31–40 of 114 posts
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but what are the downsides to this? Where is that explored?
This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive). Most importantly, it minimizes market d…
>> "It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband" Maybe it's me, but $3 billion is not a small amount of money: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13941757
Also, there is some economic gain from this activity...paying construction workers to install it, and whatever the end users decide to do with it. Is that gain > 3B? I don't know.
This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive). Most importantly, it minimizes market d…
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber. Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then. The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at lea…
But only a small percentage of fiber put on long routes uses single wavelengths. Most fiber going more than 5-10km uses DWDM and that is indeed an important place to put in modern fiber.
However, most of the railway routes in 1998 used fiber that supported 32*40G lambdas, so the problem with most of the fiber laid over the last 20 years is not that it can't handle more than 1gbps. Most of the problem is the equipment, not the type of fiber used.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber. Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then. The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at lea…
I think the idea is to get fiber into the last mile. Vast parts of the country are still under construction. New subdivisions are being built, and people are moving there from established northeastern/midwestern states. Requiring conduit to be put underground as you build the roads for a new subdivision, for example, would dramatically reduce the costs to deploy fiber in these places.
"Dig once requirements are often opposed by deep pocketed incumbent telephone and cable companies, who build their own infrastructure and would prefer that smaller competitors not have access to cheap and freely available conduit,"
I suspect the big incumbents would simply lease the space and throw their own fiber in there to monopolize this new federally funded conduit. Then some of the maintenance burden falls on the government. Such wonderful corporate welfare well see down the road!
It might work out fine, but we need to hear from the people who would carry the actual the burden under this proposal, such as those in the construction industry that will have to lay the conduit under 'Dig once', and those who currently make money from laying cable who will have their business taken away. We also need to hear from experts in that field about how much it will cost and how it is best done. As written…
Say a road construction company wins the bid and gets a contract to work on a section of federally-funded road. I think it is likely they would already have some of the work, equipment or supplies sub-contracted out to specialists. Does it make more sense for them to own the entire supply chain for making concrete, from mining and refining the minerals, to mixing, delivery and pouring? Or does it make more sense for them to sub-contact out to a number of suppliers who they can call and say "I need $foo cubic feet of concrete, with $bar properties, delivered to $baz location at $quux date/time,"? I think the latter is more likely as it gives them more flexibility. Owning and operating the equipment and infrastructure to manufacture concrete has overhead costs like anything else.
Similarly, if laying fiber becomes a requirement of taking the contract to build the roads, I think those fiber-laying companies will find themselves subcontracted those projects.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber. Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then. The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at lea…
"outside of last mile usage, which this bill is directed at" How is that? It applies only to federally funded projects. Most homes and businesses are not on federally funded roads. This bill is not a FTTH driver.
The future of America is not, and never will be, FTTH. The future of America is FTTF/FTTDP (fiber to the frontage/distribution point) to a street/basement cabinet that houses current generation micro-headends and micro-DSLAMs that are setup to handle the last 500-1000 feet, speaking G.fast and DOCIS 3.x as very small greenfield installations.
Current gen G.fast tops out at 1000/1000 in less than 300ft installations, slows to 100/100 at 1500ft (about a third of a mile) using existing installs of standard 80s and 90s era unshielded phone wire, the numbers go up with brand new copper, and next gen G.fast is aiming at increasing these speeds several fold (talk of 10gbit in under 300ft and 1gbit at much further distances).
Current gen DOCIS 3.1 tops out at 1.3gbit down, 245mbit up, and there are already existing gigabit-on-cable customers getting what they paid for on 90s era coax.
I see absolutely no reason to roll out actual FTTH ala FIOS, and I agree with Google Fiber's decision to drop actual FTTH, and they should be aiming for taking over unmaintained networks that can be rebuilt as modern DOCIS 3.x or G.Fast, or deploying micro-towers doing shorter range LTE-A fixed.
Current gen LTE-A maxes out at somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 10gbit per tower/frequency band, and fixed LTE-A "modems" with outside directional antennas can get gigabit connectivity; next gen LTE (LTE-A Pro, aka 4.9G) at least doubles this.
All of this is useless without Congress pushing for more fiber between towns, or inside large metro areas (which means burying more fiber along federal highways and major state roads).
There is literally no reason why, today, we don't have at least 50/10 to every goddamned home in America. Every goddamned home, no matter how far you are out in the sticks. This is a drain on our economy every second we aren't working towards this actually rather easy to achieve goal.
Fun fact: I don't even have reliable cell phone connectivity at my house. I'm maybe the only person on HN that bothers to maintain a POTS line and use it as my primary phone number.
But who owns the infrastructure? Would the government own it? Would the municipalities? Is this just one way for the NSA to be able to tap into the major backbone now by mandating this type of stuff? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but what are the downsides to this? Where is that explored?
The conduit would presumably be owned and managed by the government. The fiber in it by the people who pulled it presumably the provider.
But here is the thing. Conduit size is not infinite. If not large enough it could get filled. I can even see a case where a particular company may put in extra fiber just to prevent someone else from doing so (and then either not using or renting that fiber). The government is not particularly good at preventing this type of gaming and manipulation.
But who owns the infrastructure? Would the government own it? Would the municipalities? Is this just one way for the NSA to be able to tap into the major backbone now by mandating this type of stuff? Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but what are the downsides to this? Where is that explored?
I'm pretty sure NSA manages to get access to backbones just fine without the benefit of policies that try to expand the role of fibre in the last mile. NSA has ample access to backbone fibre, both at exchange points and undersea (they have submarines). This is an utter red herring.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "dig once" policy is a public subsidy for broadband in the same sense that a national roads network is a subsidy for FedEx or Amazon.com -- it indeed reduces the costs that operators need to pay to get into the market but there's a panoply of benefits to the public beyond those of a literal, "paying government money to broadband operators" subsidy.
Infrastructure, whether broadband or highways, has positive externalities that are hard for infrastructure builders to capture, so the free market under-invests in infrastructure. However, government investment in infrastructure also is distortionary and needs to be considered in every instance. For example, it's great that we can get products delivered overnight from Amazon. However, as you point out, that is effect…
Indeed -- my hope for "dig once" policies would be that they have an opposite effect on competition; namely, that national-scale incumbents (who can currently afford to throw a million dollars here or there to put in fibre of their own in a new region/market) can get effective competition from local ISPs (who don't have a comparable ability to throw cash around).