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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."
At the least, more backhaul bandwidth. Ideally, it would allow new ISPs to enter the market and compete with the current conglomerates. However, I suspect the incumbents to buy up all the access to the new bandwidth.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
Why would do that when they can just buy up all the access to the new bandwidth?
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
As a cable user, yes. Someone will have to provide the 'backhaul' and since it's traditionally very expensive to [lease|build|maintain] long distance links, it's likely that cable ISPs will jump all over this. Since Allied doesn't offer last mile service, either as fiber or anything else, then the cable company won't be helping their competitors. You might even find that a regional or national phone company will be able to use their service, and offer reduced rates or more bandwidth with DSL or some other connection.
Kid-proof tablet..
The incumbents are almost universally public utilities. They are granted a local monopoly as having more than one company digging up the streets to lay cable/phone/fiber would be insanity.
This will have absolutely no effect at all on the consumers situation.
Absolutely not.
What it means is that there will be a new powerful player in a game that has seemed to be heading for a huge win for the big telecoms and cable companies and a huge loss for consumers. The consumers will still almost certainly be the big losers, but there will be a more interesting contest for first place.
The shame of it is that "The first three phases are budgeted at $670M; the last three are not yet laid out in detail" which means that for less than a billion dollars the government could have laid the groundwork for insuring a level of true net "neutrality" for decades to come that would have given the broader US economy and probably the entire world economy an excellent shot in the arm while forcing AT&T and company to start working for their customers again instead of the other way around.
By building the internet, and then giving it away, the US government created the widest and deepest increase in worldwide wealth (WWW) that we've seen since WWII. Instead of renewing this legacy with a relatively modest investment, they've allowed to a cartel to seize one of the most important inventions of the 21st century and turn it into another tool with which to funnel wealth from the lower 95% of the population to the top 5%.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why the hell not? you can buy a SA for as little as 10Mbps, and if you're willing to handle the subscription deals with end users, you can put up a small WISP on a 100Mb for under 500K: equipment, small central office (likely home based) and all legal fees in.
:P)
in canada, (where the extremely moderate costs for peering are reasonable) we've got hundreds of small WISP's popping up all the time. they provide 756Kb/256Kb wireless connections to most of rural Canada.
most ISP's here won't run a line until there are 1K+ customers willing to sign one year SA's, so the WISP's provide for thousands of people, by peering from canada's (I know. our backbones are still SMALL) backbones.
Hurricane Electric for example, has and maintains hundreds of peer points. it's nothing these days to get a hold of a pair of 3845's for under $15K each, and take a peer point with failover. (it's hard to get a lawyer to ok your contract guaranteeing five nines though, with only one peer
now if you mean the cost associated with installing and maintaining the peer point in the first place, I completely agree. even a CRS1 is WAY out of my price range, and that would only cover a fraction of these fibers bandwidth requirements.
except that the interconnect between the municipalities will be faster. And the consumers have jobs at companies that get high-speed network between offices, and they send their kids to schools that get high-speed interconnect between campuses. And then there's just the raising the bar part.
But other than those things yeah, I suspect no one would notice at all.
That's the way it works. We could've had proper single payer universal healthcare coverage, but we're paying for two pointless wars instead. We could have proper banking reform, but probably won't since ZOMG teh Soshulists. And we can't have this because a large part of American stubbornly refuses that corporatists don't care about their interests. Even though the ones that are hurt the worse by this are the same rural voters that refuse to recognize what their politicians are doing to the country.
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
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
Do you think, for one second, that the "free market" would have created anything like the free and exuberant place we call the internet?
If it hadn't been for the basic R&D by the DoD and then passing it off to mainly publicly funded universities, there would never, ever have been anything like the openness, the opportunities, the sheer explosion of ideas and energy that became the internet. No "world wide web" for sure. You forget that there were attempts by "private industry" to create something like the internet, and it turned out to be AOL. And if there was anything at all good about AOL, it was because they were trying their best to live up to expectations that the Internet created. Without government, the Internet would be cable television. Do you remember how "interactive" cable television was going to become in the 1980s and 90s?
There's been a lot of noise from know-nothing politicians about how "big government" kills the private sector and takes all the innovation out of it. It's the kind of conventional "wisdom" you read a lot here, and certain segments of the political spectrum have come to take it as gospel. But the Internet is just one example where every single one of us reading Slashdot today can experience the opposite, the fact that government can be the private sector's best friend and not by "getting out of the way" either.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Because then Allied would have a bunch of profit over and above what it cost them to build it out. Having won good profits that way, don't you think they'd do it again?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I doubt Allied cares who leases the bandwidth. And I would be surprised if they managed to build more than the combined purchasing power of the incumbents can afford to lease.
All true, of course, but here's the cool part:
If the incumbents were to buy out Allied's entire capacity, they'd effectively be funding it to build more.
Given that capitalisation is the hardest part of the roll-out process, having your competitors effectively subsidising the growth of your network as part of a plan to make you fail... surely, that would provide at least a few moments of delightful schadenfreude.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.