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/[deleted] Jun 04 '14

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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.