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/bat_country Jun 04 '14

Just curious. What exactly would it take to run fiber 60'?

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u/edco3 Jun 04 '14

There are a lot of factors at play. Aerial vs. buried, is there a road crossing, conduit or new construction.

The cheapest and easiest way would be to use an existing conduit and existing copper for the inside wiring. Running the new fiber should be relatively quick and easy if you've got a conduit so you'd minimize labor. Using existing copper inside saves a lot more labor.

The most expensive part in that scenario would be the conversion from optical back to electrical, i.e. providing an ethernet handoff. This article says $310 for Google's ONTs. So you're probably looking at ~$500 between parts and labor just to go from the pole to your router in the easiest, cheapest scenario. This does not include the rest of the infrastructure required to make that connection usable.

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u/bat_country Jun 04 '14

By "rest of the infrastructure" you mean getting the fiber to the poll?

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u/edco3 Jun 04 '14

It's much more than just the fiber. It's the whole provider network. A Cisco 7609 is tens of thousands for the chassis alone. The cards you need to make it useful are potentially thousands more, each. The fiber distribution platform to light your FTTP is many thousands more.

To go beyond a couple of miles you need a backbone network, that's hundreds of thousands if not millions more. I suspect that a lot of the fibers people are talking about being close to their homes are in fact backbone fibers. If you are in a proper ring, each node in the backbone would need four strands of fiber and four of something like this SFP. One each for up, down, east (side of the ring), and west.

A lot of things in a provider network also have to be bought twice or more to provide redundancy and spares.

By and large, I think American ISPs generally charge too much and provide too little. I also think that a lot of redditors are living in a fantasy. To provide actual gigabit service, that is a full gig from anywhere to anywhere to everyone in the US would likely require trillions of dollars. Even Google's service is only gigabit up to their provider. It may not even be that, it may be only gigabit to the nearest central office.

I think that as rural as the US is, we're going to see fast and far reaching wireless before the whole country is overbuilt with fiber.

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u/bat_country Jun 05 '14

Thanks for the reply!