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Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

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Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#201

Post by patmorgan23 »

AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #196
philjohn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that FTTP/H has a much larger up front cost because of having to clear out potentially blocked ducts if underground, and the labour intensive work that needs to be done at the property.

How is it different from cable? One person can dig a trench and lay cable through a large yard in about two hours. This is essentially how cable tv and internet are hooked up.

Most places already have cable laid, change the equipment at the end is much easier than laying new lines

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#202

Post by thelastidiot »

volkk wrote: post #28
rb808 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's bad, but also interesting that you can have the world's main tech region without much fiber to home. Maybe fiber isn't really that important.

> Maybe fiber isn't really that important. My gut feeling is that it is , but the current monopolies providing alternatives just haven't ruined the experience enough for this to be pursued heavily by people with deep pockets

Com... cough cough, cast! That's an interesting theory and discussion topic. I was just wondering today what are my options about switching to a better ISP with all this net neutrality gone by the window and Comcast asking me to return my old router to get a new one so they can throttle me better?

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#203

Post by mmt »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #153
st26 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kinda makes it sound like they've got too much road. Property taxes are only a thousand or three per single family household, I believe.

The point I was trying to make is that utilities and infrastructure don't add up in ways that make budget decisions simple or that seem sensible when viewed from a simple calculation of total cost divided by number of households. If we did that same calculation for other utilities, we would not have many utilities at all! Honestly, I'm not really sure how it's all paid for at the end of the day.

I think it's also important to amortize construction costs over the useful life of the infrastructure, not just how long it takes to pay back the loan.

That $40k of road is only $800/year over 50 years. (And I doubt all of it was even originally as expensive as your estimate, especially considering cost of land, which was closer to zero before there was a road there).

Of course, maintenance costs have to be counted, too, and in the case of fiber, it would, instead, be eventual upgrades.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#204

Post by amazon_not »

rayiner wrote: post #156
oftenwrong wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the expected lifetime of this kind of fiber infrastructure? Shouldn't the city also accumulate funds for eventual replacement?

It depends. The actual fiber is probably good for decades. But a lot of the active infrastructure requires upgrades in a 10 year or so cycle. FiOS started out in 2005 with BPON. Then they upgraded to GPON. Now they’re working on NGPON-2. This requires upgrading ONTs, (very expensive) OLTs, switches, not to mention adding capacity out from the COs to handle the additional traffic.

OLTs aren't that expensive, especially since you can potentially split the costs of each port over 128 subscribers. Obviously the total dollar costs add up when you put thousands of subscribers on one OLT, but the cost per subscriber is quite low.

NGPON-2 isn't being deployed at scale yet, so prices are still to come down, but GPON OLTs are bulk items. You can buy a GPON OLT for a few grand which ends up being a few bucks per subscriber.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#206

Post by therealdrag0 »

I've had Verizon FiOS fiber and it was just as bad as when I had terrible Comcast. Now I have Comcast in a different neighborhood and it's great.

Personally, availability/stability is WAY more important than bandwidth. I don't know what I'd do with over 200mbps. But in some of the places I lived, during peak hours, the internet would just stop working. That was very frustrating.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#207

Post by AboutTheWhisles »

patmorgan23 wrote: post #201
AboutTheWhisles wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it different from cable? One person can dig a trench and lay cable through a large yard in about two hours. This is essentially how cable tv and internet are hooked up.

Most places already have cable laid, change the equipment at the end is much easier than laying new lines

Yes, but the parent was implying that fiber is somehow has more difficult to lay than regular coax.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#208

Post by StillBored »

tptacek wrote: post #189
StillBored wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wireless has been perpetually behind star topology wired networks despite the fact that it tends to be much easier to upgrade a few antenna's and radios around a city then make people buy new modems every couple years. Worse, wireless is really spotty, I can barely get a data connection where I work and at my house with my carrier, much less a few Mbit/sec. Like WiFi, the advertised peek rates tend to be far in exces…

I think you are significantly underestimating just how long a timespan we're talking about here. Twenty years is a very long time. Twenty years back predates 802.11b. In 1998, our houses and apartments were all wired up with cat5. In San Francisco, at the time, we were thrilled to have Ricochet modems that asymptotically approached ISDN BRI speeds (for that matter, we were generally pretty thrilled to get ISDN BRI sp…

But wired speeds are getting faster too, you need only compare your ISDN modem, with what is possible with DOCSIS 3.1. I used CDPD (early cell phone data service) in the late '90's and that was 19.2 kbit/s which was actually at least in the same ballpark as the POTs modems. So its not like wireless is getting massivly faster and copper has hit a wall. It seems that faster DSP's also help wired communications mechanisms..

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#209

Post by tptacek »

StillBored wrote: post #208
tptacek wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are significantly underestimating just how long a timespan we're talking about here. Twenty years is a very long time. Twenty years back predates 802.11b. In 1998, our houses and apartments were all wired up with cat5. In San Francisco, at the time, we were thrilled to have Ricochet modems that asymptotically approached ISDN BRI speeds (for that matter, we were generally pretty thrilled to get ISDN BRI sp…

But wired speeds are getting faster too, you need only compare your ISDN modem, with what is possible with DOCSIS 3.1. I used CDPD (early cell phone data service) in the late '90's and that was 19.2 kbit/s which was actually at least in the same ballpark as the POTs modems. So its not like wireless is getting massivly faster and copper has hit a wall. It seems that faster DSP's also help wired communications mechanis…

There is a clear and obvious point of diminishing returns, which you can see from the fact that to a pretty good first approximation nobody uses wired connections to connect their computers to the Internet; everyone uses 802.11. Yes: wired connections will be faster. But past a threshold, it doesn't matter, and the ease and lower cost of deployment will win out.

Re: Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt

#210

Post by rayiner »

amazon_not wrote: post #204
rayiner wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends. The actual fiber is probably good for decades. But a lot of the active infrastructure requires upgrades in a 10 year or so cycle. FiOS started out in 2005 with BPON. Then they upgraded to GPON. Now they’re working on NGPON-2. This requires upgrading ONTs, (very expensive) OLTs, switches, not to mention adding capacity out from the COs to handle the additional traffic.

OLTs aren't that expensive, especially since you can potentially split the costs of each port over 128 subscribers. Obviously the total dollar costs add up when you put thousands of subscribers on one OLT, but the cost per subscriber is quite low. NGPON-2 isn't being deployed at scale yet, so prices are still to come down, but GPON OLTs are bulk items. You can buy a GPON OLT for a few grand which ends up being a few…

Verizon upgraded to GPON in 2008, when prices were a lot higher. Back then, GPON line cards were in the $10-20k range. (And they're upgrading to NG-PON2 starting this year.) Also, their typical split is 1:16 or 1:32. So you're talking about $600+ per subscriber (maybe pushing a grand once you factor in cost new ONTs and cost of labor to install new ONTs). That's a couple of thousand dollars per subscriber over the amortization period (at least if you're hoping to keep up with the Joneses).
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