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In-Home Fiber Connections, Out West 104

Posted by timothy from the *now*-how-much-would-you-pay? dept.
BillyZ writes: "A Denver billionaire has started laying fiber and setting up the infrastructure to deliver fiber optic connections to residences in the southwest. Wired has the story. They hope to be offering the services to the public by the middle of next year. Now if only someone would be doing the same thing in the northeast." Tell me again why I moved out of Austin?
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In-Home Fiber Connections, Out West More

In-Home Fiber Connections, Out West

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  • fiber would be much faster, no doubt. Which country do you live in?
  • No shit. Hell, you have to offer up your first born child just to get a static IP the way it is now. Static IPs used to come standard with broadband, but providers quickly realized that was worth something to people, so naturally they started charging more for it. The lack of static IPs is currently an artificial shortage, but just wait maybe 3-4 more years and there will be a real shortage, due to IPv4's address space running out. (Now watch closely as this thread devolves into a flamewar about IPv6 vs. NAT.)
  • RCN and Mediaone (aka ATT) are providing that around Boston, too, but they don't run fiber to the house. The leaves of the network are done with Coax. Hmm.. They are running the cables on the telephone poles. Fiber would probably break too easy there. If you are burying the cable all the way, Fiber would be the cheapest thing to do.
  • All is not lost...

    The register had an article [theregister.co.uk] a while back about Psion are bringing out a Digital Radio which will have the potential for fast internet access

    Allegly the BBC here in the UK, according to this article [theregister.co.uk] in the register [theregister.co.uk] will be doing just that in the not too distant future, hook the radio to your PC via its USB port and forget phone lines becuase in theory you could recieve data at up to 1.5 Meg per second.
  • The UK has been slow due to companies like BT trying to milk everything it can out of the last vestiges of its dying monopoly. I can't believe how much they have the cheek to demand for their DSL [dis]service. For 500kbs (max), BT Openworld customers get to pay 3 times what I pay for 1mbs connection here in Canada.
  • For the residants of New Brunswick (One of the Eastern Provinces of Canada for the Geographically Challenged), this has been a reality now for about 3 years - there, the government started in about 92 and decided to lay fiber to every door - now, not much has been done with it, in terms of broadband access, but NBTel (the provincial Telco) has had some of the best connectivity this side of ATT itself for a very long time now. The idea behind this massive outlay of fiber was to set up an environment where the only barrier to ultra-high speed access to the Internet would be only limited by the current Telco switch technology.

    Well, enough rambling for now, but I thought that this might possibly have been relevant in some small way.
  • it's so nice to see you people complaining that it's not available in the 'northeast' but keep in mind some people are still unable to get dsl or even cable... people who live in fairly large non-isolated towns, how about us?

    "Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
  • if you're looking for wireless service, depending on what area of Dallas you live in you might want to look into ricochet [ricochet.com]. it's 128k for about $70 a month. you have to buy the modem too. i haven't gotten it yet, anyone have any experience good/bad with it?
    "Leave the gun, take the canoli."

  • My experience in Milano, Italy (Score:3)

    by kinkie ( 15482 ) on Monday October 30, 2000 @11:37PM (#663596) Homepage
    Right now in Milano, Italy, something good is going on.
    With the recent liberalization in the phone network (it used to be a state-controlled monopoly), many new companies sprung up offering phone services.
    One in particular, named e.Biscom and mostly owned by Milano's most popular power and gas utility company, a couple of years begun aggressively cabling in optics the whole city.
    Now the first offerings using this extensive optic network are beginning to spring up. A company called FastWeb has recently begun marketing a residential offer for 10 MB/s Internet access, plus phone (free to all other Fastweb subscribers, some discounts for local and long-distance calls), and Video-on-demand. The cost is less than the equivalent of US$ 50/month flat, including taxes. They'll bring the fiber up to the doorstep free of charge, and the 10 MB/s limitation is handled by the splitter device (Notice: the whole network backbone is over IP, including phone and video).
  • Once the fiber is laid down, they may not ever have to upgrade it, since the fiber provides more bandwidth than a typical group of home users will need in the foreseeable future. They save money in the long run on maintenance costs.
  • I read it. I'm just wondering if WINFirst is one of the companies that planned ahead, or one of the new startup that is finding itself left out in the cold as fiber goes to bigger, more established customers.

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -
  • A while back I was looking at Voice over IP programs for Linux and with compression at 28.8 they weren't too bad. With advances in compression and DSL or Cable Modems, I'd expect them to have much better quality. Will CU-Seeme kill the long distance carriers?
  • Donations for tax breaks don't count.
    Uh I hate to tell you this but the whole reason for tax breaks and inheritance taxes is to encourage the rich to have there little charities. Lets face it the rich are greedy, thats how they get rich in the first place.
  • In five years, though, the housing costs in Austin won't allow anyone to live in the service area.
  • The article states that the $1000 dollar figures are what the company incurs, not what they're charging. It explicitly says that consumers will be able to buy a single service at industry-standard rates, or multiple services at a discount. That's not cheap, but still nowhere near $1000.
  • Fiber to the home eases the retarded service area issue, as the signal can be sent much farther distances without degradation.

    --
  • A few months ago here in Austin, these guys left notices on everyone's doorknobs indicating that WIN (the story says that they've changed the name a bit since then) would be out conducting surveys in the neighborhood in preparation for the project start next year. I thought it was yet another vaporware public works project by the city government; I had no idea it was going on elsewhere.

    I'm heartened, to say the least--our cable provider can't handle TV and ISP functions on its existing infrastructure, and the phone company is so backed up on DSL installations that people aren't getting them the month they place the order. It's a long way off, but relief is apparently in sight.

  • Fiber to the home is coming. From the reading in the Wired article and other places, I have been able to gether that the WIN system is specifically using a 100base-FX type ethernet technology to supply data connectivity to the home. These fiber drops get aggregated via ethernet switches, and eventually ATM switches. Voice and Data services go over the 100Mb fiber based Ethernet, with a separate coax cable laid in for cable TV. I would guess that while that last mile is 100Mb - the Internet connectivity is very over subscribed - so don't bet that it will improve web surfing much beyond what a good DSL or cable modem provides.

    Fiber to the home really doesn't cost much more than doing new copper lines to a home. The cost of the cable when you buy it in multi-mile spools is about the same for fiber or copper. With fiber you do not have to put amplifiers or other electronics in the field - just at the side of the house and in the central office. This saves the provider money. The big cost of deploying any telecom infrastructure is the people leaning on the shovels burying the cable, and paying the city for the right-of-way to bury this cable. (or paying to put in aerial cable right-of-way).

    SO - for those service providers who are putting in new infrastructure anyway - it makes a lot of sense to put in fiber. The cost is the same, and we know the bandwidth limitations of the copper. The bandwidth limitations of fiber are 1000 times higer.

    Disclaimer - I work for a company that delivers Fiber-to-the-Home systems providing, Voice, Video, and Data over the same fiber. We are currently shipping systems to customers.
  • I work on customer applications for WINfirst, and I can clear up a little confusion.

    1. Yes, we are terminating fiber on the sides of people's homes. If you are a WINfirst customer, you will have fiber all the way to your house.
    2. We're providing voice, video, and data. You can get about 300 channels of cable tv, 10/100/Gigabit ethernet connections to the net, and phone service.
    3. Our prices for phone, cable and Internet on a standalone basis will be comparable with the competition but offer more features. Examples include Video on Demand for cable service and included long distance minutes with the local phone service as well as awe-inspiring speeds internet connection.
    4. Price for the internet service will be in the same range as other residential services (DSL, cablemodem), but it will be low-latency, it won't be shared bandwidth, etc. etc. etc. It's the real thing. All prices are discounted when you bundle service.
    5. When Wired talked about installation costing $2000, they were talking about WINfirst's cost, not the customers.
    6. I'll be working on all kinds of cool applications to take advantage of our speed.
    7. These are my words, not my company's. I could be wrong about details of the above. Please don't sue me.
  • Where the heck have you been for the last 2 years, locked in a bombshelter in your basement? Here's another headline you may have missed.. we survived Y2K just fine. :-)
  • aaahh, how can people say this?
    First, wireless needs the use of the EM spectrum which we all share. Fibre is a waveguide, so you can run what you want over it without interfering with others. So you want to run 2.5Gbps over wireless. Fine, no one else in the neighbourhood can tho.
    As for satelite, they are a bloody long way up and they see lots of people. So latency is VERY bad and the bandwidth per person sucks. That and to talk to satelites you need big antenna.
    Or maybe you were thinking or iriduim (or similar ideas?). Same bandwidth sharing problem.

    Just remember, bandwidth is only infinite if you have a fibre. IF you want to run through the air, you have to compete with everyone else.
  • One of the big advantages of fiber is that you can upgrade the bandwidth of the system without replacing the fiber. Just upgrade the transceivers as demand, technology and price warrant.
  • RCN is targeting fiber to within about 900 feet of every single residence in its build-out area (more than of 4-5 million homes in dense places like Boston, NYC, Chicago, SF, etc.). The final leg is still done on coax. We (I work there) are able to run fiber on telephone poles without much breakage risk.

    We did a fiber to the home trial and I have the results in front of me right now. I'll let you know what our next steps are as soon as I can - although with the new SEC rules I can't let anyone know much of anything until we issue a press release.

  • They said part of the big upfront cost is the $1000 for putting an optical transiever at the customer's location. These seems to say that they will be providing last-mile connections.
  • My parents live in Colorado Springs. They just got some sort of wireless ethernet from sprint. They were told that, because they live halfway up a mountain, it would be 5+ years before DSL or cable was available to them, even though the main city of CS has both. Down here in Dallas, it's the other way around- 5+ years for the wireless deal. If this guy *really* wanted to make some money, he'd run fiber up the mountains to the rich retired folk who live at the top. :>

    wish
  • As I post this, I'm actually having fiber installed into my apartment for the humble price of...um...currency conversion in progress...$200. Monthly costs are about $20.

    So my guess is that in the near future, even US companies will lower their prices considerably, both installation and montly rates.

    BTW, for those interested, I live in Stockholm, Sweden, so my ISP is not really available to most of you :-)
  • I wonder how well this article coincides with
    this article [msnbc.com] on MSNBC?

    - JoeShmoe

    -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= -
  • The most annoying thing about projects like this, is that I know it'll be atleast 5/10 years before we see similar stuff in the UK or Europe!
    Why are Europeans so slow to pick up on these things? Or rather, why are the established financial institutions, so slow to back such enterprises?

    O well, I guess that's one reason to move to the US!

  • Not necessarily. For a start, it's unlikely that all 100 people would want high-bandwidth internet access, and as people start bailing out, your $10 figure goes up. More importantly, the service providers aren't going to charge the same for a 100-apartment service (that will probably saturate its conection pretty constantly) as they will for a 1-house deal (which won't). Even if the service providers optical network has effectively limitless capacity, they have to pay for network traffic off their own network.
  • Yup, Ashland, OR has this fiber in home at 1-3 megs both ways, and to top it off it's ONLY $22/m as well. Cheaper and faster than DSL! Only downfalll is you must live in Ashland, but hey I am for moving... :>
  • Could someone enlighten us with the respective advantages in terms of bandwidth?

    Television (coax) uses 40Mhz-800Mhz, so I would say coax would have enough bandwidth to go from the customers house to the CO at the end of the street, from which cable companies have enough fiber already.
    What is the advantage of making that last couple of meters also fiber?
  • The idea of transmitting data over power lines has been knocking around for a long time. Not sure about 2.5Gbps, but there have been a variety of trials here and there of more modest speeds. This CNet article [cnet.com] has a good broad-brush overview of a few of the companies involved and the problems they face.
  • My guess would be the GODAWFUL heat.

    Ah, but it's worth every drop of summer sweat when you wake up on Christmas morning and it's 73 degrees.
  • ...it's L. Bob Rife! (Ok, ok, so it was lame)
  • We already got this in Sweden, fiber in our apartments..
  • actually, I'm here in SA too, and I was wondering much the same thing.. I live out near fiesta texas, in a neighborhood thats phone lines are all split into half the normal channel, because SWB doesnt wanna drop new copper.. I had to go for cable, but i've been pretty satisfied with it so far.. but anyway, the point is, my street is the san antonio city limit, and we arent known for getting things real fast, so I'm just hoping they're thorough in their configuration..

    Justin
  • Less attenuation, higher bandwidth, etc... of course yo ushould know that the coax is a shared bandwidth.
  • Its the _bureaucracy_ (both UK and Euro)! The politics is _IN THE WAY_ of efficient progress (but differently in the UK and Euro countries).

    Simply put, this is why the British Pound isn't worth as much as it used to be, and the Euro is now worth only 80% of what it was just a year ago.

    The British and Europeans need some revolutions before they'll be competitive again, in 50 years.

    It's also possible that the former USSR states and even Eastern Europe will get it together sooner... despite the fact that they're kleptocracies now.

    What's the difference between a country run by in-office criminals and a country run by freelance criminals? This exercise for your discussion....

  • Yes, but the City of Austin has limited the service area to a very narrow "metropolitan" market.
  • The $1000 figures are what it will cost the company, not the customer (I think the business term is acquisition cost, or something like that). I don't think they'd have much business if they expected consumers to pay that kind of money.

    ---
    Jeremy in Las Vegas, willing to don a hard-hat and help the construction workers get the fiber laid.

  • Upstream bandwidth, p2p apps, and fat pipes (Score:3)

    by Zigurd ( 3528 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @12:50AM (#663628) Homepage
    The main question I have about fiber to the premises is that, with service providers being miserly about bandwidth on xDSL and cable modem systems, how will fiber make a difference? If your DSL provider has your bandwidth limited to 384k on a link that could go to 1.5 or 2Mbps symmetric, or even 9Mbps asymmetric downstream, why would fiber, which could take the last mile into gigabit territory, not have the same issues (other than that anyone running fiber would be a fool to be as miserly as the DSL providers are to this point).

    The questions are:

    1. Why do cable and DSL providers limit bandwidth and restrict servers?

    2. Might there be some advanatge to not throttling last-mile bandwidth, such as a positive effect on peering economics for the ISP?

    3. Could Napster and other P2P applications affect service provider economics - for better or worse?

  • yeah... i had remembered that part of the article just after I submitted the story. I was really trying to say. "If only someone would be doing that in Buffalo" without having my home town plastered on the front page of /. :o)

    BillyZ

  • The companies aren't hyping their activity for one very important reason: they don't want expectations to be too high for a technology they are not positive will take off. A silent flop is less painful than a loud one caught on camera and displayed on the 11 o'clock news.

    Why oh why hasn't a certain large software company whose headquarters are located in Washington state figured this out yet?

    *sigh* The brilliance of slashdoters...

    -the wunderhorn

    -the wunderhorn
    #define OH_YES_INDEED 1
  • This guy's really stretching the definition of "Southwest". San Diego? Sacramento? No way. And the Southwest don't start in Texas until you get west of the Pecos River. Want to impress me? Bring fiber up the three miles of dirt road to my house!
  • I read some snippet last year about some guy FROM Texas that was bringing fiber to small towns and rural areas. He started his own company I think from the money made by his grandparents starting, umm 7-11 I think. Either way, he brought fiber to little towns, because he knew the big companies would never get there until after every major urban area had been fibered. makes me want to retire to a little ranch with my dog at my side, and my MPEG4 and MP3 jukebox controller in my lap... downloading and converting whatever I didn't have at the moment. Hell, I might just set up my own little free multimedia station for others to "free-per-view" when they felt like it. Ahhh, the possibilities.
  • Yep, so which continent are they a part of?
  • Except for the fact that they have a single T3 to the outside world that supplies both the businesses and residents that want to sign up for the service. (I used to work at City Hall informing people of the service.) The price is so low because they wholesale the accounts out @$17/month to local isps. Plus having just moved from there I wouldnt go back just for that, the job market blows donkey and the housing prices are north of rediculous.
  • Willow glen area has had fiber for years never hooked the stuff up, cable co. sold it off to phone co and it has been unused.
  • 4. Running the ISP (help here, folks!) ~$50-100?

    This is the big issue, I think. With the extremely high bandwidths optical fibre can offer, this is gonna be a lot more; you'd need insanely strong backbone connections when people start to do things like downloading entire pirated movies or Linux distros habitually.

  • Move back there in maybe 5 years, when the service is cheap enough to be affordable to normal people and you have the backbone bandwidth necessary to saturate those connections.
  • WIth all of the fiber makers running at capacity till 2001 or thereabouts, will these people or anyone be able to get all of the glass that they need?
  • It sucks cause it's line of sight

    But when you live on top of a mountain, pretty much everything between you and the next mountain is LOS.

    wish

  • There is a company doing such a rollout in the northeast. According to the article:

    "Princeton, New Jersey's RCN has been building a network concentrated in Northeastern United States that offers a combination of phone, Internet and cable service."

    The companies aren't hyping their activity for one very important reason: they don't want expectations to be too high for a technology they are not positive will take off. A silent flop is less painful than a loud one caught on camera and displayed on the 11 o'clock news.

  • Um, yes. Glass is literally dirt-cheap. Not so the special kind needed for high-bandwidth optical connections, of course. But that's due to the manufacturing process, not the material.
  • Tell me again why I moved out of Austin?

    Well, I hope it wasn't to get away from Taco Cabana, HEB, and BBQ. :)

    Anyhow, I've been checking where the test neighborhoods in Austin are, and they're all down southwest around the Mopac/360/290 triangle.

    One group is in an area bordered by Town Lake, Barton Creek, 360, and the south edge of West Lake Hills, in the Barton Creek Mall area.

    The other area is bordered by Mopac, Slaughter lane, Brodie Lane, and William Cannon, with a small extra area northeast of Brodie and William Cannon.

    All areas are apparently within the Austin city limits. This makes sense, as they only got approval with the city of Austin.

    Anyone who is planning to move down there to get in on the trial run had better either have a southside/360 job or plan for a fun-filled Mopac commute twice a day!

  • He has already built two of his own fiber plants in New Mexico, as of late last year.
  • It's fascinating! Could you please surrender some detais:
    The name of the fiber operator?
    Is it a trial, or a large-scale deployment?
    What services do you get over that fiber?
    Are you commited for a long period?
  • I want a faster cheeper connection here, in the northwest
  • Damn, was being too quick there. If you mean the production capacities, I suppose they will just raise prices and build new factories. Could turn out like the current SDRAM market, you're right.
  • Yes, it was
  • With that many consumers with that many fat pipes, the backbone is going to be awfully oversaturated. If this becomes a continuing trend, there inernet may become unusable.
    ---
  • I think that area is hooked up for wireless ethernet because Qualcomm was testing that technology out a few years ago. If they sold their infrastructure to an ISP like Sprint, that's pretty cool... IMHO, wireless is much cooler (although probably not as fast) than silly copper wires. It's easier to hook up your apartment/home/car without wires...

  • ..and another $1000 out of the company's pocket to hook each home up that signs up, I bet ya one thing:

    They probably won't pull an @HOME on their customers!
    ========================
    63,000 bugs in the code, 63,000 bugs,
    ya get 1 whacked with a service pack,
  • You fail to realize that the trojan known as 'napster' will saturate a connection 24/7 regardless of the number of users.
    ---
  • Scew data over power lines. I want to see power over data lines. The more, the better.
    ---

  • Ok (Score:1)

    by Th3 D0t ( 204045 )
    NAT blows. Listening sockets are difficult to map.
    ---

  • Re:Upstream bandwidth, p2p apps, and fat pipes (Score:3)

    by kieran ( 20691 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @02:33AM (#663654)
    >The questions are:

    >1. Why do cable and DSL providers limit bandwidth and restrict servers?

    Because they pay for bandwidth, in one form or other. They can either charge for it or restrict it, but don't expect them to do both.

    As for restricting servers, that doesn't work quite the same way - most providers have spare "outgoing" bandwidth because their users do a lot more downloading than serving. The main reason in this case is commercial - by allowing any old user on a cheap connection to host servers at decent speeds (and most non-multimedia servers don't use much bandwidth at all) they would be devaluing their own web-hosting, managed server and co-location products.

    It'll happen eventually, of course, because it only takes a couple of companies doing it to bring the whole thing crashing down...

    >2. Might there be some advanatge to not throttling last-mile bandwidth,
    >such as a positive effect on peering economics for the ISP?

    It would be a negative effect - more peering infrastructure (and quite likely transit costs) without more revenue - see above. Economies of scale only kick in when you're getting /paid/ for being bigger :-)

    >3. Could Napster and other P2P applications affect service provider economics
    >- for better or worse?

    More bandwidth use is always going to cost the provider - although it costs them less per Mbps each year - unless the user is paying for that bandwidth. Bear in mind that providers usually base their own bandwidth requirement estimates on a certain contention ratio (it's different for different services), so greater usage due to Napster and such will either force them to alter the ratio or leave them with an over-subscribed network. Ouch.
  • I recently had a customer on the phone from Paris, France who really started to get annying, so I told him to download about 14 Megs of software, in the assumption that this would solve his problem and make him get lost for a little while. About 30 seconds after I told this to him, he told me the whole program was on his harddisk. Turned out he had an ADSL connection.

    There should be some sort of limit that stops people from having bandwidth that exceeds their IQ in Kbps.
  • Now, this is great and all. I mean, I'm glad people are getting high bandwidth connections, but how long will we need these fiber lines? Wireless is getting better and better and better everyday, and bandwidth on it is getting bigger. I wouldn't be surprised if by the time he's done laying lines, we have stable, fast, and always connected wireless via satelite, and his lines are unnecessary.

    Joshua
  • According to what I read, the coax connection to the data connection to the houses will be 10 Mbit, not that much faster than ADSL downstream. Apparently it is symetric though.

    I think it also said that after things are established, they might be allowing people to pay for running fiber directly to the home.

    WinFirst is supposed to be working in my neighborhood soon, the went around and stuck flyers on everybodys doors.
  • In my experience, most DSL implementations go up to 4.5km, or 15,000 ft. There are people connected up to 7km, but 4.5 it gets to be hit or miss (they also get affected by other factors - according a local ISP, Sympatico - such as line expansion in the summer). Another technology called IDSL allows lower speed connections even further out.

    Rather than relying on line cards in the CO, my local ISP has started deploying remote DSLAMs. These are in neighbourhood boxes (like the current small green wiring boxes already out there) which operate in the same way as the line cards in the CO. Thus they can extend xDSL far beyond the CO.
  • Don't ask me. I have no idea what you're talking about; I haven't read either one.
    ---
  • McLeodUSA, a Cedar Rapids, Iowa based telecommunications provider, has been laying its own fiber network throughout Cedar Rapids and other markets for well over a year. The Fiber is laid in concentric circles from the center of the city to the outskirts. It allows users to get Digital Cable service (including the DMX music channels, pay per view, and a huge variety of premium channels), local and long distance service, and high speed internet access.

    I have the service in Cedar Rapids and it is great. If you get all the services, you get a 15% bundle discount. The Company ran a Fiber optic line back behind the house. There is some sort of transformer that transfers the connection to a twisted pair and a co-ax cable line to goes to the house. From there, the line connects into your house just like the old telephone service and cable service. And they dropped in a Cisco cable modem. I previously had AT&T's @Home cable service and I think that McLeods is faster.

    Bry
    --------------------------------------------- ---
  • "First, the UK is Europe"

    Whoa! That's a bold statement!
  • Yes what a troll. God some of you moderators are un-fucking-believably stupid.
    ---

  • Another lame and misleading Wired story (Score:3)

    by pkj ( 64294 ) on Tuesday October 31, 2000 @05:42AM (#663663)
    One thing curiously missing from this story is whether the fiber will be delivered directly to the door, that is, completing the "last mile."

    Last mile connectivity is the biggest difficulty in getting high-speed connectivity to residential consumers. The cost to switch and deliver fiber to the home is *extremely* expensive and revenue will likely never cover the expense.

    However, a hybrid system of fiber to local access points combined with some existing form of "last mile" connectivity can provide all of the benefits at a remarkable reduction in cost. This is certainly not a new idea. In fact, this is the scheme implemented by the cable modems that have been in operation for three years now.

    For those unaware, the bandwidth used by cable modems takes up just one channel of the 500 channels that can be encoded on coax. And that one channel provides 30 Mbps for the user on that segment. This, combined with the ability to move the fiber closer and closer to the user provides an incredibly amount of flexability with remarkably little up-front costs.

    Love or hate your local cable company or cable modem ISP, the scheme is sheer brilliance on the technical side. If your service sucks, there is no *technical* reason for this. That is to say that even if you had fiber to your door, your service could suck just as hard.

    I really, really wish that someone would start whacking Wired authors with the clue stick...

    -p.

  • After a few quick, off-the-cuff calculations, it looks to me like these services can be offered at very reasonable prices, and Winfirst could see a sizable profit in 3 years. I don't claim these figures are accurate, so anyone who knows better, please chime in.

    Revenues:

    1. The cost of a working installation is $2000, which means that with current capital of $450,000,000, 225,000 homes can be wired. Figure in extra expenses, screw-ups, etc., and that number might drop to 200,000.

    2. People are currently willing to pay around $30/month for cable access. Additional channels/features made possible with fiber might bring this up to $40.

    3. The current average cost for a phone line and local service is around $25/month.

    4. I don't know for sure, but $20/month seems reasonable for an average long distance bill.

    5. It can be assumed that fiber internet service is going to be _fast_. $50/month seems reasonable, and would be the best deal in town by far.

    Total = $135/month = $1,620/year

    200,000 users @ $1,620/year = $324,000,000

    2 years = $648,000,000, which is $198,000,000 before expenses.

    Expenses:

    1. Cable service (basic programming) might cost anywhere between $100-200 per user per year.

    2. Local telephone service might cost anywhere between $125-150, including taxes.

    3. Long distance would be about half profit. ($120).

    4. Running the ISP (help here, folks!) ~$50-100?

    Net Revenues after 2 years at the low expense estimates are $40,000,000, and $285,000,000 after 3 years. At the high level, they're -$30,000,000 and $180,000,000, respectively. At the high end of expenses, it still amounts to a 40% return on investment after 3 years.

    Of course, this assumes that everyone being wired opts for the service, and that everyone opts for the full slate of products. I don't know how many 'dead pipes' Winfirst will install (@ $1,000 apiece), or how many people will opt for only the broadband service. But it could work, especially if the services are an improvement over their current counterparts.

  • The delay is due to the fiber -&gt fibre conversion process. This isn't so bad with white light, but when you have to convert colored light to coloured light, things get tricky.
  • Actually it is only ADSL. i.e. Slow uploads! Put another way, you can't host!
  • And why would anyone ever need any more than 640KB of RAM?
    _____________
  • I'm in the Southwest, but I'm in Phoenix...not one of the cities scheduled for initial implementation.

    This is good news, as I'm really not in the mood to pay $1000 installation and $1000 a month for bandwidth, when my DSL is serving me just fine.

    I do think, however, that within a few years we'll be reminicing about the good ole days when we connected to the net via standard phone lines (hell, I still joke about the days of 300 baud modem surfing... of course, that was til I got an MPE 1000c on my Atari 800. That sucker went to a whopping 450 baud!!!)

    The question is, would this type of technology have a price decrease rapidly, or would it remain pretty high for years to come? Businesses would be fine with $1000 a month, for some high speed connections, but that's pretty damn ridiculous for residential, no?

  • Anyone remember that story about the physicist who discovered how to transmit data over the powerlines? I remember something about how it promised to deliver 2.5 Gbps of bandwidth or something... does anyone know what the progress is on that? I think the name of the company is mediafusion or something...
  • Its been shown time and time again that all the public really wants is a TV service. High speed fiber will get a really good service as soon as someone gets internet broadcast rights.

    But what good is this to the rest of us? They won't let us run a server? Why? Because big business is willing to pay a lot more for it. If they can charge more for exactly the same service then they will. Then they'll start cracking down on everybody who happens to be running a "welcome to apache" screen on their Linux box if they actually permit all us strange "unsupported" OS users to connect at all (Well, its our proprietry software that requires Windows 2000, ME or 95 but not 98)

    So have fun. Enjoyt watchin TV on your (Windows) PC. Thats all they'll let you do.
  • maybe in your urban and suburban area, but i have copper running from my home to the exchange and then onto the CO lets see 3mi to the exchange house 22.5mi to CO ~25.5 mi copper between me and the isp modem pool (33.3kbs sustained, i really shouldn't bitch), and I'm nowhere near the house deepest in the boonies, its ~62 mi of copper from my aunt's to the CO, on a good clear day I can pull a 19200 conection, normally runs at 14.4 or slower.
  • What planet do you live on?
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  • If there were running Windows, it would have automatically changed!
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  • If you read them, you would know. Don't expect us to do your dirty work for you, Mr. Smarty Pants. That's what they pay you the "big bucks" for!
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  • You're absolutely right. People think they need this kind of bandwidth for useless stuff like TV over IP ... come on, what do we have TV cable and antennas for? This is so ridiculous.
    And besides, the "high bandwidth" services I know (cable and DSL) all suffer from oversaturated backbones, bad design, too much growth and bad costumer service. They'd better fix these things up before we can think of fiber in the house.
  • My guess would be Stockholm...... don't know where I got that from, though.
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  • ..don't you think that's a bit redundant?
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  • Whatever happened to that other Southwest fiber deal that was supposed to be a partnership between the electric utilities, and (I think) HP et al?
  • Be nice.

  • You are a fucking idiot, that knows nothing about anything, keep your stupid pro-european views to yourself, we don't want to hear them, twat.
  • Did you even READ the article you posted?! You said:
    "'...Now if only someone would be doing the same thing in the northeast.' Tell me again why I moved out of Austin?"

    Neither the person who sent it in, nor the person who approved it apparantly read the article.

    From that article I quote:

    "At the same time, American Broadband -- based in Burlington, Massachusetts, and founded in October 1999 -- is planning a similar service starting in Rhode Island, and eventually crossing 2 to 3 million homes in the Eastern United States. "

    "Winfirst is not without direct competitors. Princeton, New Jersey's RCN has been building a network concentrated in Northeastern United States that offers a combination of phone, Internet and cable service. The company also plans to build a competing cable network in San Diego. "

    Another fine example of Slashdot's journalistic abilities.

    *sigh*

    yacko
  • Since I'm a UK Citizen, my primary consideration is for the UK market. Since I work in Germany (and until recently the Netherlands), my secondary consideration is the rest of Europe.
    Your immediate assertion that I'm some kind of Euro xenephobe is baseless and insolent!
    Have the decency to apologise!
  • Mr. dEaTh_ChUrCh might disagree, but I would suggest that the UK is *part of* Europe, not "is Europe".
  • to the person who moderated this, could you explain why? No biggie I suppose, but it was simply a silly little response. I am not sure how "overrated" was used, but oh well!
  • I don't really care about Mr. dEaTh_ChUrCh, since he/she/it seems to be incapable of expressing his opnion without having to revert to obscene language. I'll go with the *part of* part. Sounds reasonable. Oh, and Mr. dEaTh_ChUrCh..., FUCK THE US!!! Sorry, just had to get that off my chest.

  • I have a friend in my country's national telephone company who I recently persuaded to arrange a lecture for me and a few others about a technology they have been testing: ADSL.

    It's supposed to be able to connect your PC directly with the telco's ATM network. It uses normal copper lines for the last 1000m to your home and optical fiber for the rest of the ride (which is the existing infrastructure in most PSTN networks these days). It gives bandwidths between 640 Kbps and 8 Mbps, depending on how much you pay.

    Does anyone know how does this compare with in-home fiber connections?

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