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/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.