Getting Fiber to My Town by Jared Mauch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASXJgvy3mEg (YouTube video of NLnog presentation) https://nlnog.net/static/live/nlnog_live_sep_2020_jared.pdf (slides for presentation) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24424910#24430901 (discussion on Hacker News with Jared participating) https://washftth.com/ (project homepage)
Interesting presentation on a small scale fiber build in Ann Arbor. Highlights: - no fixed broadband since 2002 -> build own network - pre-wire neighbors with fiber drops and feed them off WISP first - lots of work to sign up customers, having to resort to snailmail to reach all - 70% of homes passed signed up - Have ASN, get IPv6 and IPv4 allocation, multihome and connect to local IXP - purchase equipment: fusion splicer, OTDR, materials, directional drill - hire contractors, deal with all manner of problems, theft, stop work orders, unbudgeted costs, unmarked/badly marked utilities, hitting (own) utilities - build own fiber blower for blowing in fiber in ducts - splice, OTDR, resplice, schedule installs ... which don't always go to plan - Upstream very helpful, offered a Cisco 6500 as CPE, however respectfuly declined and went with Arista - Link up! Network is now live with 17 subscribers hooked up. More waiting to be connected - Mixed Active Ethernet and GPON - latency drops from 30 ms to 8 ms, bandwidth from 20-30M to 730M, total commit 1.5G on 10G port, plans from 50M to 500M - SPAM! IPv4 brokers and the usual unsolicited contacts from bottom of the baller IP transit providers - Costs: $126k in 2020, $95k contractors, $32k materials and equipment. Total outlay ~$150k + years of sweat equity. Important to spread out costs over longer period of time to be able to afford. Offset costs by using pre-pay model (Can pay $5,000 up-front and receive $50 credit for 100 months) All in all it was a good presentation. I only wish Jared had spent some more time on how he had to become a telco and how this got him better access to the public right of way. Of course, some more details on his directional boring and some nice video of him running the drill would have been a cherry on top :) Jared, not the Mauch one -- AF mailing list AF@af.afmug.com http://af.afmug.com/mailman/listinfo/af_af.afmug.com
