Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Thanks Jacob and Alex. Appreciate your reply. On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: While I can't provide an average, I can say we generally have anywhere from 2-5 microwaves on most sites (with a few exceptions that only have 1, and a few that have more.) Our MWs go up to 1.6gbps. The sites aren't provisioned a set amount of bandwidth, they can use as much as they want (up to the capacity of the aggregate of their links), which almost never puts our BH anywhere near capacity, unless the ring gets cut near the pop and we have to move lots of data through just a couple of sites. (Sorry for the crappy formatting, small and barely usable phone screen.) Thanks! -Jacob On Mar 28, 2012 1:45 AM, Anurag Bhatia m...@anuragbhatia.com wrote: Hi Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul at present 2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number. I agree it would be a significant difference from busy street in New York to less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos provision per tower? On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites? Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere? If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high contention? Thanks! (Sent from my mobile device) Anurag Bhatia http://anuragbhatia.com On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, Alexander Harrowell a.harrow...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin b...@herrin.us wrote: On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an optical wire or optical fibre or something. no, it'll never catch on... Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the technology pipeline. When someone says, that's in the pipeline they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells. As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*. One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site. You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Hi Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul at present 2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number. I agree it would be a significant difference from busy street in New York to less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos provision per tower? On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites? Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere? If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high contention? Thanks! (Sent from my mobile device) Anurag Bhatia http://anuragbhatia.com On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, Alexander Harrowell a.harrow...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin b...@herrin.us wrote: On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an optical wire or optical fibre or something. no, it'll never catch on... Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the technology pipeline. When someone says, that's in the pipeline they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells. As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*. One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site. You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. .. Web: http://bill.herrin.us/ Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
While I can't provide an average, I can say we generally have anywhere from 2-5 microwaves on most sites (with a few exceptions that only have 1, and a few that have more.) Our MWs go up to 1.6gbps. The sites aren't provisioned a set amount of bandwidth, they can use as much as they want (up to the capacity of the aggregate of their links), which almost never puts our BH anywhere near capacity, unless the ring gets cut near the pop and we have to move lots of data through just a couple of sites. (Sorry for the crappy formatting, small and barely usable phone screen.) Thanks! -Jacob On Mar 28, 2012 1:45 AM, Anurag Bhatia m...@anuragbhatia.com wrote: Hi Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul at present 2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number. I agree it would be a significant difference from busy street in New York to less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos provision per tower? On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites? Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere? If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high contention? Thanks! (Sent from my mobile device) Anurag Bhatia http://anuragbhatia.com On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, Alexander Harrowell a.harrow...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin b...@herrin.us wrote: On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an optical wire or optical fibre or something. no, it'll never catch on... Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the technology pipeline. When someone says, that's in the pipeline they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells. As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*. One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site. You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Ignoring the fact that we haven't reached our limits with fiber yet ... If you're talking broadband, I think it's pretty reasonable to suggest that a fiber plant will last 20 years with minor maintenance just given the history of how long we've used copper. When its 2012 and you have people who are still on DSL with 768K broadband, it's nice to toss around the theory that technology moves fast and that 20 years from now everyone will have Terabit to the home over wireless, but I really don't see it. Back in the 90s I was sure everyone would have 100M to the home by now. The next major speed boost for broadband will be over fiber. And because the bottleneck at that point becomes equipment, we'll continue to see a healthy round of upgrades in speed over the same fiber plant. If people got serious about FTTH, I think a _very_ optimistic timeline would be something like: 2015 - First communities coming online, 100M to the home (probably Gigabit line rate, but throttled). 2020 - Gigabit to the home starting to become common 2030 - Gigabit to the home typical 2035 - 10G to the home starting to become common 2040 - Newer optics require better fiber for back haul, minor upgrades to middle-mile needed to push speeds. 2050 - People finally agree to invest in those upgrades after suffering 10 years of only 10G to the home. On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:45 PM, William Herrin b...@herrin.us wrote: On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the technology pipeline. When someone says, that's in the pipeline they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. .. Web: http://bill.herrin.us/ Falls Church, VA 22042-3004 -- Ray Soucy Epic Communications Specialist Phone: +1 (207) 561-3526 Networkmaine, a Unit of the University of Maine System http://www.networkmaine.net/
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
- Original Message - From: Ray Soucy r...@maine.edu Ignoring the fact that we haven't reached our limits with fiber yet ... Not close, and we're at 100G already. The next major speed boost for broadband will be over fiber. And because the bottleneck at that point becomes equipment, we'll continue to see a healthy round of upgrades in speed over the same fiber plant. And, much more to the point, ONTs will go over the edge of the Consumer Pricing S-curve. Bet *cash* on this. But another more interesting point being missed here is this: Assuming pointopoint fiber, *you can provision different classes of service appropriately*. If some client wants to pay for 40G fiber? Cool. You can do that. That in itself seems to positively skew the potential for muni layer 1 installs, to me. And it doesn't *preclude* the muni operating a standardized layer 2 for those carriers who don't want to do that part themselves; economy of scale will actually be productive there, I suspect. Anyone want to start Level 1 Communications? Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Actual public financed non-muni fiber is skipping the easy parts and deploying only a few of the hard parts. (current actual results of USF) How is that an improvement? Owen On Mar 25, 2012, at 8:47 AM, Jay Ashworth wrote: Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. Time to assemble some stats, I guess. -- jra -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote: Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPa d On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, Frank Bulk frnk...@iname.com wrote: How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -Original Message- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:j...@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality suppli es (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin b...@herrin.us wrote: On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry information is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some sort of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses and keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might call it an optical wire or optical fibre or something. no, it'll never catch on... Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the technology pipeline. When someone says, that's in the pipeline they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years back that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision. Better air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)* number of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise), nothing beats more cells. As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a 10GigE Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to *pass the houses in the street with fibre*. One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul network for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or a dozen DSL lines for a cell site. You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible discoveries in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from cell subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. .. Web: http://bill.herrin.us/ Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities -- Sent from my Nokia N9 On 25/03/2012 15:47 Jay Ashworth wrote: Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. Time to assemble some stats, I guess. -- jra -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote: Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, Frank Bulk o...@delong.com wrote: How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -Original Message- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:j...@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink o...@delong.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://www.muninetworks.org/ 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://www.muninetworks.org/ +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
- Original Message - From: joshua klubi joshua.kl...@gmail.com But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities Well, deserve is a strong word... but the underlying thought is my primary reason for believing that municipal fiber is a good solution, and I'll expand that thought one more layer: The Public Good is not often all that cost effective; sometimes, it's a money loser. That's why corporations can almost always be depended on *not* to be working in its interest, absent regulations to force them to do so, such as the Universal Service Obligation, imposed on ATT in one form or another all the way back to the Communications Act, and expanded in TCA96. This is one of many things that seems to militate in favor of municipally owned and operated layer 1 fiber builds -- is *is* the obligation *of a municipality* to operate in favor of the Public Good: it *is the Public*, in a very real sense. And the members of that body politic, properly informed, can make sure that such a build will be, by direction, equally accessible to all in their area: it will be a bond issue, and such items are generally ballot questions. Or at least, they can try; you can't make people vote. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
RE: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
-Original Message- From: joshua.kl...@gmail.com [mailto:joshua.kl...@gmail.com] Sent: Monday, March 26, 2012 2:10 AM To: Owen DeLong; Frank Bulk; Jay Ashworth Cc: NANOG Subject: Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) But they also deserve to have or enjoy the benefits that comes with living in the big cities I grew up in a rural area served by dialup for the first 15 years of my life, so please don't misunderstand what I'm about to say. No, they don't. Living in a rural area is a different set of value propositions than living in the Big City, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise. Do people living in the big cities reap the benefits of living in the country? No ambient noise, no air pollution, low crime rates, neighbors you know and can trust your children with? No, they don't. That isn't to say that broadband technology won't (or shouldn't) find ways of serving people in rural areas with increasingly usable levels of throughput while decreasing jitter and loss; it already is (and should), and the situation is constantly improving. But I think it's a mistake to say that people who have made the decision to live in the Big City should expect to enjoy the same benefits as people who have made the decision to live in rural towns, and vice versa. They'll never be the same, and unless I'm very much mistaken, that's actually OK. Nathan Eisenberg
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
- Original Message - From: JC Dill jcdill.li...@gmail.com On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote: In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote: Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines. Yup; that's what I said. But it cannot be privately financed; *it must be the property of the municipality*, legally. I don't care if they sub out the actual trench and splice, or even the operation of layer 1... but they have to own it; that's the whole point. Fiber has a 20-50 year life. The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is. Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless. His assertion wasn't economic life, it was *functional* life; I think we're pretty close to 50 years from the first deployment of optical fiber, and I think it's still serviceable. The question here is: did you design layer 1 properly, so as to make it cost-competitive for a long time (see the other thread on this). Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. On Mar 25, 2012 1:01 PM, valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote: On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:37:24 -0700, JC Dill said: *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless And that would be using what spectrum and what technology? Consider what the release of one Apple product did to the associated carrier's wireless net. Then consider the current tendency for unlimited wireless data to mean 2-3G per month. Where's the economic incentive for all these carriers to build out enough capacity to move all consumer data (or a large fraction anyhow), and lower their prices to match? Sure, it may happen *eventually*, but for it to happen in 5-10 years, it would have to be in motion *now*. So who's already in motion?
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard shadowedstrangerli...@gmail.com wrote: Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years? That's the whole point of what he was trying to say. Maybe wireless carriers will use visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses for all we know. 10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen. Hi Jacob, The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as the technology pipeline. When someone says, that's in the pipeline they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now. There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads replacing fiber to the home and business. 20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about 10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might replace it. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. .. Web: http://bill.herrin.us/ Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, Frank Bulk frnk...@iname.com wrote: How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -Original Message- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:j...@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. Time to assemble some stats, I guess. -- jra -- Sent from my Android phone with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity. Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote: Who cares? It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments. It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural. The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done. Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, Frank Bulk frnk...@iname.com wrote: How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -Original Message- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:j...@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote: Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. I agree. If a commercial company goes in to serve folks with fiber they expect a relatively short ROI, 3-5 years typically. This is why rural customers aren't profitable; they can't get money from a bank or wall-street for a longer time so they are trying to spread out the build costs over too short of a recoupment period. Fiber has a 20-50 year life. Munis could finance fiber with a 20 year bond at a much lower interest rate than any corporation. By spreading out the costs over 20 years these customers become profitable, often quite so. While in the CBD you might find more than one fiber provider passing a building, for 99.999% of residential users there will only ever be ONE fiber provider to the home. It's hard enough to make the first fiber cost effective, there's no way to go into an already served area incurring all the costs for 50% of the customers up front. In many small towns muni-fiber in a single star topology to a central switching station where multiple providers can co-locate would bring competitive services at a very attractive cost for both the end user and the services (IP, telephony, video) provider. It's also a topology and technology that easily has 20-50 years of life. -- Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ pgp3CvHT3zwrX.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
That is why I believe that the L1 buildout should be done by or under contract to the local authority (whether that be a municipality, county, special district, or whatever) and then leased to L2+ service providers on an equal cost per subscriber basis. Now it doesn't matter which subscribers cost more or less to build out, they all cost the same to serve. Yes, the more expensive subscribers are being subsidized by the less expensive ones. Overall, I don't really have a problem with this as I don't think that the discrepancies within a given authority area will be that large. I do think that we should require each authority to build out to all end sites within their jurisdiction not served by a smaller authority. For example, Contra Cost County, California would be required to build out El Sobrante (unincorporated area of the county), but, not Pinole, Rodeo, Crockett, Hercules, etc. (since they would be required to be built out by their cities). Yes, it's likely that the L2+ providers would have a higher cost per customer to serve El Sobrante than to serve the cities. However, since that increased cost would apply equally to all L2+ providers, it would easily be passed on to those subscribers and they would, therefore end up paying roughly the true cost of their choice to live in an unincorporated lower-density area. Yes, higher-density authorities would have a better chance of attracting greater competition and diversity in L2+ providers. However, nothing would prevent or exclude smaller authorities from working out colocation deals with nearby larger (or even groups of smaller) authorities and bringing the termination points of multiple authorities together in the same location. Likewise, nothing would prevent authorities from building inexpensive backhaul facilities to adjacent larger centers. If you cleanly separate the L1 infrastructure from the L2+ services providers, you really do have opportunities to do better for the subscriber base overall. Yes, the L1 buildout will cost slightly more than an optimal monopoly build-out by a service provider. However, that small increase in cost yields huge benefits on the other side in terms of reduced barriers to competition, increased diversity, and more price pressure on the L2+ services side of things. Owen Sent from my iPad On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:49 PM, Frank Bulk frnk...@iname.com wrote: From my own experience in my $DAYJOB, separating capital decisions at the L1 and L2 layers would end up adding cost. As mentioned elsewhere, GPON and similar shared medium approaches do not lend themselves well to structural separation. The most practical approach is dark fiber runs from the customer to as few centralized places as possible. The CLEC would co-locate their equipment at those centralized places. The CLEC is then free to use ActiveE, GPON, whatever-the-next-gen-of-PON. Structural separation works best when the cost to build to a customer are roughly the same. Wherever there's significant disparaties, those will be exploited and people will overbuild to the highest-margin/lowest cost customers to avoid the averaged cost of L1 network. Frank -Original Message- From: Owen DeLong [mailto:o...@delong.com] Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 9:28 AM To: Masataka Ohta Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services. If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer. Owen
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote: In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote: Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose. It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines. If a commercial company goes in to serve folks with fiber they expect a relatively short ROI, 3-5 years typically. This is why rural customers aren't profitable; they can't get money from a bank or wall-street for a longer time so they are trying to spread out the build costs over too short of a recoupment period. Fiber has a 20-50 year life. The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is. Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless. This is why most modern build-outs have to show a ROI of under 5 years. We just don't know what new technology breakthroughs might happen, which could make a project that requires a 10-30 year payback schedule go bankrupt when a new technology makes the prior one obsolete. jc
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
On Sun, 25 Mar 2012 12:37:24 -0700, JC Dill said: *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless And that would be using what spectrum and what technology? Consider what the release of one Apple product did to the associated carrier's wireless net. Then consider the current tendency for unlimited wireless data to mean 2-3G per month. Where's the economic incentive for all these carriers to build out enough capacity to move all consumer data (or a large fraction anyhow), and lower their prices to match? Sure, it may happen *eventually*, but for it to happen in 5-10 years, it would have to be in motion *now*. So who's already in motion? pgp47U4KH5q6C.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 12:37:24PM -0700, JC Dill wrote: their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless. You have offered a two part problem. The initial question is, will fiber put in the ground today still be able to do something useful in 20-50 years. I believe the answer to that is yes. There is fiber that was installed in the early 1980's that is still in use today. It's predecessor technology, copper wires to the home, has been in use far longer and with today's DSL technolgy has done far more than ever intended. High quality transmission media in the ground has long life, and new, well designed fiber would be no exception. The second part of your question is really might fiber be replaced with some disruptive technology? That is always a risk, but I actually think the avenues for advancement are few. Wireless of some type is probably the only viable competitor, and it's anything but cheap at scale. The real way to address the second part is to look at the outgoing technology, copper/dsl. Even though phone lines were designed to just carry 8khz voice, we've found it far cheaper and easier to design DSL technology around those properties rather than replace it with fiber or wireless. The reason? Build cost mostly. Diging to bury new fiber is expensive, and even with wireless permitting new transmitter locations and spectrum are very expensive. Can I _guarantee_ no better technology will come along? No. However I would posit even if it does come along the life span of fiber is still 20 years just due to the build cost and timeframe of the new tech. It's if it doesn't come along the timeline grows to more like 50 years. There's risk in any technology investment, however I think having a high bandwidth, high reliability, cheap to operate pipe into the home will always have enormous value, and right now fiber is the best tech to that and thus the best place to invest. -- Leo Bicknell - bickn...@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/ pgpxpgFGnT5SN.pgp Description: PGP signature
RE: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -Original Message- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:j...@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
RE: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
From my own experience in my $DAYJOB, separating capital decisions at the L1 and L2 layers would end up adding cost. As mentioned elsewhere, GPON and similar shared medium approaches do not lend themselves well to structural separation. The most practical approach is dark fiber runs from the customer to as few centralized places as possible. The CLEC would co-locate their equipment at those centralized places. The CLEC is then free to use ActiveE, GPON, whatever-the-next-gen-of-PON. Structural separation works best when the cost to build to a customer are roughly the same. Wherever there's significant disparaties, those will be exploited and people will overbuild to the highest-margin/lowest cost customers to avoid the averaged cost of L1 network. Frank -Original Message- From: Owen DeLong [mailto:o...@delong.com] Sent: Friday, March 23, 2012 9:28 AM To: Masataka Ohta Cc: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) snip It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services. If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer. Owen
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
Jared Mauch wrote: It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate. The difference is in how the services can be unbundled. Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant. For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine. So is optical fiber if single star topology is used. WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1. However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling. Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why PON promotes local monopoly. Masataka Ohta
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
On Mar 23, 2012, at 6:21 AM, Masataka Ohta wrote: Jared Mauch wrote: It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate. The difference is in how the services can be unbundled. Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant. For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine. So is optical fiber if single star topology is used. WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1. However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling. Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why PON promotes local monopoly. It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services. If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer. Owen
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:27 AM, Owen DeLong o...@delong.com wrote: On Mar 23, 2012, at 6:21 AM, Masataka Ohta wrote: Jared Mauch wrote: It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls the outside plant controls your fate. The difference is in how the services can be unbundled. Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is irrelevant. For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine. So is optical fiber if single star topology is used. WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1. However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling. Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why PON promotes local monopoly. It doesn't promote local monopoly if you don't allow the L1 company to provide L2+ services. If the L1 company is required to be independent of and treat all L2+ services companies equally, then, the ILEC, CLEC, et. all have the same cost per customer. Hi Owen, Just for grins, I wonder: what is the minimal set of _structural_ requirements that could end the kind of abuses we see from the ILECs without relying on good behavior? The problem with regulatory compulsion is that it restrains the march of technological progress too. Minimum is good. Here's what I'm thinking: 1. Any company which provides more than 5% of the OSI Layer 1 services in a given locality is prohibited from providing any Layer 7 services except those strictly incidental to the operation of the L1 service (e.g. billing or customer service web sites, internal corporate network). 2. Such a communications infrastructure company may vend L1-L6 services only in units suitable for connecting single customers. For example, they're not allowed to lease a multi-customer coaxial cable in the King street neighborhood. The service unit is a dedicated coaxial cable from 44 King street to the head end or A dedicated cable channel from 44 King Street to the head end or 25mbps/25mbps from 44 King strreet to the head end or 25 mbps / 25 mbps from 44 King Street to 888 King Street. 3. Such a communications infrastructure company is compelled to provide reasonable and non-discriminatory access too all who would interconnect. Charge whatever you want but no quantity or special discounts and if you bill any service provider at the head end of the connection then you bill them all the same. No settlement free peering for this guy while that guy pays. Regards, Bill Herrin -- William D. Herrin her...@dirtside.com b...@herrin.us 3005 Crane Dr. .. Web: http://bill.herrin.us/ Falls Church, VA 22042-3004
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
- Original Message - From: Kris Price na...@punk.co.nz I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Are they? Last I saw they were building out a layer 3 network -- no wholesale access -- did this change? No, you're right; that was me being flippant. (He thinks flippant is the name of a dolphin...) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
William Herrin wrote: However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means there effectively is no unbundling. I strongly disagree. If this were true, there would be no market for MPLS service: folks would simply buy Internet service and run VPNs. You agree with me. MPLS at L2 sucks because it is as expensive as, but less capable than, IP at L3. If you take my packets off at the first hop and deliver them to a 3rd party provider, If you are saying delivery as IP, your local provider is an ISP with monopoly. Even if the cost for the unbundled L2 circuit was *identical* to the cost of the bundled Internet circuit it would enable a huge range of niche products that aren't practical now. See the reality of your example of MPLS. Masataka Ohta
Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
- Original Message - From: John Kreno john.kr...@gmail.com This sharing can be done at a layer-3 or as you say at the time slot level or lambda level. It's no different than what is happening with the copper already. It's not like they have to give it away for free. They just have to offer it to other carriers at cost. This will hopefully provide more of a competitive market. But I don't see Verizon giving into it, nor Comcast or any other provider that has fiber. Verizon campaigned hard to have fiber removed from the equal access legalize so like most of these other large companies, they don't want to share their new toy with the other children. Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)
I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Are they? Last I saw they were building out a layer 3 network -- no wholesale access -- did this change? It sorta fit with their goals in that it meant they could build a faster/simpler network for less money and make a big/bold 1 Gbps to every home (not really true) statement, but it doesn't end up serving a very practical model for most of the world who believe the separation needs to happen at layer 2. Layer 3 is interesting, but is everyone happy with saying goodbye to the ISP entirely and accepting regional monopolies on that space?
