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'I'm Suing New York City To Loosen Verizon's Iron Grip' (wired.com)
New submitter mirandakatz writes: New York City is lagging far behind when it comes to ensuring ubiquitous, reasonably priced fiber optic internet access for every resident. There's a jaw-dropping digital divide in the city, and more than a quarter of households are still using dial-up. The city could be doing more to fix that -- but it's not. That's why Susan Crawford, a professor at Harvard Law School and fierce advocate for nationwide fiber, is suing the city. At Backchannel, Crawford writes that "the city's intransigence should be embarrassing to it. Instead of a plan, instead of exercising power and acting coherently, all we've got is shuffling and nay-saying. Getting information regarding access is the key to transforming telecommunications policy in the U.S. -- as well as in New York City. We must do better." "New York City is the regulator of all the underground conduit in those two boroughs -- meaning the pipes running under the streets through which fiber optic lines are threaded," Crawford writes. "At any moment, it could require that additional conduit be built where it doesn't now exist. It could require that choked-up conduit that is now decades old be cleaned and repaired. And it could require that that conduit run to every building in the city, and require that all new buildings have neutral connection points in their basements allowing many competitors to hawk their services to tenants. If the city took these steps [...] it would foster a vibrantly competitive marketplace for retail fiber-based services for everyone. Dozens of competitors. Low prices for data transmission. But the problem is that, as far as I can tell, the city that never sleeps is, in fact, asleep: It is not taking advantage of its powers. That is why I sued the city five years ago seeking information about its regulatory efforts."
I've made a career in telecommunications as part of a large organization, going through migrations from T-carrier to metro-optical spoke-layout from one vendor, to metro-optical ring-layout from another vendor. This is in addition to PSTN, ISDN, and even the occasional presence of DSL and cablemodem.
One of the fundamental problems is the sheer amount of space required in telecom rooms for all of the various service providers to have their equipment, and decisions that the service providers themselves make can have fairly important impact on the space required.
Right now each large facility has basically four racks dedicated to service providers, moderate-sized facilities will have two racks, and small facilities will have one rack. Remember, this is for a single customer per facility, not multi-tenant facilities, and involves service-providers set up for specific purposes. We have one smallish building that was purchased with existing tenants, and thus has a couple of shared-use telecom rooms. We have probably five racks for four tenants plus ourselves in order to allow all ISPs to play. To give the service provider enough space for both their network equipment and their power-backup equipment.
The problem is that it's asking a lot for landlords to create telecom rooms that have the square footage, cleanliness, organization, and physical access control in order to allow multiple service providers to have presence. We have a few cell-towers located on our grounds and I've had the opportunities to see inside of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile cell-tower installations, and assuming that service providers would want the level of integrity and security that the cell companies look for in their networks, it's going to be expensive to make this new network.
The only practical way I can see it working would be to build incredibly high-bandwidth fiber networks in a star topology where the power-reundancy is needed only for the building, rather than to keep a ring intact for adjacent customers, and to then break-out with some fairly expensive equipment in order to offer service to the tenants, as that equipment would need to be small in unit-usage so that the power, active network gear, and the demarcation point and LIU are able to fit into as little space as possible to allow more service providers to serve the building.
Otherwise I'm not sure how it would really work. Dedicated fiber to customers back to a CO or NX would take too much space in-conduit, but other solutions would take up too much floorspace in the building.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
The submitter says that for New York City "more than a quarter of households are still using dial-up". Where are they getting this information? I found this article that says the 2014 Census Bureau counted New York City with 30,000 house holds with dial up. Lets assume 5 members per house hold, that would be roughly 1 or 2 percent of the population of New York City, not even close to 25 percent.
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>"when it comes to ensuring ubiquitous, reasonably priced fiber optic internet access for every resident"
Is that the standard for which to aim? Fiber to every resident? That is not only unrealistic but just silly and unnecessary. Fiber to the customer is very expensive, hard to install, hard to terminate, and hard to repair. How about fast, reliable, and reasonably priced as the goal? What about choice in providers? What about good customer service?
I have nothing against fiber- it can be very reliable, super fast, is impervious to interference, can push data a long way without repeating, and is future-proof. But the cost and complexity of fiber means it is usually at odds with providing wide coverage to everyone. Fiber to the neighborhood is usually a very reasonable compromise when the goal is to make it affordable AND accessible.
The only reason that's even possible is that flyover country gets more back in tax dollars from the federal government than it sends in, while California (and a few other states) pay for your lifestyles. By which I mean the welfare programs that are overwhelmingly largest in the "reddest" counties.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"