Perhaps the most practical service for both broadband and ALWAYS-on voice service is one pair of copper (POTS) and one pair of fiber everything-else per house.
Does anyone have a ballpark guess on the incremental cost of a strand-mile (assuming the ditch is going to be dug and the cable put in it, how much does the per-mile cost of the cable go up for each additional strand in it) ? If the fiber pair goes all the way from some reasonably concentrated location to the house, then excessive locations with batteries should not be required. -Dorn On Fri, Aug 28, 2009 at 9:47 AM, Jack Bates <jba...@brightok.net> wrote: > Robert E. Seastrom wrote: > >> The problem is that if you break down the costs, you'll find out that >> it almost doesn't matter what you put in as a cost of the total build; >> the big costs are the engineering and the labor to install, not the >> "cost of the NID" or anything like that. Nobody cares whether you >> saved a million bucks on a 2 billion dollar project. >> >> > Errr, I've yet to meet a rural ILEC that doesn't take the cost of the NID > splitter vs inline splitters into account. ILECs will argue over a single > $1/customer, and rightfully so. The cost of the FTTH NID adds considerably > to the price per customer. In addition, it generates additional maintenance > costs maintaining batteries. I've yet to hear an ILEC suggest that they not > have batteries in the NID to support the voice in power outages. Batteries > have shelf lives, and maintaining one per household is definitely more > costly than maintaining the batteries to power the remotes. > > Getting rid of costs, FTTH uses more power, and most of the people I've > talked to said we can't feed it from the remotes even via copper mixed with > the fiber. This creates issues when we need to provide service. Everyone > always badmouth's the whole emergency phone thing, but we take it seriously > in the rural areas where power outages are not uncommon, natural disasters > are expected, and we are the ONLY utility that continues to function. > > > Jack > > > One of the cool things about the infrastructure that is now in place >> (copper pairs) is that it turned out to be relatively future-proof - >> lots of 50 and 70 year old OSP still in use. In order to get >> similarly long life out of newly installed fiber assets, the only real >> solution is home runs to either existing or newly constructed >> concentration points (not just a box at the side of the road, that's >> not what I'm talking about here). Distributed splitter designs force >> forklift upgrades when the Next Big Thing comes along, rather than >> upgrading the service only for folks who are willing to pay for it. >> The Next Big Thing is always coming, and 2.4 Gbit/sec down per port >> GPON is gonna look awfully slow 10 years hence when everyone's >> demanding gigabit ethernet to the desktop, not to mention 20 years >> from now with IPv6 multicast of 2000 channels of 4320p pr0n. >> >> I used to believe in the FTTC (fiber to the curb) model too - it's the >> "obvious" solution. That was before I started cranking the numbers >> myself, playing with some of the new splicing solutions that are out >> there that require *far* less finesse than the cam-splice stuff I was >> using 10 years ago. Now I believe in the "other" FTTC (fiber to the >> couch). >> Get it as far out into the field as you possibly can, right up to, >> or even inside, the house. >> >> -r >> >> Jack Bates <jba...@brightok.net> writes: >> >> heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's; >>> different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the >>> OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the >>> way back to the office. >>> >>> Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments >>> concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or >>> draw too much power. >>> >>> Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul >>> redundancy on fiber rings >>> >>> Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID >>> >>> Jack >>> >>> Robert Enger - NANOG wrote: >>> >>>> CON: active devices in the OSP. >>>> On 8/26/2009 12:06 PM, Jack Bates wrote: >>>> >>>>> jim deleskie wrote: >>>>> >>>>>> I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to >>>>>> the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to >>>>>> homes, it's outdated before we even finish. >>>>>> >>>>> I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the >>>>> home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house >>>>> which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit. >>>>> >>>>> Pro's for copper from curb: >>>>> >>>>> 1) power over copper for POTS >>>>> 2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more >>>>> resilient to splicing by any monkey. >>>>> >>>>> Jack >>>>> >>>>> >