested in existing copper networks. What actually screwed Optical Solutions was focusing too much on RBOCs like Qwest and Verizon, because they move too slow, because they have too many hundreds of millions invested in copper in the big cities.