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Test Selling "Last Mile" Fiber to Homeowners Under Way in Canada
Ars Technica is covering an interesting pilot program taking place in Ottawa, CA. 400 homes are being outfitted with fiber optic cables; however, the "last mile" of fiber is going to be sold outright to the homeowners rather than providing internet at a monthly fee. "In the future, it could become commonplace for homes to come with 'tails.' These customer-owned, fiber-optic connections would link them to a network peering point. Without the expense of rolling out last mile infrastructure to every home, many more ISPs could afford to serve a given neighborhood by running wiring to the peering point, leading to more competition and lower prices. Perhaps best of all, the growth of customer-owned fiber could make debates over 'open access' and network neutrality moot, as robust telecom competition should prevent the worst of the monopolistic behavior exhibited by telco and cable incumbents."
Like say some idiot knocking out your connection because they knocked it out with a backhoe. Or even the city tearing up the street, and saying you have to pay to relocate your fiber.
It's a hell of a lot easier for someone that owns a LOT of the fiber to hire lawyers and get someone else to pay for mistakes than it is for one person.
AccountKiller
The ideal would be for it to operate like any other civic infrastructure (water, sewer, power, etc.) where the homeowner is responsible only past a certain point (demarc point, property boundary, etc.) and the utility company is responsible for the rest.
Realistically, bandwidth _should_ be a utility.
Please mod parent up. You can't just tap an existing active fiber optic line any more than you can just take a sip from an open fire hose.
Better "series of tubes" analogy: you cant just cut a hole and screw your garden hose to the nearest water main, you need pressure reducers, check valves, cuttoffs, a meter, and other pipe fittings, and it reduces the service level to everyone else on the same pipe, and you have to take it out of service to put in the T.
With fiber its that * 10, generally your fiber will run with with everyone elses' (and maybe even along side the backbone) to a fiber hut somewhere down the line, where they all patch into transceivers and fiber-mux's to be piped back upstream or around the ring. Sure, the backbone itself might be laid at the edge of the road 20' from your door, but the nearest fiber hut could be a few miles down the road. Same reason you dont normally see the houses directly under high-tension power lines running taps to them...
tm
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A trencher is good but sometimes the ground has huge nasty rocks. We use all three here on the farm do do trenching, ditchwitch, backhoe, trackhoe. You can even use a ripper plow and then go back over it with the blade and smooth it back out if it is all soft mostly. That's really fast if you have a big crawler to drag it, it's like butter then. Just depends on your terrain and how deep you want to go.
With that said, I wish we had better options on wireless. It's gotten really old them tards in government selling all the good spectrum to the same billionaires all the time and leaving john q. public with the *dregs*.
The "easiest" solution would be to run a bunch of fibres to some "neutral" point on each block. Although this uses multiple cables, with one cable per end-point in the junction box, it's the same distribution mechanism that cable currently uses. (You see cable junction boxes on some telephone poles, but also as small green pedestals in front of houses and as junction boxes on the sides of apartment buildings.) The "last mile" becomes the "last few feet", with the cable relatively easy (and therefore relatively cheap) to reach and replace.
If you wanted to do municipal/metropolitan broadband, you'd have 32 fibres run to each block, then a 256-way multicast-capable, MPLS-capable router linking four blocks together. (MPLS, or some other virtual circuit protocol, would then uniquely tag a user's stream, so it can be identified further along.) This would be linked to a switch, in the case of larger cities, which would link up a fairly large set of these 4-blocks into a well-defined subset of the city. You'd then have a set of top level multicast-capable MPLS-capable routers that linked the layer below it onto the public Internet, possibly through multiple gateways. Residents would then "buy" Internet access from the providers as always, but this would only require adjusting a QoS table entry in one top-level router that identified how much bandwidth a given virtual circuit had on the public Internet and which gateway that connection would use.
For intra-city connections - say, IMing a friend in the next building - you would only go over the metronet, and your connection could sensibly be whatever speed the local fibre could handle - call it a gigabit per second - provided the upstream networks weren't saturated, as you're working over shared pipes some of the way. Saturation can be avoided by placing routers and switches in parallel. You could load-balance between them, or you could have them working wholly in parallel and have very high-speed switches linking the independent metronets together into a collective metronet. In either case, it makes no difference which router a packet comes in on or goes out on, even if the routers are not on the same "tree" per-se.
If you don't have limited funds, then saturation is inevitable at some point. To minimize the overall impact, routers should be enabled with CBQ or HFSC, such that each virtual circuit has a guaranteed bandwidth (something it can always reach, no matter how busy the network) and a hard maximum bandwidth of whatever the local few meters connection can support, where the guaranteed bandwidth is either an equal fraction of the network at that segment or the hard maximum, whichever is less.
Could this be done? Yes. It's not anti-competitive, as ISPs still end up selling bandwidth to customers the way they have always done. The metronet doesn't replace the ISPs, it replaces the need for excessive physical wiring and it allows ISPs that provide broadband to do so without buying/maintaining quite so many expensive DSL modems, so it cuts the ISP's costs.
Is such a model in use? Yes. It's how natural gas and electricity are sold already. It's how DSL works, for the most part, as DSL companies all share the same phone lines. The difference is the line supplier, not the principle.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
So, there will be a new Fiber Management Company (FMC ?) setup to manage your own fiber and arguably the peering point.
Who would this Company report to and how would it too its business ?
Would it report to the Homeowners through some kind of HOA ?
If not, then you just moved the monopoly from the ISP to the FMC.
But if the peering point and fibers are really owned by the HOA, can an HOA really ensure quality service to its member ? Do you feel comfortable with your neighbors handling this ? I mean my HOA is trying to regulate the Satellite Dishes, in the complex, with very little success. And I dont really want my neighboors to have access to my connection logs.
It is likely that the local cable or phone company will be first to connect to your peering point and try to keep the competition out by the usual means.
I'm not saying its a bad idea, but I doubt it will be a perfect solution...
A couple days of using the backhoe to dig the ditch would pay for itself.
Ottawa is a city. There tend to be pavements, roads, concrete etc. in the way not to mention a city council that will get rather ticked off if you dig a large trench into the middle of the street. While the idea seems nice in principle is the city going to give homeowners the right to dig up the street to fix their connection if it fails? Are there really going to be multiple companies connecting to the streets central hub to provide a real choice of service? On the face of it it seems rather impractical.
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If you are looking for a return when it comes time to sell your house... all I can tell you is that the odds are better in Lotto.
The choices you make in tech - like those you make in interior design - are personal. The buyer sees your dream house, not their dream house.
Here in the US, Federal, State, and Local governments either directly build roads, or hire private companies to build and maintain the roads.
Why can't the US do this with fiber? Competing ISPs, could provide service over the fiber to end users, and tax dollars would pay to maintain the fiber "roads". Your monthly ISP bill would cover the services provided over the fiber (data, voice, video...etc).
I'm sure many will argue that they don't want their tax dollars paying for someone to download music and porn, but your tax dollars already pay for roads, even if you don't drive.
A reliable, public, fiber infrastructure will be as important to the US in the future as telephones and electricity are now. We need leaders that are smart enough to see that.
-ted