Sean Donelan wrote:
Stimulus money per rural housing unit = $277.58 one-time
What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money
in a rural build-out?
How much will fiber to the home cost in a rural area?
For 1-2k customers in small rural towns I've been hearing numbers in the
millions of dollars without FTTH. FTTH projects exceeded all DSL in
price and had higher cost NIDs. There are also more engineering details
that must be considered in FTTH (and standard telco engineering firms
sometimes screw up on it; running the bill up more) to cover voice concerns.
And while everyone is arguing about this, I'll let you know right now it
is much MUCH harder to get money when putting copper in than fiber;
including many of the different types of loans. I've seen people screwed
over because of the push to fiber which has often made it cost
prohibitive for them to get service and strained the telco finances
reducing their overall ability to support service.
So, yeah. I'd be happy if everyone would back down and quit pushing FTTH
so hard and support sound, reliable, inexpensive FTTC technologies. They
both have their place. Just for the record, I still have over 50% of my
customer base in dialup. Of course, 98% of those dialups are in AT&T
territory. My ILEC/CLEC customers have done well in providing DSL to a
majority of their customers. They have even increased bandwidth where
they can and tariffs allow. I hope to see AT&T expand further out than 3
miles from the CO, upgrading some of their double ended carrier and
putting in DSL capable remotes. Given they probably can't recover costs
on some of the existing plant, it is doubtful they'll put in more fiber
than necessary.
Jack
