I’m looking for some advice/input from people either public or private about woes building fiber to reach people outside the footprints of the existing incumbents.
There is a group of people looking to organize private fiber to reach areas that are unserved.
There’s been recent local people doing this like Lightspeed (Lansing) and the Vergennes Broadband folks.
When it come to private right of way, public right of way use, swaps, pole attach and other things, any best practices people can share either in public or private?
TL;DR background for those interested:
Many wireless ISPs are finding it harder to locate equipment or utilize frequencies based on interference or congestion. Advanced encodings like 16-QAM that are seen in 802.11ac hardware also introduce latencies that are not ideal. The FCC is also making it harder for equipment to be qualified in this space, in some cases rightly so due to out of band emissions or just adjacent frequency noise. The revisions of rules in 5Ghz are helpful, but the cellular industry is also looking to exploit these frequencies to solve indoor coverage.
There are two groups I’m trying to assist, a local cooperative which is trying to just own the fiber and let providers gain access and some WISPs that are looking to improve service due to increase customer demand.
Getting service on the fiber is “easy” once it’s there, but gaining access or building it is the part I’m looking for insights in.
- Jared
I worked on one such project, indirectly, years ago. Fiber in a small
town. My three takeaways were:
At the time it cost about $5 per year per pole to rent attachments on
the phone pole. An attachment is a particular distance up the pole
where you are allowed to attach your cables. Rights of way from pole
to pole included in the deal. The power company usually owns the poles
and is usually required by regulators to rent attachments.
"Help" the local schools with a "partnership" to bring them fiber
interconnects. Your part of the partnership is interconnecting the
underfunded schools well below your cost. Their part is clearing the
bureaucratic hurdles to stringing your fiber all over town. 'Cause
tech is a source of tax revenue... unless it's all about the kids.
Resist the urge to be a cable and phone operator at the same time.
Yes, there's a temptingly large bucket of money over there, but it's
not for you. The incumbents aren't going to take your entry in to the
market sitting down. If you would beat them, you need the folks who
would battle the incumbents for the buckets of "content" money to all
be pulling for your success.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
I’m looking for some advice/input from people either public or private
about woes building fiber to reach people outside the footprints of the
existing incumbents.
I worked on one such project, indirectly, years ago. Fiber in a small
town. My three takeaways were:
At the time it cost about $5 per year per pole to rent attachments on
the phone pole. An attachment is a particular distance up the pole
where you are allowed to attach your cables. Rights of way from pole
to pole included in the deal. The power company usually owns the poles
and is usually required by regulators to rent attachments.
I’ve heard that auditing the bills is quite important as they often don’t
know who is attached to the poles. Labeling requirements are stricter
as well and I can often pick out the yellow comcast labels here, the blue
university/merit labels and others without slowing down.
"Help" the local schools with a "partnership" to bring them fiber
interconnects. Your part of the partnership is interconnecting the
underfunded schools well below your cost. Their part is clearing the
bureaucratic hurdles to stringing your fiber all over town. 'Cause
tech is a source of tax revenue... unless it's all about the kids.
We have this place called Merit around here that some people may know
that tries to cover the schools. They also got either NTIA or RUS
monies (i don’t recall which) and are controlled by various state
universities. I’ve not yet met their new president but recall having
many conversations with people there off and on for ~20 years.
Resist the urge to be a cable and phone operator at the same time.
Yes, there's a temptingly large bucket of money over there, but it's
not for you. The incumbents aren't going to take your entry in to the
market sitting down. If you would beat them, you need the folks who
would battle the incumbents for the buckets of "content" money to all
be pulling for your success.
The incumbents aren’t battling for these areas, they either have only
cellular data or no service. I am served by a fixed wireless customer
myself and even with Michigan Bell/Ameritech/SBC/AT&T fiber 1200 feet away
there is no broadband here except fixed wireless, dial or cellular data.
Content is clearly the largest data source and IMHO the easiest to solve,
most of the content people are willing to either place equipment in a network
permise or something else.
The wireless ISP wants to expand with fiber, mostly burial. The local
cooperative wants to just build fiber on these mostly rural routes and
have someone like the WISP expand into the FTTP business and lease the
strands back. The incumbents are unlikely to buy fiber from this model
in my mind, but I’m willing to accept counter data points. I recall
some of the traditional bell company people being upset using cable
fiber due to the perceived poor quality to recover their networks post
Katrina, likely because they had more splices and lower OTDR results.
- jared
Jared;
What you are trying to do is quite achievable, but a huge topic worthy of a
book, not an email post. Also, situations vary significantly between states
due to incumbents, regulatory regimes, and level of state support. NANOG is
a bad place to get advice about this topic. There are many other venues
with literally thousands of other organizations/groups/companies on the
same path as you. I would start from the FTTH Council, Next Century Cities,
Institute for Local Self-Reliance and work out from there.