Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt • Hacker News Board

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#121

Post by kiallmacinnes » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:25 PM UTC

planteen wrote: post #49

briffle wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For all but the smallest apartment buildings, this is not a good idea. Ethernet has a 100m limit. By the time you go up a wall, back down it, zig and zag around things in the ceiling, etc, you can quickly hit that limit. Then you can start getting errors such as packet loss, crosstalk, etc. Yes, it depends on the size and layout of your building (maybe your building has a comms cabinet on each floor, or wing, etc) bu…

I did technician work as a side job during college. It seemed like most dorms had data closets every floor/every other floor. Some buildings only had them in the attic and basement, but they were also usually limited to 4 levels. Are most large apartment buildings similar?

Does it really matter if there are comms closets nearby though?

It wouldn't surprise me if fiber optic cable was cheaper than cat6 to buy in bulk (Copper is expensive, and the process to manufacture the copper cables is more complex), and if you're doing fiber to the building anyway, you still end up with a media converter - so there is likely no significant cost saving there either.

It may actually be higher cost to have a centralised (within the building) media converter - ports need to be provisioned for the max possible customers up front. The class of hardware will likely be different too - matching enterprise style datacenter hardware, instead of the cheap and easy to replace stuff they send to customers...

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#122

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:26 PM UTC

monocasa wrote: post #93

jessaustin wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems dumb that poles are uncommon in an area with little topsoil over a granite substrate? Why so fancy? Incidentally this could mean that the trailer parks are cheaper to serve than swankier neighborhoods; there are lots of poles in trailer parks.

It's Boulder, houses are getting close to California levels. The cheapest starter homes are around $700k.

FWIW, the market appears to have cooled down a bit this spring. It remains to be seen whether that's a blip or a trend.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#123

Post by Retric » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:29 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #120

numbsafari wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$100/mo for FTTH vs. $69/mo for 250MB/s Comcast? I'll take the FTTH and leave Comcast and Century Link behind, thank you very much. Would be even better if the City charged you for the fiber link and then let you select your backend provider. E.g., the way consumer choice works in the electric space. Let the city run/own the cable, and let the back-end carriers compete to provide the backbone and value-added services…

Maybe you're willing to pay more. Most people probably aren't. (FiOS uptake rates are under 40% even though its always been much faster than competing cable services.) And the brutal economics of fiber really punish you for that. If your uptake rate goes from 50% to 33%, your per-subscriber costs have to go up to compensate (which puts even more downward pressure on your uptake rate).

FIOS includes TV. The real issue is Verizon is not that much better than cable companies.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#124

Post by yahyaheee » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

davidw wrote: post #114

tschellenbach wrote: post #6

I moved from Amsterdam to Boulder, CO. The tech ecosystem is amazing here. It's crazy how many tech companies are in a tiny city with ~100k people. You just walk down the street and it's Nest, Google, Github, JumpCloud, SolidFire, Logrhythm, VictorOps and hundreds of smaller startups. Great ecosystem. People are friendly and welcoming. It's amazing, except the internet. It's expensive, unreliable, and slowwwww.

It's a very nice place. Unfortunately, they are egregiously failing to provide enough housing at reasonable prices, so they copied that bad aspect of silicon valley as well as some of the good.

can't build up, can't build out. Its a tricky problem, but we don't want to use our open spaces for development. The surrounding areas are reasonable

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#125

Post by sanderjd » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:36 PM UTC

tptacek wrote: post #82

ttul wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.

That's twenty years. There is a decent chance that mainstream high speed Internet will be wireless in 20 years.

There is also a decent chance that it won't be. We (in Boulder) have this same "should we continue the status quo in the present because better technology may be widely deployed in the future?" debate with public transportation vs. self-driving cars / hyperloop / whatever and municipal power infrastructure vs. solar + storage. It's always a tricky question (and I don't come down on the same side in each of those debates).

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#126

Post by jdwithit » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:37 PM UTC

leesalminen wrote: post #79

planteen wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Having worked in Boulder for 4 years, my observation is that the number of people who actually live in town are the minority. In-college interns or new college grads tend to live in town. There is a smattering of more senior engineers in Boulder as well. But it seems most people commute in from Longmont, Erie, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Broomfield, Denver, or Ft. Collins. I worked with a guy who commuted f…

I thought the person I worked with that commuted from Fort Collins to Boulder was nuts, but the Springs?!? Hopefully it was a really fulfilling job.

I used to live in Fort Collins, and had to commute from there to Englewood/Tech Center area once every couple of weeks. Even that infrequently, it made me want to die. Usually the morning drive was tolerable, a bit over an hour if there wasn't an accident. But in the evenings it could take 2-3 hours, again without an accident. And there is ALWAYS an accident on I-25. I'd end up just staying in the office til 7PM or later because I'd get home at the same time whether I left at 5 or 7 anyway. I cannot imagine doing a commute like that daily for any reason. I'd get home in such a bad mood I that didn't want to see my family, just pour a drink.

Thankfully I was able to work remote 90% of the time in that role.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#127

Post by AlphaSite » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

makerofspoons wrote: post #18

I went to school at the University of Colorado Boulder. Something this article doesn't mention is that the city already has over 100 miles of fiber laid that isn't currently being lit up: http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-... . There were several groups of students looking to build companies to utilize this existing infrastructure, as well as business interests outside the city, but it just…

100 miles of fiver isn’t really that much is it? Maybe in absolute terms but when you have runs to each house that’s probably less than a couple hundred homes

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#128

Post by yahyaheee » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

d--b wrote: post #48

The bigger picture is Boulder is attracting startups. Having fiber broadband is a plus to that attraction. So a better broadband means a better economy: more activity, more jobs, more people, more taxes... The cost of that infrastructure makes total sense.

yeah I think they are less concerned with the cost/practicality and more focused on image. With Google increasing its presence this is just another move to paint us as a startup hub. I'm all about it

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#129

Post by daguu » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:38 PM UTC

JustSomeNobody wrote: post #40

crikli wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty much anything you can imagine from front-end web to embedded circuits. Thing to keep in mind with Boulder is that it suffers from the same building restriction effects as SF, combined with explosive population growth, so you're going to pay out the nose for every square foot of living space. As long as you build that fact into your salary negotations Boulder is going to be awesome with a quality of life eons b…

Good to know. I literally do everything from HW comms to web UI to push all that data to the cloud. HW comms and protocols are where I'm best. Happy where I'm at but always looking just in case. Been to Colorado Springs. It is a nice area.

Qualcomm has about 300 people in north Boulder.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#130

Post by hvoiiita » Thu, Jun 14, 2018, 4:39 PM UTC

dahart wrote: post #39

yock wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makes for a pretty compelling reason as to why Charter hasn't done it themselves.

That, or maybe $140M is a gross over estimate, or is referring to more than what’s discussed in the article? I’m tending toward that; it can’t possibly cost anywhere near $10k per subscriber to build out fiber normally, even in small cities, can it? Seems like if it was normally that expensive, there wouldn’t be fiber anywhere. What’s so different in Boulder? I’d speculate that CenturyLink paid less than $1k to run f…

I work for an ISP, typical cost for just labor + materials for fiber is $10k per mi., labor being the majority of the cost. I live in the midwest and fiber techs start getting paid around $25 per hour and it can take a crew of 2-3 guys for a few hours per household which if you have in-house guys isn't as much but if you're contracting it out can inflate cost 2-3x. That's if you don't have to make the run down the street and live close to a node.