Optical Fiber for a Small Community? 31
wildsurf asks: "I live in a small community of about 70 homes, which has been on a septic-tank system for many years, soon to be replaced with a sewer system. Not too exciting, except that this opens up the possibility of laying fiber-optic cable alongside the sewer lines, which could add significant value to the properties, as well as ultra-broadband. (It seems a shame to dig up all the trenches and NOT lay cable.) DSL doesn't work out here, and the cable provider is a bit sketchy, but there's an ultra-high-bandwidth pipe running nearby that we could possibly tap into. Anyway, I figure this would be the perfect audience to ask for recommendations, since I'm not quite sure how to approach this. The homeowner's meeting is next month, and I'd like to know what to suggest to them. Thanks in advance!" Well, if your local media company isn't going to wire your community, the community may just have to foot that bill itself. What would it need to do: what forms would they need to complete; what contractors would they need to hire (especially when piggy-backing on other municipal works); and most importantly, how much would something like this cost?
General Ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
First, find out who owns everything involved: The trench, the land it's going through, the pipes, the trunk you want to join, etc. If all are small enough entities you may be able to deal with them directly in which case it may be as simple as hiring a lawyer to write up contracts and hammer on the details of service/etc.
You may need to start up a company/corporate entity to handle the ownership/etc of everything.. this might also help with your smoke-and-mirrors convincing of those involved.. if they're approached by "Waterloo broadband services" (or whatever you call your company) for permission to use their trench/backbone, they may react better than to your community council (which may well be a corporate entity, but still sounds.. well.. grass rootish
Anyone know specific details on any of the above steps?
No Need to Dig! (Score:1, Offtopic)
That optical fiber can probably be threaded through the pipes. After all, they're only filled with, uh, "liquid".
Optical fiber can't be much worse than some of the tree roots that can infest septic lines.
Re:No Need to Dig! (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyone notice... (Score:1)
If you lay fiber in your subdivision, you're going to have a faster network than AOL themselves!
Laying fiber isn't cheap, neither is the switching etc equipment...
Consider: (Score:2, Interesting)
If you want to do this, it will take a LOT of effort. But, if there is demand, then you should have no problem running fibre to a termination box at each person's house. Finanaces: you pay? who retains the rights for the fibre, and the equipment at the end? Do you want to become an ISP?
advice. (Score:1, Insightful)
note that you will have to get lots of permissions from lots of government entities which takes forever. good luck.
for cost figures
The Town of Morrisburg (population 2000) is in the process of deploying a
25km dark fiber network connecting all of their schools, hospitals,
libraries and businesses. They are also building a carrier neutral hotel
across the street from the local telephone company central office.
The total cost - less than $CDN 250,000.
Re:contacts. (Score:1, Insightful)
For more technical details on the Morrisburg fiber build please contact Max
Thomas of Prophet technologies, the company who is building and managing the
fiber network for the town of Morrisburg - mjtoms@prophettech.com
To learn why the town considers fiber networks critical to their future
economic survival contact Roy Brister who chairs the town's
telecommunications committee - insurance@bristergroup.com
And to learn what other communities plans for dark fiber in Eastern Ontario
please contact Birket Foster at birket@mbfoster.com
Re:advice. (Score:1)
But what about upstream connection? (Score:3, Insightful)
Start with around 40 cents per foot for your fiber. (my number on that might be a little old)
What do you want to hook up? Ethernet over single mode fiber will cost a couple of hundred $ per end point. You want more than point-to-point Ethernet? Maybe doing voice, video, etc? Then you are talking significantly more.
You do know that this almost has to be single mode fiber don't you? Single mode fiber is more expensive, and the connections to it are more expensive, but multi-mode fiber has too much dispersion to be usable beyond a couple of hundred meters.
Then there are some installation costs. You may need to pay the city for the right to put the fiber in the trench with the sewer pipe.
The big question is who is going to put up the money to buy the fiber, build a place for all the fiber to go to? How are you going to get a connection to the Net? Just because there is a fiber bundle running down the main road near you doesn't mean that it is that easy to tap into. The owner may not want to talk to you, the fiber may be running highly WDM traffic that makes it cost $100k+ just to install a add/drop multiplexer.
Now - please don't get discouraged by this - I my current employer builds Fiber-To-The-Home equipment, so my livelyhood depends on things like this. It will however take a significant amount of effort to build something like this. It's not as easy as stringing some CAT5 in the dorms to make a floor network.
Look at ashland fiber network. (Score:2, Interesting)
lizard boy
OT: Does fiber have to run underground? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:OT: Does fiber have to run underground? (Score:2)
Fiber typically has a pretty high tensile strength on its own. The jacketting can also add to the strength. It can be run across telephone poles without much problem.
The only reason fiber gets buried is because most places are starting to bury everything. My neighborhood doesn't have a single pole within a half mile. The only poles around are the main transmission lines for the electric company to our local substations as well as the poles up and down our two "main" streets. Those poles are going to be removed soon, though, as the utilities are being forced to bury everything.
Out in the country, where my folks live, the cable and telephone companies all string up fiber from pole to pole--no problems. They also have their various break-out boxes installed up high on the poles. Poles are cheaper, and country folk don't mind them as much.
Re:OT: Does fiber have to run underground? (Score:1)
If the local phone lines are underground and in ductwork of some sort (fairly common in new construction), the state may require that the phone company share the duct space for something like this, but there would probably still be a monthly fee.
Trenching Logistics (Score:1)
However, the trenching for a sewer line isn't quite the same as an ideal layout for coms conduits. They will have a 16" bucket on a backhoe (or thereabouts) for doing a sweer line. Another major concern is slope... "shit don't go up hill!" Logistically, you would end up needing to put the conduit above the sewer pipe. This would forever be a problem with maintaining the sewer. Also, because of the small bucket, it would be significantly more trenching effort to lay the conduit to the side.
Last big concern is manholes and pulling points. For residential service, these things work better in the sidewalk than the street. (Sewer having the opposite preference.)
If you do go ahead with it, I would recommend a 4" conduit with 4-bore innerduct so there are multiple pulling compartments. Costs might limit you to a copper solution for the short-term, but longer-term fiber might be viable.
Fiber is -expensive- (Score:2)
Cable companies, these days, have fiber all over their network, but not to people's homes - the "last mile" is still done with coaxial copper wire.
From what I recall of my visit to the new Time Warner building here, my home town of ~30k is split into 6 nodes. Which is to say: Six fiber runs, for thousands of coaxial drops. It works well.
Coax is cheap. It's cheap to lay, cheap to terminate, easy to splice and repair, and networking gear to utilize it is readily available from consumer-oriented companies like Linksys and Toshiba. It can be serviced by mere mortals with tools available from Radio Shack or Wal-Mart. It can carry DC current to power any amplifiers which are needed in-line, while fiber is completely non-conductive. It is more versatile than fiber; I have a number of devices, from my stereo to my cable modem, which can interface directly with the coax network. I have -zero- which have a fiberoptic port. My apartment building is wired for coax, with fiber nowehre to be seen. So on, so forth.
It is also readily able to stretch the relatively small distances encountered in your community with coax. Single-mode fiber is made to go for tens of miles, and for your application, it's just not needed. Add to this the high cost of plugging people in, and you'll soon find that, beautiful though it may be sitting there underground, your fiber network is completely unused.
Just what the world needs. More dark fiber.
A coax network will also let you install a community antenna for people to use, in the original spirit of cable TV, in addition to providing the financially-dubious service of internet access to a mere 70 homes. It would be an excellent way to supplement the DirecTV dishes which are undoubtedly common where you live, get rid of ugly roof-mounted antennas, and probably be financially feasible to provide for free (built into property taxes or somesuch).
That all said, if all you want to do is put people online, it'd be so much cheaper and easier and, most likely, better to construct a tower large enough to see the entire community, and spray the area with 802.11b. Wireless ethernet, even properly implemented with cellular-style antenna arrays at the head end, parabolic grid antennas mounted on houses, and high-end Cisco Aironet gear all 'round, is still vastly cheaper than anything involving fiber for the masses.
If, having given that some serious research, you still have your heart set on laying cable, it'll be in the plan's best interest to do something with it which might -actually- get used at some point in time -- which is to say, lay anything but fiber.
Consider burying some 500-pair telephone wire and installing a DSLAM at the fire station or other appropriate public structure. You'll have far better luck offering high-end SDSL service than trying to interest people in spending thousands on fiber gear.
Re:Fiber is -expensive- (Score:2)
-- Tim
Re:Fiber is -expensive- (Score:2)
Coax can propagate 1GHz signals (read that as "10/100/155(oc3)/1000 and beyond", if you wish) with ease.
Distance, in this application, does not matter. He's not looking to wire the countryside for a ten mile radious, but rather piggyback some bandwidth alongside the new sanitary system in a village of a couple of hundred heads.
Fiber is neat. Per foot, on a reel of a few thousand feet, it's pretty cheap.
Every other aspect of it is painfully expensive. It is not a magic bullet. It does not equate to enormous increases in bandwidth over copper. It does not make sense for any communications need which is not point-to-point and of extremely long distance, except for precious few situations where it is necessary to have no electrical contact between two points, or where radiated or induced noise is intolerable.
Re:Fiber is -expensive- (Score:2)
-- Tim
Re:Fiber is -expensive- (Score:1)
Re:Fiber is -expensive- (Score:2)
Coax can carry a lot of bandwidth - BUT if you are talking digital data it takes relatively expensive equipment to encode/decode that digital data into the RF spectrum that is carried over the coax.
Fiber can carry a lot of bandwidth - BUT the termination points have relatively expensive equipment to get the data from electrons to optical and back.
Coax can carry DC power in the cable to power amplifiers, etc. This DC power tends to degrade the connections if they aren't made extremely well and well protected from the elements (i.e. no Radio Scrap or Walmart connections if you want it to last) Those amplifiers etc are active electronics hanging on some telephone pole or in some green hut near the curb. Prime targets for snowplows or SUVs backing up if on the ground, and lightening strikes if in the air. They are also active electronics so they are prone to breaking down over time (those -40 degree temperatures in the north or +120 in the south of the US aren't kind to electronics.) Fiber systems often do not have any active electronics in the field making them more reliable and cheaper to maintain.
Disclaimer - my current employer makes this kind of equipment so I am somewhat biased. But it also means I know something about it.
Our field engineers have shown that a fiber system will cost the same or less than a coax or DSL type system when you are installing new cables anyway. The big costs are still the initial install to each home. If you have the trenches open already and are installing something - then fiber costs the same and gives you far more capabilities.
Anything but not multimode ! (Score:1)
But in any case, DO NOT INSTALL MULTIMODE FIBER !!! It's more expansive than SMF with for a given conditionning and every single interface standard defined over MMF is moving to SMF. The most important, 100BASE-FX Ethernet, is being reformulated right now by the IEEE 802.3 EFM committee as "100BASE-LX" (not a definitive name), 100Mbit/s duplex over SMF at 1310 nm and will become available in 2003. Equipement pricing will in the same league than 100BASE-FX. So no MMF, no matter what the vendors say. MMF is worthless and has no future.
Ah, and of course, every time you lay down fiber, make sure they come by pairs
LAY THE CABLE (Score:2)
DO NOT let anyone talk you into laying COPPER over FIBRE. The cost of fibre should be at or below the cost of copper. And the Fibre equipment is dropping in price. The cost of the fibre is basically the trench.
I would overbuild the fibre or lay conduit. I would also look at forming a CO-OP or a "Non-profit" and then do an RFP(Request For Purposal) to find a LEC or CLEC to provide you with the internet bandwidth. Be sure to put inthe RFP
the TOC that you want to see, I.E. allow the use of VPN's, No DL cap, the ability to run a webserver or what ever.
There is an optical technology called POND which costs approximately $800/port (source and destination) which provides Phone, cable & Broadband.
If you want any more information please send me an email and I will talk to the Network engineer here and send you more information.
-- Tim
How-to (Score:2)
All of two seconds with Google. Really.
Re:How-to (Score:1)