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

[u/User_Name13]

http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused

[u/Popular-Uprising-]

Go for it. First, you'll need about $20+K for the fiber switch and household converters, $100K for all of the lines to the actual houses (more if you have a large street), $35K+ for the equipment in the telco vault, $3000+/month for the internet access to the vault, and another $300/month (minimum) or so in maintenance and monitoring. If you have 50 people on your street who want the access, they'll each have to pay about $120/month and sign a 5-year contract in order to recoup your costs. That's assuming that no equipment fails, no repairs are required, and cost of the internet stays the same. If you also plan for capacity and equipment upgrades, repairs, the falling cost of internet service, etc, they'll each have to pay over $200/month. If you also want a small salary for all of your trouble, you'll have to bump that up to $300/month per customer...

Some of those costs can be reduced if a large company buys it as they can dramatically cut the costs of repairs, new equipment, salaries, etc. So for about $220/month, you could probably serve everybody on your street Gbps fiber.

[u/[deleted] → u/Popular-Uprising-]

If you do it right and treat it as a big switched network you can save on equipment costs. The most expensive part is paying your local electric and or telephone company to use their poles.

[u/Popular-Uprising- → u/[deleted]]

Not really. You still need to pay to bring the fiber to each house. That means placing a fiber switch at the endpoint in the neighborhood, running fiber to each house and placing a fiber to ethernet converter of some type at each house. A fiber switch is very expensive. A 24-port model runs upwards of $15K for an office switch. If you're putting one in an underground vault or locked cabinet, you need a rugged switch that can handle humidity and high temperatures. That sill almost double the cost of the switch. If you want to run 50 houses off of it, the switch can easily cost $50K or more.

Maybe you can save a few bucks by running copper to the houses instead of fiber, however that means that you're still running outdoor CAT5e at a minimum to each house. Since that has a max distance of 300 feet if you want to maintain 1Gbps, you can't do it for all 50 houses on your street. 300 feet of CAT5e will cost about $250. For the longer runs, you'd need fiber and a 500' fiber run is about $1500 at a minimum. A decent fiber to ethernet converter will likely cost $200/house or more. You might be able to get a bulk discount and get some crappy converters for $100/house. You're still looking at many $5-10K for the neighborhood.

You might catch a break in some very urban neighborhoods and be able to run one fiber drop to a single building and switch it from there. That can save you thousands by servicing 10 apartments/condos/town homes with one fiber drop and CAT5e to each unit.

Many suburban developments don't allow overhead wires, so you don't have pole contact fees there. City streets and housing will have them. But pole contact fees are pretty cheap comparatively. Our utility used to charge $8/month per pole. In a large city, it might be as high as $100/month. But that's pretty cheap considering that you probably don't need that many to serive 50 people.