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Test Selling "Last Mile" Fiber to Homeowners Under Way in Canada
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Aug 01, 2008 03:46 PM
from the more-individual-control-the-better dept.
from the more-individual-control-the-better dept.
Ars Technica is covering an interesting pilot program taking place in Ottawa, CA. 400 homes are being outfitted with fiber optic cables; however, the "last mile" of fiber is going to be sold outright to the homeowners rather than providing internet at a monthly fee. "In the future, it could become commonplace for homes to come with 'tails.' These customer-owned, fiber-optic connections would link them to a network peering point. Without the expense of rolling out last mile infrastructure to every home, many more ISPs could afford to serve a given neighborhood by running wiring to the peering point, leading to more competition and lower prices. Perhaps best of all, the growth of customer-owned fiber could make debates over 'open access' and network neutrality moot, as robust telecom competition should prevent the worst of the monopolistic behavior exhibited by telco and cable incumbents."
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Name For a Community-Owned Fiber Network? 253 comments
CleverMonkey writes "I'm a town representative to a newly created municipal group creating a new type of telco. This group has formed to build and operate a FTTH network, and provide both triple-play services and access to other providers, to over 20 mostly rural towns in East-Central Vermont. The project is novel because of the size of the network (a cable pass down every road within 600 square miles), the low-density of the area served, and the public-ownership/private-financing model that is being used. Some of the towns included in this group currently have nothing beyond 14.4 dial-up on a good day. This project began as a grassroots effort in a couple of towns and the name they chose was ECFiber — East-Central Fiber — or sometimes the East-Central Vermont Community Network. We hope that this network will grow beyond one corner of this state, and we would like a name that is both descriptive and flexible. What would you name a community-owned, cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network covering every remote corner of two-dozen contiguous towns?"
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Cablecos, Telcos Working To Strengthen the Duopoly 113 comments
The LA Times is running a piece on cooperation among cable companies and telcos. No, not cablecos cooperating with telcos; rather, both industries working on industry-wide initiatives aimed at getting a leg up on the other. AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest have been working on a site, Moveroo.com, aimed at easing the pain of people moving within the US — by making it easier for them to hook up with the incumbent telco at their destination, for instance. Odd that there is no mention of which cable services might be available where they are heading. The cablecos are cooperating on a more ambitious initiative to standardize targeted advertising nationwide, using data gathered from the set-top boxes used by Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, Cablevision, Charter, and Bright House Networks. The article quotes a spokesman from a utility consumers' action group: " [The spokesman] said these moves by the telecom and cable industries may be good for the respective businesses, but they almost surely won't be good for consumers. 'All they're doing is creating obstacles to each other's industry from gaining an advantage,' he said. 'That's not competition.' Well, it is. But not the kind that benefits customers."
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won't prevent anything (Score:4, Interesting)
I remember back in the day a wealthy friend of mine had a line to his house that he had actually paid for, a quarter T I believe it was -- he was still liable for all full payments (even more), and susceptible to shutoffs at a whim.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
susceptible to shutoffs at a whim
Your friend had a fractional T1 and didn't have an SLA?
I would be willing to do this (Score:2)
Sure hope that this can become an option in the U.S. A couple days of using the backhoe to dig the ditch would pay for itself.
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Backhoes are more fun!
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Hoes is always more fun on they backs... DIG THAT SHIT!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I own a backhoe, not a ditchwitch, otherwise would use it.
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:5, Funny)
You know what they say... when all you have is a backhoe, everything looks like a quarry.
Parent
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:5, Informative)
You use a ditchwitch to cut a trench, not a backhoe. It only needs to be a few inches wide. Right tool for the right job.
Usually not. Most communications trenches are 18 to 24 inches wide. Why? Because the cable is pulled in 3" or 4" conduits, which must be laid on a bed of compacted gravel (called "shading"), covered with more shade, and then backfilled. This requires working space in the trench. Usually multiple conduits are laid too, and telecom is often co-trenched with other utilities below it. A narrow bucket on a backhoe is the tool of choice. I have never seen a ditchwitch used to install pipe for telecom. Ditchwitches are the tool of choice for small irrigation pipe, small buried electrical feeders, and other really light duty applications. Yes, IAACC (commercial contractor).
Parent
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:4, Informative)
Can a ditchwitch fill the trench back in too ?
Automatically. You can either run it to cut a narrow trench and deposit the dirt off to the side, or you can run it to automatically cut the trench, lay in pipe or wire from a spool, and drop the dirt back on top. It then requires only a little watering and compaction and you are done. Fast and easy.
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:I would be willing to do this (Score:5, Funny)
Maybe a bunch of us in my neighborhood could get together and arrange something like this. We could string fiber to all of the homes in an area, like on poles or something... Maybe, since we're putting up poles we could get electricity to the homes as well.
We need a name for something like this that expresses the general usefulness of it for all the customers in the area. I know... let's call it a "public utility district."
Now how to pay for it... since it affects everybody, maybe some sort of property tax.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact my new house is in a community (in WA) where, during the plan of the subdivision, they mandated fiber to every home.
The service provider is owned by the local council. They provide 24x7 support. All hardware, including the hookup and the fiber router is free.
The only drawback is that every home owner - even those who do not use the service - have to pay the minimum fee, which is $42 per month for 6MB symmetrical / 20MB symmetrical is an extra $50.
I think this service has been around for about 5 year
Re: (Score:3)
You have to have sigs turned on in order for this joke to work. Here, I'll help:
A public utility district is authorized to provide telecommunications services. - WA SB 6102 2007
In the city? (Score:3, Insightful)
A couple days of using the backhoe to dig the ditch would pay for itself.
Ottawa is a city. There tend to be pavements, roads, concrete etc. in the way not to mention a city council that will get rather ticked off if you dig a large trench into the middle of the street. While the idea seems nice in principle is the city going to give homeowners the right to dig up the street to fix their connection if it fails? Are there really going to be multiple companies connecting to the streets central hub to provide a real choice of service? On the face of it it seems rather impractical.
Looking forward to this... (Score:5, Interesting)
I do shudder at paying for repairs to 'my' section of fibre optics - I mean, what happens when they get cut because someone is out digging in the yard? It is pretty hard to get other people to pay for their mistakes... especially if they're expensive!
But, I certainly could go for a community network, even if it was partly independant of the internet - it would make p2p much faster, and more difficulty to monitor.
Re: (Score:2)
The same thing that happens if you're out digging in the yard and the part of the water line that you're responsible for gets broken?
Re:Looking forward to this... (Score:5, Insightful)
The "easiest" solution would be to run a bunch of fibres to some "neutral" point on each block. Although this uses multiple cables, with one cable per end-point in the junction box, it's the same distribution mechanism that cable currently uses. (You see cable junction boxes on some telephone poles, but also as small green pedestals in front of houses and as junction boxes on the sides of apartment buildings.) The "last mile" becomes the "last few feet", with the cable relatively easy (and therefore relatively cheap) to reach and replace.
If you wanted to do municipal/metropolitan broadband, you'd have 32 fibres run to each block, then a 256-way multicast-capable, MPLS-capable router linking four blocks together. (MPLS, or some other virtual circuit protocol, would then uniquely tag a user's stream, so it can be identified further along.) This would be linked to a switch, in the case of larger cities, which would link up a fairly large set of these 4-blocks into a well-defined subset of the city. You'd then have a set of top level multicast-capable MPLS-capable routers that linked the layer below it onto the public Internet, possibly through multiple gateways. Residents would then "buy" Internet access from the providers as always, but this would only require adjusting a QoS table entry in one top-level router that identified how much bandwidth a given virtual circuit had on the public Internet and which gateway that connection would use.
For intra-city connections - say, IMing a friend in the next building - you would only go over the metronet, and your connection could sensibly be whatever speed the local fibre could handle - call it a gigabit per second - provided the upstream networks weren't saturated, as you're working over shared pipes some of the way. Saturation can be avoided by placing routers and switches in parallel. You could load-balance between them, or you could have them working wholly in parallel and have very high-speed switches linking the independent metronets together into a collective metronet. In either case, it makes no difference which router a packet comes in on or goes out on, even if the routers are not on the same "tree" per-se.
If you don't have limited funds, then saturation is inevitable at some point. To minimize the overall impact, routers should be enabled with CBQ or HFSC, such that each virtual circuit has a guaranteed bandwidth (something it can always reach, no matter how busy the network) and a hard maximum bandwidth of whatever the local few meters connection can support, where the guaranteed bandwidth is either an equal fraction of the network at that segment or the hard maximum, whichever is less.
Could this be done? Yes. It's not anti-competitive, as ISPs still end up selling bandwidth to customers the way they have always done. The metronet doesn't replace the ISPs, it replaces the need for excessive physical wiring and it allows ISPs that provide broadband to do so without buying/maintaining quite so many expensive DSL modems, so it cuts the ISP's costs.
Is such a model in use? Yes. It's how natural gas and electricity are sold already. It's how DSL works, for the most part, as DSL companies all share the same phone lines. The difference is the line supplier, not the principle.
Parent
$2700 is a lot of money, sorry folks. (Score:4, Interesting)
Paying $2700 for a fiber connection may seem like a lot, but plenty of people spend more than that on other high-tech gadgets. High-end gaming machines and laptops still cost more than $2700. And, Wu notes, a fiber connection will probably sell with the house; a couple thousand dollars is a pittance compared with the amounts many customers pay for remodeled kitchens and bathrooms, new windows, and the like.
I have fiber running less than 100 feet from my house. Why the fuck can't I just access that? I realize that they are talking about Ottawa Canada here, but why can't someone just ask me if I want to pay money to tap into the cables that are so close to me? While I don't believe $2700 is at all reasonable for what they are asking (especially in the United States) and I couldn't tell you more than a handful of people that would even know what Fiber to your door means let alone have it be a selling point, I still want someone to come to me and say, "hey, you can use that McLeod fiber that is right there -- today -- enjoy."
Ah, my dreams.
Can't just tap it (Score:5, Informative)
A fiber isn't something you can just tap into without negative results. You'll need to cut it then add a splitter.
Assuming it went perfectly, you've just
1) Killed the network for everyone using that fiber for the time it was cut
2) degraded the signal(light) for everyone
3) ponied up for several (10's of?) thousands of dollars in equipment because that signal won't likely be usable by low-end short-haul consumer equipment.
Now imagine all your neighbors doing that.
You'll need some type of remote terminal for your neighborhood.
Even in the old days of vampire taps on coax there were limits.
Parent
Re:Can't just tap it (Score:5, Insightful)
Please mod parent up. You can't just tap an existing active fiber optic line any more than you can just take a sip from an open fire hose.
Better "series of tubes" analogy: you cant just cut a hole and screw your garden hose to the nearest water main, you need pressure reducers, check valves, cuttoffs, a meter, and other pipe fittings, and it reduces the service level to everyone else on the same pipe, and you have to take it out of service to put in the T.
With fiber its that * 10, generally your fiber will run with with everyone elses' (and maybe even along side the backbone) to a fiber hut somewhere down the line, where they all patch into transceivers and fiber-mux's to be piped back upstream or around the ring. Sure, the backbone itself might be laid at the edge of the road 20' from your door, but the nearest fiber hut could be a few miles down the road. Same reason you dont normally see the houses directly under high-tension power lines running taps to them...
tm
Parent
Re:$2700 is a lot of money, sorry folks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesn't always work like that.
My university is about 2 miles from the fiber backbone which connects Denver to Chicago. I believe it's the primary line from the East Coast to West Coast. Tons and tons of capacity.
However, after doing a cost analysis, the university bought IRUs on fiber to a peering point about 150 miles south of us solely because the cost of tapping in to the nearby fiber would have been insane. In fact, that was the last option - it would have been cheaper to buy fiber from here to Chicago, 500 miles away.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
.
If you are looking for a return when it comes time to sell your house... all I can tell you is that the odds are better in Lotto.
The choices you make in tech - like those you make in interior design - are personal. The buyer sees your dream house, not their dream house.
Internet as a utility? (Score:5, Interesting)
And then that thought went the other direction: maybe the broadband internet access market will start looking more like the electricity market, rather than the other way around.
As things stand now (in the US at least), broadband competition is all but non-existent for the same reasons as more conventional utilities: the prohibitively high infrastructure cost for competitors to enter the market. If this experiment doesn't enable viable competition, maybe it's time to think about applying the regulated-monopoly idea to internet access.
Kinda' like a patch panel (Score:2)
I know I wouldn't mind buying a house with my own fiber uplink to a distribution point, as it's probably cheaper when it's part of the 'package' with a house purchase than having it run by a contractor. Since it costs just about the same to run a si
Owning your fiber is great, till something breaks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Like say some idiot knocking out your connection because they knocked it out with a backhoe. Or even the city tearing up the street, and saying you have to pay to relocate your fiber.
It's a hell of a lot easier for someone that owns a LOT of the fiber to hire lawyers and get someone else to pay for mistakes than it is for one person.
Re:Owning your fiber is great, till something brea (Score:5, Insightful)
The ideal would be for it to operate like any other civic infrastructure (water, sewer, power, etc.) where the homeowner is responsible only past a certain point (demarc point, property boundary, etc.) and the utility company is responsible for the rest.
Realistically, bandwidth _should_ be a utility.
Parent
What happens when something goes wrong? (Score:2)
It should be interesting to see how maintenance is handled. Can't wait until something goes wrong and you have a $15,000 bill to dig up the road to the "peering point."
Re:What happens when something goes wrong? (Score:5, Informative)
I know this is Slashdot, but if you had bothered to read the article you would have discovered that the cable would be managed and maintained by a management company. So the cost of maintenance would be shared among the community. Just like existing home owners associations today.
I currently pay a monthly fee to my association and it covers lawn care, water, sewer, snow removal and garbage removal. This would just tack on "fiber internet connection" to that list.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I currently pay a monthly fee to my association and it covers lawn care, water, sewer, snow removal and garbage removal.
Me too. It also pays for them to dig a hole in my yard, not fill it in, then send me a nasty notice threatening me with fines if I don't fix the hole in my yard. Depending on them for Internet access, too? God almighty!
This is great! (Score:2)
This is great! Now, the phone companies will be able to blame the customers directly for their troubles!!!
This would solve so many problems for us. (Score:5, Interesting)
I would definitely pay to have fiber drawn at my house.
I think a peering agreement is way easier than using an ISP.
This increases competition and provides infinitely more options to customers.
For instance, I could peer with a large network provider and ask for 100Mbits both way. The price would drop significantly since it's just a simple network connection after that.
Re:This would solve so many problems for us. (Score:5, Interesting)
For instance, I could peer with a large network provider and ask for 100Mbits both way. The price would drop significantly since it's just a simple network connection after that.
I'm assuming you went for funny and the mods missed it.
Just in case you were serious...why the hell would they peer with you? Unless a whole lot of their customers were sitting inside your network (ie, in your house), they'd be carrying all your traffic and you none of theirs. So that peer agreement would be rather imbalanced.
I dare you though - call up Verizon and tell them you want a peer agreement. Would be a good prank if nothing else.
Parent
Re:This would solve so many problems for us. (Score:5, Funny)
I dare you though - call up Verizon and tell them you want a peer agreement.
They told me it would cost 0.02 cents/kB.
Parent
Limit the monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Absolutely, although I would suggest at least neighbourhood level aggregation, not blocks.
(depending on what size of blocks we're talking about here)
Also, if this organization is to be a monopoly then it will have to be heavily regulated.
A co-op or condo-association model might work better and be more efficient.
Pitch in... (Score:3, Interesting)
Necessary move (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Necessary move (Score:4, Interesting)
Work the phones and talk with Verizon's FIOS people. Not the customer support folks, but the technical folks who lay the cable and stuff (if you can catch one of their vans out there laying out cable, talk with the workers). They can get you in touch with managers and supervisors who make the actual go/no-go decisions on who gets FIOS.
My previous workplace was in the same situation with FIOS available literally on the other side of the street, but Verizon unwilling to bring it to their building because it was too far back from the street. After a lot of talking, they came up with an arrangement to split the cost of the fiber install to the building 50/50 (which was still way cheaper than the T1 they were using). Last I heard Verizon decided to just pay for the whole thing. So get on the phone and talk with Verizon.
Parent
No Easement, No Fiber (Score:3, Interesting)
So, I pay $2700 for a company to "pull" fiber directly to my house/condo. But, according to the article, even though it throws around the word "ownership" there's nothing defining that ownership.
When this company goes belly up in the future, I will lose this fiber because I don't have an easement for it. And because there isn't an easement, nothing gets transferred with the property, except a gentleman's agreement. And what's to stop this company from doing something else with the fiber?
This sounds suspiciously like a cableco/telco that allows you to use another network on their physical line. I own nothing. I have no rights. It also sounds like a subscription music service.
Baby Bells RULE! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm on a farm in the country (in Ontario) that is serviced by a "baby bell" This is a co-op where all the people on the line have a share in the company.
The neat thing about this is, Bell and Rogers and all the baby bells go to Ottawa to discuss what a proper service rate is. Rogers and Bell, present their case that it costs $$$$ to do their thing. My co-op costs $$$, but because of anti-competition rules the bigger guys their their way with $$$$ and the co-op has to have the same prices.
So I'm paying $$$$ for my phone service. BUT.....
All is not lost, remember the share in the company? Well if it only costs $$$ to run a service that $$$$ is being charged, then the owners receive a dividend at the end of the year! Whee.
Or alternatively we get better service!
Whee!!!
On Tuseday (yup this really is relevant!) they were installing Fiber Optic in front of my house. In the near futures I'll be getting it inside.
Don't forget, I live on a Farm, in the middle of the farming area.
Don't you wish you didn't have to deal with the monopolies?
The Low Population Density Means A Long Wait! (Score:3, Informative)
The population of Canada is pretty low (about 35 million), spread out across the second largest country in the world and frozen solid for at least two or three months in the warmest areas, it's a big deal if this was offered.
Some places near me have just got cable access last year because they were so isolated the cable company wasn't going to put up miles of cable for one house.
I would pay up front for fiber if that meant I would get it sooner...it'll probably still end up being throttled to death somehow!
Management ? (Score:3, Insightful)
So, there will be a new Fiber Management Company (FMC ?) setup to manage your own fiber and arguably the peering point.
Who would this Company report to and how would it too its business ?
Would it report to the Homeowners through some kind of HOA ?
If not, then you just moved the monopoly from the ISP to the FMC.
But if the peering point and fibers are really owned by the HOA, can an HOA really ensure quality service to its member ? Do you feel comfortable with your neighbors handling this ? I mean my HOA is trying to regulate the Satellite Dishes, in the complex, with very little success. And I dont really want my neighboors to have access to my connection logs.
It is likely that the local cable or phone company will be first to connect to your peering point and try to keep the competition out by the usual means.
I'm not saying its a bad idea, but I doubt it will be a perfect solution...
Why not build out fiber like we build out roads? (Score:3, Insightful)
Here in the US, Federal, State, and Local governments either directly build roads, or hire private companies to build and maintain the roads.
Why can't the US do this with fiber? Competing ISPs, could provide service over the fiber to end users, and tax dollars would pay to maintain the fiber "roads". Your monthly ISP bill would cover the services provided over the fiber (data, voice, video...etc).
I'm sure many will argue that they don't want their tax dollars paying for someone to download music and porn, but your tax dollars already pay for roads, even if you don't drive.
A reliable, public, fiber infrastructure will be as important to the US in the future as telephones and electricity are now. We need leaders that are smart enough to see that.
-ted
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Here in Ottawa we have the vast majority of our cables on poles.
nah, thanks to google TiSP... (Score:5, Funny)
Does this mean that the street will be opened every week, when the next person in a neighbourhood wants fiber, instead of every month? ...
Nope! Thanks to the innovative people at Google, there is no trenching involved! With their latest beta release of TiSP [google.com], all the end user has to do is flush one end of the fiber down the nearest toilet, and wait for the plumbing techs to plug it in to the nearest node!
Tm
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't scoff. A neighborhood only dark network for "sharing"
stuff could be a very interesting possibility. It would be
like a neighborhood private BBS and could be completely
invisible to prying eyes.
Re:They should partner with Google (Score:4, Funny)
Boy, that's some SHITTY service :D
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