Looking for some diversity in Alabama that does not involve ATT Fiber

Mailman List Mirror (Read Only)
21

Bingo.

On the flip side of the equation, if you want to be an overbuilder (a
third communications infrastructure provider beyond the phone and cable
companies) the owner of the telephone poles is usually required by the
state to sell you an "attachment." An attachment is a connection to a
pole at a specific height, reserved for connecting your cables. The
power company is usually the owner, so they don't get too bent out of
shape about the fact that you're competing with the ILEC. The last I
checked, this ran about $5/year per pole.

See http://transition.fcc.gov/eb/mdrd/PoleAtt.html

When I worked for a CLEC the way that power pole attachments went, they
would sell you the bottom most attachment point on the pole and you were
required to move the other attachements further up the pole to make room for
your attachment point (at your own expense).

In our town the ILEC (GTE which morphed into Verizon) sold the power poles
to the local municipality. So if you wanted attachment rights you had to
negotiate with the local city manager. So be sure to check with them as
well.

My personal favorite was driving down the road one day watching them
literally snip our fiber off the pole with a pair of cutters (it was a dark
overlay we weren't using at the time, thankfully). Apparently the new city
manager deemed that our agreement for power pole attachment didn't apply to
him since it was negotiated under the previous city manager. He instructed
the line workers to cut it down. Lawyers were involved shortly thereafter
and the company went insolvent. Good times.

22

VZ wants to get rid of their copper plant. It's expensive to maintain, and

As opposed to fiber plant which is indestructible and cheap to maintain?

Well, if VZ owns the copper, if it's not being used to provide a
service, and the price of
copper keeps going up, it's only a matter of time before VZ should
want to take their bits of unused cable back. How useful is leaving
a dormant loop in place just because someone might theoretically want
it someday?

Seems like a waste for VZ not to reclaim it so it can be recycled/put
to good use.

it requires that they sell service to competitors. Once they've disconnected
their customers from it, they can just eliminate the copper plant. POTS

You sure the regulations won't eventually be updated to apply some
rules to whatever POTS is being replaced with? Possibly years
before they could finish eliminating their copper plant, which
doesn't
likely happen until the pricing allows POTS customers to get FiOS
delivery installed for free as a
cheaper alternative to POTS delivery.

23

My understanding was that fiber loops were originally included in UNE products available to clecs but several years ago the FCC modified the regulations to remove them.

So, if a service can be provisioned over a copper loop, a clec can offer it, but the ilec doesn't have to share fiber loops or services provisioned over fiber loops. I guess that explains
the frenzy of fiber-to-the-curb buildout we saw with Pac Bell in the early 2000's. I don't think ATT/PacBell has been ripping out copper, but much of it in the SF Bay area is a rotting
mess and ATT hasn't been spending much money to maintain it.

Now that the DSL clecs are all but extinct, the pace of fiber buildout to the end-user has slowed down considerably.

Joe McGuckin
ViaNet Communications

joe@via.net
650-207-0372 cell
650-213-1302 office
650-969-2124 fax

24

Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> writes:

Seems like a waste for VZ not to reclaim it so it can be
recycled/put to good use.

To put some numbers with this statement (which I agree with btw):

OSP cable is commonly available composed of 19 AWG, 22 AWG, 24 AWG,
and 26 AWG pairs. 19 and 26 are outliers; 19 is for low pair count
cables going extra long distances and 26 is only good for quite short
distances (CO/SLC to customer) but Superior Essex makes a 3000 pair
cable in #26 (22 and 24 max out at 900 and 1800 pair, at least on the
spec sheet I have handy).

Most of the cable out there is 22 or 24. Solid #22 and #24
(uninsulated) copper wire weighs 1.95 and 1.23 pounds per 1000 feet
respectively. That's without the insulation, and only one wire, not a
pair.

I found scrap pricing for "telco" (obviously the contaminant ratios
out there are different for different types of copper) at $1.20/pound,
which may or may not be current, but if you figure a single pair of
#24 is probably around 4 pounds per 1000 feet scrap weight... if an
average loop is, say, 5000 feet, you can see where there is
substantial incentive to recycle all the 600 pair that you have lying
around.

-r

25

Hi Robert,

That depends on the cost of recovering it. We're not talking about
salvage operators pulling cable, we're talking about highly trained
[sic] Verizon installers.

The last 4 pairs in use on that 3000 count cable will tend to linger a
long, long time before you can go remove it. Mostly you'll recover
short runs of low-count cable like the fifty-foot two and six pair
cables from the street to the house: maybe $3 in scrap. How many
dollars worth of time will the installer bill Verizon for recovering
it?

Regards,
Bill Herrin

26

That's relatively current. I recycled about 105 ft of 25pr I pulled out
on a cabling job 3 or 4 months ago, and I think I got $130 for it.

But remember: much to most telco trunk cable is icky-pic, and direct-burial;
both of those change the effectiveness equation *markedly*.

Cheers,
-- jra

27

I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their fiber
which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the end
of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of
course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and replace
it with a unregulated one.

Also, I think Z doesnt see any problem at the moment because they probably
make more money with the closed fiber network than they ever would shutting
down/recycling copper

28

From: William Herrin [mailto:bill@herrin.us]
> Jimmy Hess <mysidia@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> Seems like a waste for VZ not to reclaim it so it can be
>> recycled/put to good use.
>
> To put some numbers with this statement (which I agree with btw):
>
> OSP cable is commonly available composed of 19 AWG, 22 AWG, 24 AWG,
> and 26 AWG pairs. 19 and 26 are outliers; 19 is for low pair count
> cables going extra long distances and 26 is only good for quite short
> distances (CO/SLC to customer) but Superior Essex makes a 3000 pair
> cable in #26 (22 and 24 max out at 900 and 1800 pair, at least on the
> spec sheet I have handy).
>
> Most of the cable out there is 22 or 24. Solid #22 and #24
> (uninsulated) copper wire weighs 1.95 and 1.23 pounds per 1000 feet
> respectively. That's without the insulation, and only one wire, not
a
> pair.
>
> I found scrap pricing for "telco" (obviously the contaminant ratios
> out there are different for different types of copper) at
$1.20/pound,
> which may or may not be current, but if you figure a single pair of
> #24 is probably around 4 pounds per 1000 feet scrap weight... if an
> average loop is, say, 5000 feet, you can see where there is
> substantial incentive to recycle all the 600 pair that you have lying
> around.

Hi Robert,

That depends on the cost of recovering it. We're not talking about
salvage operators pulling cable, we're talking about highly trained
[sic] Verizon installers.

The last 4 pairs in use on that 3000 count cable will tend to linger a
long, long time before you can go remove it. Mostly you'll recover
short runs of low-count cable like the fifty-foot two and six pair
cables from the street to the house: maybe $3 in scrap. How many
dollars worth of time will the installer bill Verizon for recovering
it?

If it means they're shutting down the CLECs in the process? I suspect it's worth quite a bit of installer billable time...

Jamie

29

I think this partly captures the incentive case here, but there is also a larger one at play. Over the years the copper infrastructure was installed and extended through various incentive programs. You can see the modern-day reflection of that in the RUS (used to manage rural electrification act, part of USDA) and NTIA (Department of Commerce).

The barriers to entry are significant for a new player in the marketplace. The cost is putting the cabling in the ground vs the cost of the cable itself. One can easily pick up hardware for $250 to light a single strand of 9/125 SM fiber @ 10km for a 1Gb/s ethernet link. That's low enough you could likely get a consumer to buy the hardware. The real cost is the installation per strand foot/mile.

In the past this has been subsidized for copper plant. There is no reason in my mind that the fiber plant should be treated differently from this standpoint. I can find fiber optic cabling for $0.25/ft. The problem here is a multi-dimensional one that I've seen play out in a few markets:

Verizon selling assets to Fairpoint (NH, ME, VT). These are high cost areas due to low-density population. For the sale to go through, Fairpoint had to agree to build into these higher cost areas. The result was bankruptcy for Fairpoint.

Verizon sold assets in Michigan (and other states) to Frontier. I've not tracked this one as closely, but I suspect the economics of this are fairly complex.

I've also spoken to some small ISPs and their general cost of building fiber to the home tends to be $2500/subscriber in upfront capital. This covers just the installation cost. Due to years of subsidy and regulation, people are unwilling to pay this amount to install a telecommunications service whereas a new home requiring a connection to the water, sewers, natural gas or electric grid may pay $10k or more to connect. Many people wouldn't think of buying a home without electric service, but without modern telecommunication service? I've seen this play out after the fact with friends asking how to get service. Satellite, Fixed wireless or just cellular data quickly become their fallbacks. The demand is there, the challenge becomes recovering the build cost.

It is my firm belief that without a regulatory regime it will not be feasible to connect many communities robustly to modern communications infrastructure. This could clearly change if the carriers involved see fit to replace this infrastructure, but with their current debt loads, I think it will be challenging to say the least.

Taking a look at Verizon - Their most recent quarterly balance sheet shows:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bs?s=VZ

Assets: 230.461 Billion USD
Liabilities: 194.491 Billion USD.

This is not a lot of money, considering they have growing liabilities on a quarterly basis as part of their debt load (Long-term debt of $50 Billion).

A large fiber build would easily cost a few billion dollars and have lots of regulatory barriers. In my county it costs $200 to go over or under any public road (just for the permit). This starts to add up quickly.

I do think we need a new last-mile regime in many areas, be it more "fair" access similar to pole attach fees or the removal of local barriers to build this infrastructure.

Some school and other governments here in Michigan would love to sell/lease their excess fiber capacity to the private sector, but are worried about turning a profit when it was built with taxpayer funds and problems associated with that. I'd like to see these barriers removed. If it's there, lets make it of value. If the school system turns a profit on their enterprise, that's fine, it can lower the tax burden elsewhere.

Me? I'd be willing to pay $2500 to have Fiber built to my home. I might even pay more. At this point, my research continues on building the fiber and arranging my own easements for where to place it. I suspect you just need a few geeks that are willing to part with some extra $ for fiber bragging rights and one can build it.

- Jared

30

I agree that barrier of entry is what is stifling competition. Hardware,
cabling, even software is relatively inexpensive. Opening things up to
competition is what drives innovation in the field. I think a good example
of this is in the datacenter space. You usually have the same group of
suspects who provide internet access for the home/business delivering
service there at a fraction of what their retail price is. I know some
people will say its a different scenario and less complexity, but the
competition helps significantly. Do you think Verizon can sell ATM circuits
with ridiculously long contracts like they're used to? Hell no. If I call
up the carriers who service my local datacenter and they know they have
competitors who can deliver the same service they will price accordingly.

There's a unique sequence of events in each market but its all similar, and
all in all Verizon isnt the only one at fault. We need new regulation that
puts things back into perspective. Why is it that the big companies are
controlling what happens?

31

They have used the past decades or century to establish these assets.

- Jared

32

Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly does one share fiber? Isn't
it usually a closed loop between DWDM or Sonet nodes? It doesn't seem fair
to force the incumbents to start handing out lambdas and timeslots to their
competitors on the business side. I guess passive optical can be shared
depending on the details of the network, but that would still be much
different than sharing copper pairs.

33

of some sort?

34

You agree on a price per distance (e.g.: mile/foot/whatnot).

Lets say the cable costs $25k to install for the distance of 5000 feet.

That cable has 144 strands.

You need access to one strand. If you install it yourself, it will cost you $25k. If you share the pro-rata cost, it comes out around $174 for that strand. Lets say they mark it up 10x (profit, unused strands), would you pay $1740 for access? What does emergency restoration cost?

WDM/DWDM add cost to that strand, but also increase the capacity based on what your overall lit capacity may be on a route. There are various cwdm/dwdm systems that range the usual 10/20/40/80/100km ranges. You obviously need to do the math yourselves on this. You may find the ROI is better than you think...

- Jared

35

This is done in some places. eg: http://www.allband.org/

Some states place barriers to establishing a cooperative. Call your state PUC, there are good people there who will tell you about the unserved areas of the state. Your universal service fund tax has not made PSTN available to 100% of the US. The Allband service area just got the telephony services the rest of the country has enjoyed for decades.

There are also many independent phone companies nationwide. Some are comfortable in their areas, others are pushing to expand.

- Jared

36

>
>
>
> > I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their
fiber
> > which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the
end
> > of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of
> > course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and
replace
> > it with a unregulated one.
>
>
> Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly does one share fiber?
Isn't it usually a closed loop between DWDM or Sonet nodes? It doesn't
seem fair to force the incumbents to start handing out lambdas and
timeslots to their competitors on the business side. I guess passive
optical can be shared depending on the details of the network, but that
would still be much different than sharing copper pairs.

You agree on a price per distance (e.g.: mile/foot/whatnot).

Lets say the cable costs $25k to install for the distance of 5000 feet.

That cable has 144 strands.

You need access to one strand. If you install it yourself, it will cost
you $25k. If you share the pro-rata cost, it comes out around $174 for
that strand. Lets say they mark it up 10x (profit, unused strands), would
you pay $1740 for access? What does emergency restoration cost?

I agree, but what if it's not as simple as a bunch of strands in a
conduit. What if the plant is part of some sort of multiplexed network or
GPON solution. That's alot harder to share with another carrier . But yes
if it's simple stands of glass not plugged into anything in particular it
can be shared just like copper. Alot of the fiber plant out there isn't
used this way though.

WDM/DWDM add cost to that strand, but also increase the capacity based on
what your overall lit capacity may be on a route. There are various
cwdm/dwdm systems that range the usual 10/20/40/80/100km ranges. You
obviously need to do the math yourselves on this. You may find the ROI is
better than you think...

This is different than sharing cables. Any long distance carrier is still
free to purchase service from any LEC. The term "sharing fiber" seemed to
imply that it's freely transferable from one company to the next. It
largely isn't though, which is why I think the FCC hasn't touched it yet.

37

>
>
>
> > I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their
fiber
> > which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At
> > the
end
> > of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in
> > so of course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated
> > part and
replace
> > it with a unregulated one.
>
>
> Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly does one share fiber?
Isn't it usually a closed loop between DWDM or Sonet nodes? It
doesn't seem fair to force the incumbents to start handing out lambdas
and timeslots to their competitors on the business side. I guess
passive optical can be shared depending on the details of the network,
but that would still be much different than sharing copper pairs.

You agree on a price per distance (e.g.: mile/foot/whatnot).

Lets say the cable costs $25k to install for the distance of 5000 feet.

That cable has 144 strands.

You need access to one strand. If you install it yourself, it will
cost you $25k. If you share the pro-rata cost, it comes out around
$174 for that strand. Lets say they mark it up 10x (profit, unused
strands), would you pay $1740 for access? What does emergency restoration cost?

I agree, but what if it's not as simple as a bunch of strands in a conduit. What if the plant is part of some sort of multiplexed network or GPON solution. That's alot harder to share with another carrier . But yes if it's simple stands of glass not plugged into anything in particular it can be shared just like copper. Alot of the fiber plant out there isn't used this way though.

WDM/DWDM add cost to that strand, but also increase the capacity based
on what your overall lit capacity may be on a route. There are
various cwdm/dwdm systems that range the usual 10/20/40/80/100km
ranges. You obviously need to do the math yourselves on this. You
may find the ROI is better than you think...

This is different than sharing cables. Any long distance carrier is still free to purchase service from any LEC. The term "sharing fiber" seemed to imply that it's freely transferable from one company to the next. It largely isn't though, which is why I think the FCC hasn't touched it yet.

38

PON (e.g. FIOS) is similar to CWDM. The PO in PON is Passive Optical.
As in a glass prism-like device with no electronics. You remember
prisms from high school physics, right? Beam of white light into a
glass triangle and it splits off into a rainbow of colors. Well, with
CWDM the different color sources all being joined by the prism into a
beam of "white" light. And then split back out at the other end.

So, you share fiber by having one guy control one wavelength (color,
e.g. red) and another guy control another wavelength (e.g. blue). And
when you install it to a home or business, the "prism" sits up on the
phone pole and just splits out the one wavelength that is intended for
that location. You can't even stray out of your color: if you do, the
prism will bend the light in a way that misses the target beam.

Key is: it's just a piece of glass. A very finely machined piece of
glass to be sure, but no electronics.

Or, you could share at a different level: ethernet packets. Unbundle
the local ethernet service from the Internet service. $X for the local
ethernet service to the local concentration point at whatever
capacity, $Y for the Internet/tv/phone services connected at the
concentration point. Or buy some other service from another vendor at
the concentration point. But you don't get to double-dip the billing:
$X includes the cost to take the packets off at the concentration
point; the service vendor doesn't pay again.

Regards,
Bill Herrin

39

William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> writes:

That depends on the cost of recovering it. We're not talking about
salvage operators pulling cable, we're talking about highly trained
[sic] Verizon installers.

The last 4 pairs in use on that 3000 count cable will tend to linger a
long, long time before you can go remove it. Mostly you'll recover
short runs of low-count cable like the fifty-foot two and six pair
cables from the street to the house: maybe $3 in scrap. How many
dollars worth of time will the installer bill Verizon for recovering
it?

I bet there is some kind of creative accounting that they can use that
makes this totally worthwhile window dressing on their 10-Qs.

-r

40

I'm trying to do just that right now, actually. 55 s. market to
250 Stockton in San Jose. I dono if it's five thousand feet, but
it's not twice that. The cheapest fiber pair I can rent from
someone else I've found is $5K/month; the cheapest build-out
I've found is $150K, so even if I'm only using one pair in
that, if I can get money at anything like a reasonable interest
rate, if I plan on sticking around more than 5 years it makes
sense to lay new fiber. Which is weird, as this is probably
one of the densest masses of existing fiber in the world, going
from a 'center of the universe' data center to a minor data center.

Even the $5K/month rate isn't bad. If they asked for a third
of that, I'd bite even though I don't need that much capacity
quite yet.

The big problem here, I think, is that it's quite difficult to
figure out who has what fiber where, and even once you know who
owns it, to find out who to talk to at a company that might know
what 'dark fiber' is, much less know how much they might rent
it to you for. I spent several hours last month on the phone
with XO and I kept getting redirected to someone trying to sell me
a T1.

I've got other projects right now, but once I'm done with that,
I'm going to be spending a bunch of time pestering the PUC and
other people that might know who owns fiber between here and there.

As for equipment cost, in my corner of the world, I can get used
cisco 15540 systems for what I consider to be not very much money,
and 32 10G waves is plenty for what I'm doing. I mean, they eat
way more power than is required, and 10G/wave is not great these
days, but if I could sell a reasonable number of waves, even at a
whole order of magnitude below market, I'd be in good shape.

The whole project seems dramatically cheaper than lit services.
At quoted prices, 10G waves over the same distance cost about
1/2 what a full pair of dark fiber costs.

Now, the big problem with the build out? as far as I can tell, I've
gotta be a carrier to actually own fiber in the ground. From what I
understand, that's not out of the question for me, but it's
definitely a lot of work and red tape. There are, however,
companies that will do a build out for you (of course, charging you
for it up front) then they will lease you the fiber at a very
low yearly rate - right now, that looks like the second-best option,
where the best option is hunting down the owners of all the dead
bundles of fiber going into the meetme room. (250 Stockton
is ex-enron, it's got bundles coming in from MFN, quest, global crossing,
MCI, "enron broadband" xo and others. I'd bet money that if I had
the kind of access to the meetme at 55 s. Market that I have at
250 Stockton I could start shining light down empty strands and I'd
see some of it come out the other side.) But from the amount of time
it takes to just find someone at those companies that even knows
what dark fiber is? I think I might be better off putting in
the effort to do whatever regulatory red tape is required to
own fiber in the ground.

So yeah; really? in my corner of the world, the problem is the
same problem you see everywhere else in this industry.
Any useful information is guarded jealously. In this
case, where does the fiber run? I mean, I have pretty good
maps of the Santa Clara municipal fiber network; but the private
networks are impossible.