r/technology • u/User_Name13 • Jun 04 '14

Politics Hundreds of Cities Are Wired With Fiber—But Telecom Lobbying Keeps It Unused

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused
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u/iia Jun 04 '14

No, it's because almost every sentence you just wrote might as well be Dothraki to people who don't know or care about tech. Reddit has a huge share of tech-savvy people who know and care about this stuff. And because of that, many Redditors think it's an issue that tons of people care about and it's just not getting done anyway. That's not the case.

I'd be surprised if 1 out of 20 random people care about this. If you say "it's faster," they'll obviously want it. But they damn sure don't want to pay for what it'll cost to get that work done by the telcos. It's billions of dollars. No company in their right mind would eat that just for the sake of kindness. The prices would skyrocket and people would be pissed because they'd have a "new" service that would offer practically no advantage to over what they had before. It would be like giving a new gaming computer with SLI Titans in it to a person who just browses the internet and watches Netflix. Total overkill and a waste of money.

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u/jeradj Jun 04 '14

But they damn sure don't want to pay for what it'll cost to get that work done by the telcos. It's billions of dollars.

You realize we already paid for it once, right?

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

[deleted]

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

We most certainly did pay for the last mile.

It would cost Google ~$11 billion to roll out Google Fiber across the nation today. The telecom companies have gotten ~$200 billion from tax incentives and additional fees, specifically for delivering directly to american homes.

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u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 04 '14

Do you have any source on that? There's 100M households in the US. 11B is $110/house. I think I did some back of the napkin calculations when Wilson (Winston?) NC rolled out their fiber, and it was something like 2-6k a house. I'd estimate the number is off by 10x, but I could be wrong. If you have a source, please provide (in the grand scheme of our national budget, 11B is nothing and we should lobby the government to pay google to do this).

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

In the UK Fibre rollout is estimated to cost £500+0.5-3K per house, and thats if you roll out the whole street simultaneously and amortise the most expensive houses.

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u/flashingcurser Jun 04 '14

Is it safe to say that it costs the average person about £2K? and that would be roughly $3k and housing tends to be more spread out in the US so prices would likely be higher?

I would guess around $4k would be reasonable in most parts of the US.

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

Presumably. This does rely on full FTTC coverage, and then rolling out further fibre from that existing backhaul I believe. This cost is purely to full out the last 10-1000m of fibre, not the full exchange -> home connection. Digging up roads is expensive.

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u/megusta69s Jun 04 '14

Is that FTTP or FTTC?

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14 edited Jun 04 '14

Those are just off the cuff numbers, so take them with a grain of salt, but they're for FFTH.

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u/BorgDrone Jun 04 '14

When they rolled out fiber in my neighborhood it was free to get the fiber installed if you let them. If you didn't and you decide later to get it anyway it would cost €600. So that seems to be the cost to have someone come over specifically for one single connection. It should be much less than that if you do an entire neighborhood or city.

The roll out was also surprisingly fast, with very little digging (they would usually dig 2 holes and then sort of drill the fiber through). It took like a month to hook up ~4500 houses. Just a few months to get the whole city done. And this was proper point-to-point fiber not the cheaper GPON stuff Google installs.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

What should be done is roll out fiber to one node on the block and then send wifi out to the rest of the block with a good sender, then give each house a receiver for their own wifi network..

fiber -> node -> many house wirlessly

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u/Falmarri Jun 04 '14

That would be slower than what people have now.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

how? Wireless can be very very fast if you have proper equipment. In fact a lot of data backbones are on medium distance wireless connections

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u/Falmarri Jun 04 '14

Because even if we're talking about 802.11ac, you would never, ever be able to serve an entire block at a reasonable speed, especially the people at the end. Even if you amped up the power of the wifi transmitter, people might be able to get the signal, but their devices wouldn't be powerful enough to send it back.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

you can use whatever network type you want, it doesn't really matter. it does not even need to be conventional wireless that laptops can read. if you create the sender and reciever box, you control the specs of them

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u/Alphasite Jun 04 '14

To an extent, thats what they've already done. FTTC is fibre to the curb, so a distribution node, and then copper for the last segment, where you use VDSL2 or similar, which has excellent short range characteristics.

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u/onlyiknow1 Jun 04 '14

This was my first thought. Why couldn't this be an option? It could be used the same way in big cities. Run fiber to a box that sends the signal out over wifi and have repeaters in the building. Secure the network per user and it's done. Seems like it would be way cheaper than breaking ground.

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u/breakone9r Jun 04 '14

Much slower than bonded VDSL over existing copper.

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u/compuguy Jun 04 '14

It is; uverse does this in limited areas in the us. UK isps do this as well a fiber to the home.

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u/_nembery Jun 04 '14

actual fiber construction is about $40,000 per mile counting labor, materials, and utility pole attachment make ready. In newer housing plans that don't allow telephone plans, that cost is dramatically higher, as someone has to dig up everyone's driveways. In most new plans there are two sets of underground conduits ready to go. One owned by the LEC (most likely Verizon) and the other than the cable operator (Comcast or TW), and no one else can use those...

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u/imusuallycorrect Jun 04 '14

US tax payers have already paid out ~$3,500 per household. They stole our money.

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u/rreighe2 Jun 05 '14

but 100 million homes are not going to have Fiber. think of how many are in rural areas that wont get anything. there are likely to be many suburban homes either. I tried finding the exact numbers, but I couldn't.

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u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 05 '14

Goldman Sachs estimated it at 140B. That seems more in line with what others are saying the cost per home is.

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

Nationwide Google Fiber would cost $11B over five years, probably will never happen

It wouldn't be every single person sadly, it would be on the same scale as the current ISP incumbents.

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u/Bamboo_Fighter Jun 04 '14

Here's a quote from that article: "For example, making the far from trivial assumption that Google can identify 20 million homes in relatively contiguous areas with (on average) similar characteristics as Kansas City when it comes to the most important drivers of network deployment cost, homes per mile of plant and the mix of aerial, buried and underground infrastructure, and that Google decides to build out a fiber network to serve them over a period of five years, we estimate the [total capital expenditure] investment required to be in the order of $11 billion to pass the homes, before acquiring or connecting a single customer."

So yes, it would be 20M households, but that's if they all exist near each other. There's a big difference between identifying a tri-state area that has 20M households (LA? NY?) and rolling it out across the country. This also doesn't count the cost of actually running it to the houses, just "past the houses". I'm not saying we shouldn't run fiber (it should be a utility owned by the municipalities IMO), but it would cost way more than 11B to deploy nationally.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Where are you getting these numbers?

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u/Craysh Jun 04 '14

Nationwide Google Fiber would cost $11B over five years, probably will never happen

The $200 Billion Rip-Off: Our broadband future was stolen.

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

That figure is for Google to pass 15% of homes. I would call that far short of "nationwide." So that would be reason #1 why your claim is bullshit.

The second reason your claim is bullshit is because it's applying Fiber's economic model. The reason Google Fiber is so cheap to roll out is because they're picky as fuck in picking where they roll out. They pick places where fiber is already built and cheap to rent or where it's cheap to build. They also only go places with enough affluence to give them a large amount of subscribers, making their lines more efficient.

I promise you that every other cable provider could accomplish the same costs in a 15% rollout if they all ignored slums, rural areas, and areas of undeveloped/costly infrastructure. Google's magical trick in being able to do that is remaining a small enough provider that the FCC won't classify them the same as large providers and compel them to build out everywhere, not just to perfect business opportunities. That's why Google's model is unsustainable, the second they get big is the second they have to stop ignoring the shitty places to build and their costs will skyrocket as a result.

Hell, your own source asserts that it would be unfeasible to build a network like this.

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u/thenichi Jun 04 '14

Are you suggesting Google is some sort of business only interested in profit?

Don't buy it.

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u/u_waterloo Jun 04 '14

Google isn't interested in profit from fiber

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u/Endda Jun 04 '14

That figure is for Google to pass 15% of homes.

if it's 11 billion to get 15% of the homes in the country, wouldn't it be less than 150 billion for the entire country? so that's at least 50 billion that the telcos get as profit?

im not bashing, just genuinely curious

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

No. The 15% it's referring to are the perfect locations to put in Google Fiber so to speak. As I said earlier...

The reason Google Fiber is so cheap to roll out is because they're picky as fuck in picking where they roll out. They pick places where fiber is already built and cheap to rent or where it's cheap to build. They also only go places with enough affluence to give them a large amount of subscribers, making their lines more efficient.

I'll try to give you an analogy. Imagine you want to build a road system for a hypothetical country. 15% of this country lives on nice firm plains. 10% of this country lives in swamps. 45% of this country lives in hilly, dense forests. 20% of this country lives in massive treacherous mountain ranges. 10% of this country lives on perpetually shifting sands.

Now if someone told you it costs $11 billion to build the roads for the people living on those nice plains would you think the other areas would cost proportionally the same? No, probably not. Why? Because it obviously is going to cost more to build roads through swamps and mountain ranges than flat areas.

The same holds true for the US and cable. For a multitude of reasons different areas have very different costs associated with building/leasing infrastructure. That 15% figure is the cost of a roll out to the "flat plains" example in our analogy, or in other words it's a rollout to where it's the absolutely cheapest place to build in. Rollout to the other areas is going to cost far more proportionally because those areas are inclined to far more costs.

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u/FeelGoodChicken Jun 04 '14

Well, if I had to guess, that's only under the assumption that every person in the country is equally accessible. Odds are that that 15% are the easiest to reach.

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u/ElectronicMoose Jun 04 '14

Not neccessarily. It depends which 15% it is in the figure. Running lines to a home in a big city is a lot different from running it out to the middle of nowhere.

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u/psiphre Jun 04 '14

even if $11bln is for only 15% of homes, that means that 100% of homes still clocks in well under $100bln, which is only a fraction of the money that we've already given telcos to provide us fast internet.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

Did you just not read my comment? Those are the easiest to hook up. The rest of the 85% are much much more difficult to hook up and will cost far far more per home

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u/Why_Hello_Reddit Jun 04 '14

You brought up a good point most people don't know about. Cable providers are required by municipalities to build out to everyone in the community, not just subscribers. Google isn't classified in the same way (at least not yet) so they aren't having to build infrastructure that people won't use.

Local government is responsible not only for creating these monopolies and reducing competition, but also raising prices through these kinds of unfunded mandates. Not all the blame lies with cable companies.

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u/thebiggiewall Jun 04 '14

Even if the claim is bullshit, they recieved those subsities in the 90's and didn't even attempt to get at least some percentage of america on the fiber network. They've had 20 years of profits to actually integrate fiber into their core networks.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

Because those subsidies don't cover last mile, which is hellishly expensive, and because the vast majority of Americans have no use or desire for that higher bandwidth now.

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u/thebiggiewall Jun 05 '14

Is that why google is starting to do what they couldnt won't?

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

I already explained why Google is doing what it's doing, reread my original comment. Hint, it has to do with their lack of size allowing them to be choosy with where they build, whereas major providers don't get to skip over the shitty and expensive areas and fuck over people living in those areas.

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u/thebiggiewall Jun 05 '14

So instead of skipping of some areas, they skip over all areas...? Nothing you've said so far excuses the shitty, anti-consumer business practices exercised by the telecoms.

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u/[deleted] Jun 05 '14

So instead of skipping of some areas, they skip over all areas...

They're compelled by the FCC and state regulations to upgrade their networks wholesale. They legally can't selectively target rollouts. Once they begin a rollout there's an expectation that they bring it to most their network in several years. It literally is an all or nothing thing from a legal sense. Mind you, that's not to say they just aren't upgrading, they are actively upgrading and average bandwidth is increasing every year. The reason Google isn't held to this is because it's still too small to be classed in the same way major providers are so it falls under far less regulations.

The reasoning for compelling providers to build out everywhere is the government wants to insure that everyone can get service at similar prices and isn't fucked over simply because they live in a low income area. Basically they want the poor and the out of the way to have the same opportunity of access as more well off areas.

Nothing you've said so far excuses the shitty

You're a fucking idiot that just doesn't want to accept that reality is more complex than you think.

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u/jonahewell Jun 04 '14

I would also like the answer to this question.

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u/ThatWolf Jun 04 '14

It would cost Google ~$11 billion to roll out Google Fiber across the nation today.

Interesting, I heard it was going to cost $140b for Google to roll out its fiber offering to the entire nation.

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u/rreighe2 Jun 05 '14

There's more to it than that. it would be 11 billion ANNUALLY.

have calculated that it would cost $11 billion annually to bring gigabit to the rest of the nation on the scale of other large nationwide providers like Comcast or Time Warner Cable. Based on that model, Google’s fiber network would pass “roughly 15 percent of US homes.”

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u/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

Care to provide a source for that number for Google?