About 20% of new home construction is owner-financed ("Custom" homes). The builder will add essentially any "commercially reasonable" options the owner is willing to pay for. But even the rich can't fix broadband access beyond their property line.
About 80% of new home construction is builder-financed ("Tract" or "Spec" homes). Builders have a fixed menu of construction options. A "Smart Home" seems to mean a Ring doorbell and Nest thermostat. The neighborhood infrastructure is usually the minimum required by building code. In many states, there is essentially no minimum outside of city limits.
About 1% is Ultra-Rich home construction. As one builder described it "The Laws of Physics don't apply to these homes."
I looked up the top 10 broadband network provider CEO's home addresses (don't worry, I'm not posting a list of CEO home addresses). Some have several houses, so I chose one of their residential addresses near their corporate HQ -- assuming Return-to-Office means they commute to their corporate HQ.
Eight out of the top 10 broadband CEO's homes had 10 Gbps service available, and all had at least 1 Gbps service available at the home address nearest their HQ according to the FCC Broadband Map. I didn't check apparent secondary/vacation homes.
When I built my house a few years ago I put a 0 entry hand hole with 2" conduit in the ROW in front and pulled 96 SM into the basement. It takes a little convincing to get the providers to connect out there instead of running their own lines into my house but so far so good.
From "Sean Donelan" <sean@donelan.com>
To nanog@nanog.org
Date 12/27/2024 1:29:00 PM
Subject Re: New home builders without wires
In USA, the provider DEMARC used to be at the building wall (i.e. 12-inches minimum point of entry inside the building). Fiber providers sometimes install the ONT inside the wiring structured infrastructure cabinet instead on the building outside wall now.
In many other countries, the DEMARC is at the ROW/property line. Comparing broadband techniques between countries. The builder/owner is responsible for construction between the ROW/property line and the building.
But if the neighborhood builder/developer has no broadband providers (coax, telco or fiber) in the ROW, it doesn't matter.
In OECD broadband statistics, USA ranks 15th out of 36 countries. France and South Korea are #1 and #2.
I just wish I had the hook up at my local ISP (Armstrong). They are currently running fiber to replace their Coax infrastructure, but they havenāt done it down my street yet. I wish they would!
The limitations of the FCC Broadband map, if you are in the Top 10 (not percent, the Top 10) wealthest people in the USA, it doesn't apply to reality. Why the builder said "The Laws of Physic don't apply."
Bill Gates, former Microsoft CEO, residential address (again, not listing his address, even though everyone knows where he lived)
No broadband fiber available
DSL/Cable max 1.2 Gbps down / 35 Mbps up
Satellite broadband available
I have no idea what network access Mr. Gates has at home. I wouldn't be surprised if Mr. Gates has OC/SONET special access service which doesn't show up in the FCC data. If you are in the Top 10, laws of physics don't apply to home construction
For everyone else, like my friend's new house, the infrastructure is not there.
I'm not personal friends with any multi-billionaires, and I don't get invited to parties at multi-billionaire mega-mansions. So I don't have first-hand experience with multi-billionaire home construction.
This thread began with my friends new tract-home subdivision construction (developer-financed), which only has 5G wireless broadband. No cable, no telco, no fiber.
According to Loudoun County, VA; in order to qualify for NTIA BEAD grant subsidies, residential addresses can't have ANY wired broadband service (cable or fiber). Apparently the rural (non-bell) telco serving the area ceased business in 2021.
ISPs aren't sharing NTIA BEAD grant money with property developers for pre-construction ROW preparation. Electric companies can qualify for
pre-construction "Make-Ready" funds for utility poles.
I don't know the details of construction business money arrangements or if someone is misunderstanding NTIA's BEAD rules.
If you are not rich enough to build a custom home, 70% of new home construction are tract homes. Your buying options are what the developer negotiated or didn't negotiate. When I went down the rabbit-hole doing my own research trying to understand what weird business reason why my friend's brand-new house didn't have broadband, I didn't look at apartments or multi-tenant construction.
Uhm. Do you realize that cable is asymetric, with less than 35 Mbps upstream, and marketing bandwidth numbers aren't real? Mega-mansions like the Gates estate are like small hotels, and sometimes have parties (charity events) with over 200 people, and corporate events with over 500 people. The "home" was small enterprise in itself.
When I worked at an ISP in California, we had a few multi-billionaire customers, and several multi-millionaire customers. They had dedicated internet access (DIA) and special access circuits. Most had an "IT guy" who took care of it. They didn't wait for a field service appointment
between 8am-5pm, their IT Guy did the waiting
Unlike some celebrity customers, the really, really rich customers were nice to the customer service folks.
To be fair to the HFC operators, if you've got a high split deployed, 100+Mbps upstream numbers are now realistic and upwards of 500Mbps is possible, though I have yet to see a practical deployment do it.
Likewise, if you've got lots of usable RF bandwidth and are willing to pay to pack DOCSIS 4 carriers in there, you can get like 20Gbps per node of usable downstream bandwidth. Even a fairly large node can statistically deliver multi-gig resi service at that point.
I've heard some of the cable MSOs are looking to retire linear OpenCable type video and move to multicast over DOCSIS to make the latter happen. The former is a lot harder obviously and requires field work including potentially changing out things at or even inside customer prem.
But yeah, I'm of the impression that anything we'd colloquially call a "mansion" (which is much bigger than what the real estate agents would call one) is probably going to have dedicated service of some sort. The same goes for larger hotels, though smaller (and low-rate) ones usually just go with small-business consumer access mechanisms.
I'm not worried about the 400 mega-billionaires. If a certain mega-billionaire wants to build a company town in Brownsville Texas with ZERO terrestrial communication alternatives according to the FCC Broadband Map (no cable, no fiber, not even 5G cellular fixed wireless), you better like Starlink.
Ignoring the top 1%, and even the top 20% who build (owner-financed) custom homes.
I'm still wondering, for the 70% of new tract home construction, are ISPs not interested in greenfield construction anymore? Greenfield construction used to be much cheaper than brownfield development projects later. I assume some ISP business finance reason I don't understand. 5G fixed wireless is that good now? Or that cheap now?
In our area of Canada, the electrical company has a "shared trench"
agreement, where ISPs (who have done the paperwork
and have elected to get involved in X project in a Y subdivision) have
access to put their own conduit in while the trenches are dug for
electrical, or they can pay the same contractor who does the electrical work
to also put in conduit to their own specs / connected to their ISP system.
Since it's usually done for greenfield and a shared build, the costs can be
lower even when you consider the fact that the electrical company's
subcontractors are often a lot more expensive per hour / bureaucratic than
for the in-house ISP crews.
I would assume that that model is done in most places, but definitely cannot
guarantee. There are some developers who may be doing their electrical
separate from the electrical company before turning it over, so they may
choose not to get involved in such agreements to save time/money.
