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How Much Does a New Internet Cost?
wschalle writes "Given the recent flurry of articles concerning ISP over subscription, increasing bandwidth needs, and lack of infrastructure spending on the part of cable companies, I'm forced to wonder, what is the solution? How much would a properly upgraded internet backbone cost? How long would it take to make it happen? Will the cable companies step up before Verizon's FiOS becomes the face of broadband in America?"
The problem with dark fiber is that it never goes where you want it to. Sure theres heaps of it around in various areas of CBD's (but not past the building you care about), or long distances between cities, but it'll probably coz you a whole heap of money to actually get it from where the fiber is to where you need it to be.
And then you have to assume that the dark fiber has actually been maintained sufficiently that it's worth using. Dark fiber often is left in the ground and ignored and when you go to use it you discover it doesn't work anymore.
To bring some outside perspective, in France we had a huge problem due to the monopoly and then quasi monopoly of the original state operator. Prices were pretty high and nothing seemed to move. We had a really great phone system thanks to the state-operated France Telecom and the amount of cash the state spent building it, but prices and choices were not that great.
At some point arrived an operator named Free. They offered a no-contract, local call (no more expensive than calling your neighboor) RTC service that was a huge success (along with e-mail and web-site hosting).
When came the time of moving to DSL (able never was a real success in France), again the prices were high and the choice scarce. Free deployed its own equipments and offered a low-cost 512 Kb Downstream ADSL access (30 EUR a month, about $40, when others were more easily around 60 EUR).
That proved to be a nice example of how competition pushes the market in good directions for the most parts).
Ever since, Free upgraded their access to 1 Mb, then 8 Mb. Today 25 Mb is available if you are lucky enough to be in the right zones (and to leave almost in the DSLAM, since DSL is distance dependant), with free national telephony (and free calls to a bunch of other countries like the US, landline or mobiles) as well as TV. All of that for the exact same amount of 30 EUR a month.
Let it be said, they might have invested a bunch in laying down the equipment. But they made it big, and customers saw right away where they should go.
Granted, there are issues with Free (poor hotline support, poor coverage for rural zones, accusations of violating GPL license in their terminal which seem to be true...), but they did bring the market to where it is today in France. At this point, Free is busy trying to bring fiber optic into buildings (no word yet on the price or speed for this future service).
No, laying down equipment and upgrading it to support faster delivery speed does not seem to require a "price upgrade" if the business model involves selling what customers are ready to purchase. Investment is not about hitting the customer, it's about planning what return you expect of it.
MetroFi, actually, did just that - and I live within their coverage.
The MetroFi's signal is decent, but they require a login before you can access any IPs beyond the registration server, so if you have equipment that assumes connectivity (like an IP phone, or even a PS3) then it does not work (since there may be no browser to do the login first.)
Yes, considering the insane amount of dark-fiber between major cities and business districts, I'd guess that the problem is not there. Obviously it takes money to light that fiber. I have to say that technology is being driven very fast right--and its being driven by the likes of Google.
Google is pushing vendors for very fast, high density interconnect. 10Gbps from the server to the mesh. An IEEE study group just green lighted work on a 100Gbps ethernet standard. The target market for this is in metropolitan networks.
An OC-192 fiber connection is worth a mere 622.080 Mbps. Layer-3 switches can operate at roughly 240Gbps.
The noise is all about the business model not about the fundamentals. The backbone providers are becoming something of a commodity service. This would be okay if the tax structure let them provide their service + pay dividends. Instead every company has to be a 'growth company'. Ergo, they have a problem. There is no revenue growth future in what they are doing--unless they can dig their teeth into a new revenue stream--e.g., by raising the rents of content providers.
Err oc192 = 622mbps? Explain to me how I get 2.5gbps out of an OC-48 then :) I think you meant an OC-12. which would be 622mbps.
OC-192 is approx 10gb/s.
We are moving to GIG-E 10Gig- connections for backbones now, as Ethernet interfaces are way cheaper than POS (Packet of Sonet) ones.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
use a lin-box to spoof the mac address of the device that you need to "log-in"...then use firefox (or opera or whatever) to do the logging in...
my dorms in college did the same thing (you had to get past cisco's clean access), and i used the same method to get my openwrt box on the network (cause the wireless signal strength in my dorm room was like -84dbm).
hope this helps!
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It is all just endless streams of bull shit. Consider how much it cost to do the original copper telephone network, which contrary to the bull was far, far more expensive they any new fibre network and guess what the population has risen since then quite a lot in fact, so not only is copper tech more expensive but it had to be done with a far far lower population density, it had to be done with far more primitive technology, it had to be done using backward switching technology, telephone exchanges as major buildings and even the local was not a box but a whole building. Think each and every copper connection had to have it own line, it's own independent bit of wire, nothing like fibre at all with thousands of connections down the same line.
Face it, it is just bullshit, more bull shit and yet more bull shit. Under the current corrupt political system you will not be getting FTH until such time as the copper network degrades to the point were it significantly impacts the US economy, let me see, hmm, lets say 2025 at a minimum, possibly as late as 2050, good luck.
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