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A New Neutral, Long-Haul Fiber Network
techclicker sends word on the ambitious plans of Allied Fiber to disrupt the long-haul business in the US. The company is embarking on the first phase of a planned six-phase build-out of dark fiber, towers, and co-lo facilities ringing the US. The first three phases are budgeted at $670M; the last three are not yet laid out in detail (announcement, PDF). Phase 1 is scheduled for completion in 2010. Allied's business model of selling wholesale bandwidth to all comers is in sharp contrast to that of incumbents such as AT&T, who won't sell backhaul to potential competitors. "Allied is deploying a 432-count, long-haul cable coupled with the 216-count, short-haul cable that will be a composite of Single-Mode and Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted fibers. Allied Fiber has implemented a new, multi-duct design for intermediate access to the long-haul fiber duct through a parallel short-haul fiber duct all along the route. This enables all points between the major cities, including wireless towers and rural networks, to gain access to the dark fiber. In addition, the Allied Fiber neutral colocation facilities, located approximately every 60 miles along the route, accommodate and encourage a multi-tenant interconnection environment integrated with fiber that does not yet exist in the United States on this scale."
Watching the network administrator dealing with our peers is very aggravating. I hope this works out, from what is given it might solve a lot of these headaches.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I fully expect the cartels to lodge complain of some kind (no matter how absurd) any day now...
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
What this might mean to me as a cable user? Anything at all? Will I be able to buy access to this? or?
The guy in charge of it is named "Newby".
I really hope this works out.
That brings me to an interesting point, / . is just "the ramblings of socially-inept, technology-literate news-mongers".
Where can I buy stock?
My first thought was 'Hellz YEAH!' I mean, sod the telcos and cable companies. I was lucky enough to find an independent ISP. I can see them hooking up with this quickly. Last mile questions aside, anything that routes around qw*st, c*mc*st, and v*r*zn is a good thing.
Look up Metromedia Fiber Networks and see the past history of this idea.
about a project of this scale was Iridium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iridium_satellite_constellation.
The single mode, Non-Zero Dispersion Shifted fibers is of course optimized for DWDM. That means that a buyer can put at least 128 colors in the fiber, each with 10Gb/s. With 423 fibers in the bundle, that adds up to 0.5Pb/s.
With 10x oversubscription, this will supply 541 million homes with 100Mb/s broadband each.
That should cover all of the americas with 100 million is USA, 46 million in Brazil, and 12 million in Canada.
The cost for each household should be pennies.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
While this won't give us a whole new group of local ISPs, what it can give us is a handful of Metropolitan Wireless Area Network ISPs for most major and mid sized metro areas that have a reasonable chance of competing against the local monopoly carriers.
For instance, in the metropolitan area where I live, you have two main choices for broadband, Cable and DSL over the telco. There are a few metropolitan wireless providers, but they are paying hefty fees for their backbone links through the local monopoly carriers (I know, I used to temp for one). Assuming that there will be available bandwidth left on this "neutral access" backbone, and assuming that one of the rings comes close enough to here, they could shift over to that and reduce their interconnect costs, being able to compete on a cost basis with the wired, monopoly carriers in the area.
Remember Level 3? There's a whole lot of dark fiber already in the ground that is obsolete and will never be lit up. Level 3 has conduit and fiber in place all over the globe. Before "The Fall" it was trading near $100 per share. Now it's $1.25. So no, I wouldn't buy stock in this venture.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Actually Level 3 is doing OK now (despite the low stock price) but it sure seems like Level3 is already doing what these guys plan to, and in fact I'd be really surprised if new conduits are being laid or if it's just running fiber through Level3 conduits... Level3 even has I think the access points along the cable routes they were describing, since they have to repeat the signal every so often anyway.
Also 675 million sounds REALLY low to put in a nationwide fiber network, I think Level3 spent more like ten billion...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Here is the logic. If they are able to roll out as they plan then there will be allot of companies buying back haul from them rather than one of the incumbents. If the CoLo prices are reasonable then even more so. On the other side you would have companies like AT&T looking at them as a target for acquisition since they would be cutting into their high profit customer base and potential future revenue streams as well. They would almost have to or fall under their own weight. Either way the investors will win.
a franchising authority may not grant an exclusive [cable TV] franchise and may not unreasonably refuse to award an additional competitive franchise.
Things like "unreasonably" tend to be decided in favor of who has the more expensive lawyers.
This could go a long way toward reducing costs and improving performance. The FCC or Congress should long ago have required mandatory "open access" leasing of backhaul. In other countries, open access has been directly correlated with lower prices and better performance.
1.- Propose ambitious project for ultra high speed for everybody!
2.- Rise public funds over promises of open unregulated connection for the nation
3.- ???
4.- Profit!
For 1000pts, guess what is step 3?
But... the future refused to change.
More competition is always good for the consumer.
Comcast will still own the last mile for 100 million Americans but now their costs will be lower so they can claim higher bandwidth and charge more and then throttle any non-premium customer who uses more than a GB per month!
No, I am not being funny. Nor is Comcast.
I nearly blew a load when I read this. Competition in the space where its sorely needed, and fat fat pipes needing data. I have data that I want out. Getting upload bandwidth is freakishly expensive (download bandwidth is cheap and easy). Show me a piece of OC3 fiber, and I will fill it (ok, I may only be able to fill 100Mb/s of it), but given a bit of time, I could fill an OC24 connection. Where I live (Canada), bandwidth is extremely slow and pricey. I pay $40C ($42.10US) for 2.5Mbps down, 512kbps up, per month (60GB cap, with a per GP fee over that). Because the scale slides, they don't worry about net neutrality, go do whatever you like, just pay us at the end. Still, I would rather have fiber for cheaper.
Whoever engineered the smaller run alongside the larger one, then decided that anyone who wants access to the system taps into the smaller system, is definitely worth whatever that person makes every year. Keeping the end users off of the backbone itself limits the chance of a misconfiguration taking everything down.
How does fiber become 'obsolete'? If we're not talking decay due to physical rot or some other abuse, I'm not seeing it.
A semiconductor fab built 20 or 30 years ago sees obsolescence due to clean-room air-quality standards increasing, but the old fab is still far cleaner than hospital standards -- medical products suppliers are buying/leasing old fabs to convert to their own manufacturing needs. But for fiber to be *obsolete*, there needs to be some technical qualification they no longer meet. What changed?
Who is funding allied fiber? $670 million is a lot to raise in this economy. I have the sneaking suspicious that some large CDN like google is behind this. The only company that would want to build an entirely new long-haul network is someone who can build an entire datacenter just for one feature on their website. Otherwise like others have said here, there's plenty of dark fiber around. Otherwise the existing players already have their own routes, their own pops, their own peering agreements. If google or facebook or someone was tired of strict peering agreements or paying up the ass for transit, a "neutral" company like allied is the perfect cover. By hyping it and slashing prices they can attract outside business to build up enough usage to make it plausible they really are neutral. Then companies like At&t will play ball.
Hi there. I want to talk to you about ducts. Do your ducts seem old fashioned, out of date? Central Services' new duct designs are now available in hundreds of different colors to suit your individual tastes!
A fiber through a neighborhood drops one 10Gb color per highrise. An edgerouter in the basement connects each of the 36 floors with Gb ethernet. Each floor has GigE routers to 30 apartments.
Actual cost of installation in a dense urban deployment:
1km of fiber between each highrise: $60k (This was a shared cost ditch)
10Gb uplink edgerouter $30k
1k ports Gig switches: $8k
In building infrastructure(wiring, power etc: $56k
total cost for last mile for dense urban deployment per 100Mb customer: $142
Montly depreciation with 5 year life on equipment and 20 year on infrastructure: $1.65
Provisioning, management, billing, email, DNS servers etc: $3.50
Marketing, DRM, security, law enforcement support, Lobby efforts: $5.50
Adjust these numbers for yourself, and there is no way you can get more than 3x even if you goldplate it all.
Wifi can keep cost down in less dense deployments.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
And this would be better for the internet. As much as we might not trust Google at least they are fair with their privacy invasion.