Let me clarify. I'm referring to Metro-E deployment. I'm not refering to the physical medium "glass filled wire", which of course has a huge long reliable life.
Metro-E typically runs from commercial building to commercial building. Each Hop is a potential failure point. Metro-E tends to be a Sequential or In-Series deployment, where there are many potential failure points between Start and End Point of a desired link. Most Metro-E Deployments whether Layer3 or Layer2, tend to terminate everything at the end of the line at a central place, so there is often much shared infrastructure on the way to the far end.infrastructure. The fact that Fiber can extend in 20-40 mile incrememnts without power is irrelevent when its most cost viable for Metro-E providers to stop at each building along the path on the way. What Fiber Providers cant control (no better than us), is the rules and decissions Building Owners need to make to maintain their building and power. For example, recently, there was a water leak in a building, the Building protocol was Turn off power to the electrical rooms in the building until leak fixed. The building owner could care less that the Fiber infrastructure would be turned off, becaue they had a bigger responsibility to the maintenance and safety of their Half-Billion dollar commercial office building. So, Fiber routers got powered off and service went down. These type things happen ALL the time. At one building, it might only happen 2-3 times over 5 years, but multiply that times 20 buildings in-line path, and that becomes 40-60 outages in 5 years. With Wireless PTP, we tend to go longer distances before a hop is incurred, and minimizing the number of buildings in-line that could have an effect on whether we had power or not to our gear. If we compare RF to Light, the difference in uptiem by technology isavery insignificant amount even if Fiber better. But if we compare deployment its not so insignificant to compare wireless with 2-3 buildings inline to fiber 10-20 buildings inline. The fact is, fiber does have the ability to deploy redundant technology, but so does Wireless. And Fiber carriers bypass redundancy in many cases for the same reasons Wireless carriers do, to reduce cost, add simplicity for maintenance, and capacity planning/control. What you see happening is Fiber carriers using one fiber strand, and then putting EVERYTHING on that one strand of Fiber. They do this because they often dont own the fiber, and have to buy Dark Fiber, and they pay per strand. Fiber deployments are not automatically redundant as much as people think, when considering all networking components. For example, LAyer2, Layer3, OSPF, and BGP all have to function both waysacross all redundant paths for all customers. When there are one or two hops inline with Wireless, its so much easier and less disruptive to verify and test that redundancy doesactually work in a failure situatuation. With Fiber carriers it is to risky to test redundant configs because to many people are sharing the infrastructure and it crosses so many hops. The Fiber carriers make config mistakes. And when they share so much infrastructure, its easy to harm another customer's config, when configuring new customers. I can not give national data for all carriers deployment. BUT.... from our experience on our network the most reliable network components are our wireless PTP links. The largest cause is Power. One of the reasons we did not increase the uptime of our wireless towers fed by fiber was that it did no good to have power systems that gave uptimes larger than the uptime delivered by our fiber carrier's power systems. The truth is batteries fail, and nobody knows it until a failure occurs, and the 4 hour uptimes doesn't occur. The more buildings inline, the more chances one of the buildings inline is effected by a power outage somewhere. The number we use is that when one of our end users experiences an outage it is 4x more likely it is from a fiber related outage, not from our Metro Wireless back haul. I'll give a real world example, We provide wholesale to a WISP in DC. I'm estimating that they had near 8 outages in two years if not more, and all were related to fiber. The DragonWave wireless link and Tlink-45 inline serving them the last mile has not failed once in the same time. Sure I'll agree that Long Haul Fiber is likely more reliable, because it is built to be. But Metro-Fiber and FTTH is not built to that same spec most of the time. One of the bigger mistakes I made is I paid for fiber instead of Licensed links early on. (ACtually it was not a mistake, it was a lack of upfront cash/pitol at the time). I lost a lot of business because I relied on Fiber Metrol Transports, that could not deliver the SLA or Uptime anywhere near the expectations that I set for my Wireless transport network. EVEN my Trango 5830s, I had PTP links that never had a hickup for 5 years. The bottom line is, IF I can get a wireless link between two points, and the capacity I need does not exceed capabilty of Wireless, I will ALWAYS choose Wireless for better uptime. Fiber is good when the capacity exceeds wireless's. Fiber is good if it has a shorter number of Hops than Wireless does. Wireless backhaul tends to develop undesirable packetloss if the number of hops get to large. We try to keep our Core Wireless transport/backhaul HOPs under 3. But if Line-of-sight can be acheived, that gives a 30-60 mile radius that can best be served with Wireless backhaul for small providers, that dont expect huge capacities. A 300mbps wireless backhaul is more capacity than most small WISPs ever need, to achieve good ROI.. Note that I did not say "quality". I said "Reliabilty", meaning uptime and repair time. Wireless is also less expensive, I have never once seen a fiber carrier quote a lower cost per mb than a Wireless provider's lease payment to build their own, IF quote was for something like a tower site, where there were not numerous fiber carriers competing to that site location. IF I could get Dark Fiber cariers to sell me Dark Fiber as cheap as Metro E, with dedicated uninhibited paths dedicated to me extending 20 miles a hop, I could build Fiber to be more reliable than wireless, But its not cost effective to buy Dark Fiber in most cases. They want 5x more for Dark Fiber because of the opportunity cost. Dark Fiber is often priced to be not worth it unless pushing 10GB or more. As a matter of fact, IF I did a FTTH deployment, I'd feel more comfortable feeding it with a 300mb Wireless link, for better uptime. Because I'd know it would be more than enough capacity considering oversubscription. Tom DeReggi RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband ----- Original Message ----- From: "Brian Webster" <bwebs...@wirelessmapping.com> To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org> Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 9:18 AM Subject: Re: [WISPA] Why the telco's will never be true competitors to us > Tom, > When you make the claim that wireless has more uptime than fiber, where do > you base those facts from and what types of fiber deployments are you > comparing it to? While I believe wireless is a great thing, one has to > wonder why a company who's name was MCI (Microwave Communications > Incorporated) eventually switched everything to fiber? I helped buy a > bunch > of their old microwave tower sites after they were decommissioned. They > built them for capacity and did everything right. It just seems that > eventually the larger WISP's will need to consider the path that MCI took > over time and wonder if they won't evolve along a similar path. Now their > failure was not due to their choice of fiber over wireless and that's > another story altogether. Fiber deployments have been commonplace between > telephone switches for years now and I have never heard about reliability > issues and/or downtime problems with the fiber. Not that they don't happen > but when you average their uptime to their outages, I would think they > have > some of the better reliability figures over any technology. > > > > Thank You, > Brian Webster > > > -----Original Message----- > From: wireless-boun...@wispa.org [mailto:wireless-boun...@wispa.org]on > Behalf Of Tom DeReggi > Sent: Monday, January 11, 2010 8:40 AM > To: WISPA General List > Subject: Re: [WISPA] Why the telco's will never be true competitors to > us > > > Agreed, Brett. > > I see people use business Cable all the time, UNTIL they have an outage, > and > then they loose all their customers feeding off it after that. > If there is one Thing the Cable Cos understand it is "you didn't buy a > service with an SLA because we dont offer one, so we can care less if you > are down for a week, read the small print.". > And what can you tell your subs once it occurred? "Oh I used a low cost > Cable service, uh oh yeah why did I say we had better service than the > Cable > cos?" > > Plus, Wireless is more reliable from an uptime perspective, than any other > technology (even Fiber), so why would a WISP want to use anything other > than > Wireless for connectivity to a tower? > > Well, it is true that some Business CAble services are less expensive than > a > single antenna roof right fee. But I used that arguement to negotiate > lower > roof right fees. > > Tom DeReggi > RapidDSL & Wireless, Inc > IntAirNet- Fixed Wireless Broadband > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: Bret Clark > To: WISPA General List > Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 5:49 PM > Subject: Re: [WISPA] Why the telco's will never be true competitors to us > > > Blah...I wouldn't rely on any telco or cable company to serve our towers. > We are completely wireless between towers, even our upstream Internet > links > are wireless running to local Internet exchange points. That way if there > is > a problem we are responsible for it and we can fix it without getting the > run around from a telco. > > I was in the CLEC business for over 10 years and if there is one thing > telco's do better than anyone else is finger point! It was never their > problem until you provided beyond a shadow of a doubt it was their problem > and 90% of the time is was their problem to begin with! > > Bret > > Tom Sharples wrote: > I found out about so-called business DSL a few years ago. We had it here > (Qwest), and every three to four weeks it would go belly-up. The "fix" was > that, after a day or two of dead air, Qwest would send out a tech to > power-cycle the ancient and creaky Nortel neighborhood dslam. This went on > for a few months, until I switched to Comcast business-class cable. That > has > proven to be extremely reliable, and I haven't looked back since. > > Tom S. > > > ----- Original Message ----- > From: "Marlon K. Schafer" <o...@odessaoffice.com> > To: "WISPA General List" <wireless@wispa.org> > Sent: Sunday, January 10, 2010 1:41 PM > Subject: [WISPA] Why the telco's will never be true competitors to us > > > I have a tower down. It's fed by a *business* grade DSL link. > > Can't get to the main router at that local. > > So I log onto the Century Tel (century link nowadays) web site go find a > phone number for tech support. > > IF there is a phone number on their Microsoft Bing cloan of a web site, I > couldn't find it. So, I decided to try the online chat thingy. > > Up pops a page with a spot for a the username, phone number and zip code. > Naturally, I put the right things in the boxes. Only to get an error. So > I > tried again, and again. Finally I actually READ what the smallish print > said you can ONLY put in ONE of the fields, not all of them. Hate to > allow > any answer to work rather than make people only fill in one field where > they > usually have to fill in all of them. My fault for not reading the fine > print, but then again, I shouldn't have to.... > > Next, I finally get a tech on the screen. Well, kinda, the web site > doesn't > have anything but an error at the top. But the chat part eventually came > up > and a tech was on the line. We quickly established that the tech support > guy wasn't able to see if there was a dsl connection or not. ug > > So, he gave me a phone number for tech support. > > I called that number only to sit on hold for a while (not toooo bad > though) > and then find out that that wasn't the right number for a business > account. > > Called the next number. Sat on hold a bit longer this time, but still > only > a few minutes. We quickly got through all of the who are you type stuff. > Then the gal on the support end asked me to tell her what lights were on > on > the modem. "Um, I'm an hour and a half form there." "Well, sir, I'm > unable > help you unless someone is on at the site." > > Sigh. The home owner at this site is a snow bird and won't be home for > months yet. > > The tech support people aren't able to tell if there is a connection or > not. > It's not like this is a little, rinky dink company like mine. This is a > HUGE telco! Ug. > > They won't even try to fix a business account that I pay $1200.00 per year > for. Probably even more than that. Amazing. > > Have a great day, I know I will. > marlon > > > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- > ---- > WISPA Wants You! 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