I think the big push to get the fcc to define broadband is highly based
on the rus/ntia setting definitions of what broadband is. If any anyone
has been fallowing the rus/ntia they are the one handing out all the
stimulus infrastructure grant loan money. So there are a lot of
political reasons to make the definition of broadband a bit slower than
one would think. I guess it doesn't hurt that the larger lec's with the
older infrastructure are shelling out the money to lobby to make sure
the definition stays as low as can be. They don't want to see the gov
funding there competition. Just my 2 cents.
-carlos
If it's about stimulus money, I'm in favor of saying that broadband implies fiber to the home. That would provide all sorts of stimuli to the economy - infrastructure, equipment sales, jobs digging ditches, and so on. I could pretty quickly argue myself into suggesting special favors for deployment of DNSSEC, multicast, and IPv6. As in, use the stimulus money to propel a leap forward, not just waste it.
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to
the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to
homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to
the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to
homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS
2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
I have fiber to the home. I can't imagine going back to "cable
modems" now. eww..
Joel Esler wrote:
I have fiber to the home. I can't imagine going back to "cable
modems" now. eww..
I couldn't imagine leaving my VDSL2. I've seen broadband sent to the house via fiber, coax, and copper. I've seen them all done well, and I've seen them all done poorly. All are capable of hitting >50mb/s.
I personally like copper for the splice and cost on drops as well as cost of NID/CPE.
Coax has a lot of bandwidth, but requires you to get as close as you would with copper to do it right and has other issues.
Fiber is the fastest and can run off fewer remote systems, but it has higher costs and maintenance issues.
I would probably run fiber in a densely populated area. In rural America, I would stick with copper off 1.5 mile short loop remotes. A lot depends on what the bandwidth is for. Most of the telco's I work with rarely have a corporate customer paying for more than 10mb/s.
Jack
Roy wrote:
The problem that the FCC faces is making a realistic definition that can apply to the whole US and not just cities. How does fiber (home or curb) figure in the rural sections of the country?
It figures in nicely, thank you. Of course, our definition of curb might be 1.5 miles further than your definition. 
2 miles is the cutoff for > 10mb/s reliability, but to deal with future stuff, most of my telco customers have dropped it down to 1.5 miles. This also suited them for handling smaller remote systems with 48 ports and shifting from gr303 to SIP/MGCP, some with gr303 translators at the home office.
Our highest supported circuits currently top at 100/50, but customers don't need them, and the telco's aren't pushing video down them. We honestly hope Internet video will continue to grow and we'll just shift into higher Internet bandwidth and stick with transport. We're good at transport.
Jack
not to mention all the lightning-blasted-routers that will be prevented by
FTTH 
even with several layers of protection I still accumulate about one
dead interface of some sort each year on my very rural T-1...
We're way past the time in which broadband meant more bits than baud, huh? Was it the other way around? I forget...
Anyway:
"Broadband" could be defined as a duplex channel that is some positive multiple of the BW needed to carry the lowest resolution, full-power, public broadcast TV channel currently permitted by FCC regulation.
As technology and regulation changes, we'd always have a definition of "broadband" that is implementation independent, technology agnostic, and easy to grasp for most people.
David Hiers
CCIE (R/S, V), CISSP
ADP Dealer Services
2525 SW 1st Ave.
Suite 300W
Portland, OR 97201
o: 503-205-4467
f: 503-402-3277
I'm sure I remember hearing from someone that the timelines for disbursement of stimulus money were tight enough that many people expected much of the money to remain unspent.
Does narrowing the scope of the funding to mandate fibre have the effect of funding more and better infrastructure, or will it simply result in less money being made available? Does it matter?
The push to dumb down the definition is not only to benefit the legacy providers. It also benefits the politicians. A lower standard means that a greater quantity of citizens can be deemed to have been given broadband. The politicians will claim that they have served more Americans...
The hard underlying issue is cost-justifying expensive OSP builds in low-density areas. Yes, aerial construction is cheaper than UG. But, it is still hard to build a business case for providing service in a low-density area, especially as an over-builder. (And any terrestrial provider is essentially an over-builder now that DBS tv service is so pervasive.) One cannot count on ~100% penetration, as was possible when there was only one game in town.
I don't know if we can ever cost-justify bringing *real* broadband (un-capped FE, GigE, fiber) service to the hinterland. Many of the countries with higher speed service that we compare ourselves against (e.g. S.Korea) are able to build at a very low price point because they have a very high percentage of MDUs. MDU builds are comparatively low cost. Urban MDU, where you can piggy-back on an existing building-entrance conduit are even cheaper.
This is like farm subsidy or foreign aid. The tax payer is asked to subsidize bringing the benefits of modern urban/suburban technology to the middle of nowhere. However, if the program succeeds in increasing broadband penetration (whatever broadband is) perhaps it will have the beneficial effect of making the nation more homogeneous and harmonious.
CON: active devices in the OSP.
jim deleskie wrote:
I agree we should all be telling the FCC that broadband is fiber to
the home. If we spend all kinds of $$ to build a 1.5M/s connection to
homes, it's outdated before we even finish.
I disagree. I much prefer fiber to the curb with copper to the home. Of course, I haven't had a need for 100mb/s to the house which I can do on copper, much less need for gigabit.
Pro's for copper from curb:
1) power over copper for POTS
2) Majority of cuts occur on customer drops and copper is more resilient to splicing by any monkey.
Jack
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They have a saying in politics to the effect that "the perfect is the enemy
of the good." This is a pretty good illustration. We have the opportunity to
improve connectivity in rural America through the wise expenditure of
taxpayer funding, and it's best not to squander it by insisting on top-shelf
fiber or nothing at all. Let's push the fiber a little deeper, and bridge
the last 20,000 feet with something that won't be too expensive to replace
in 3-5 years. The budget ($7B) just isn't there to give every barn some nice
GigE fiber, even though it would make the cows happy.
Richard Bennett
I would argue that "broadband" is the upper X percentile of bandwidth
options available to residential users. For instance, something like
Verizon FiOS would be broadband while a 7 Mbps cable wouldn't.
Jeff
Having worked for rather large MSO in past I can tell you the issue
with this that the cost man power and engineering time to go back and
replace today with 3-5 forward technology is mostly like more then
delta between copper and fiber today.
-jim
Broadband stimulus money = $7,200,000,000
Housing units in USA (2000) = 115,904,641
Stimulus money per housing unit = $62.12 one-time
What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money?
Or for rural housing units (2000) = 25,938,698
Stimulus money per rural housing unit = $277.58 one-time
What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money in a rural build-out?
How much will fiber to the home cost in a rural area?
heh. I've seen 3 different plans for FTTH in 3 different telco's; different engineering firms. All 3 had active devices in the OSP. Apparently they couldn't justify putting more fiber in all the way back to the office.
Don't get me wrong. I've heard wonderful drawn out arguments concerning vendors that failed to properly handle Oklahoma summers or draw too much power.
Brings up new PRO: active devices in the OSP providing longhaul redundancy on fiber rings
Another PRO: simple, inexpensive NID
Jack
Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
Sean Donelan wrote:
Stimulus money per rural housing unit = $277.58 one-time
What definition of "broadband" can you achieve for that amount of money in a rural build-out?
How much will fiber to the home cost in a rural area?
For 1-2k customers in small rural towns I've been hearing numbers in the millions of dollars without FTTH. FTTH projects exceeded all DSL in price and had higher cost NIDs. There are also more engineering details that must be considered in FTTH (and standard telco engineering firms sometimes screw up on it; running the bill up more) to cover voice concerns.
And while everyone is arguing about this, I'll let you know right now it is much MUCH harder to get money when putting copper in than fiber; including many of the different types of loans. I've seen people screwed over because of the push to fiber which has often made it cost prohibitive for them to get service and strained the telco finances reducing their overall ability to support service.
So, yeah. I'd be happy if everyone would back down and quit pushing FTTH so hard and support sound, reliable, inexpensive FTTC technologies. They both have their place. Just for the record, I still have over 50% of my customer base in dialup. Of course, 98% of those dialups are in AT&T territory. My ILEC/CLEC customers have done well in providing DSL to a majority of their customers. They have even increased bandwidth where they can and tariffs allow. I hope to see AT&T expand further out than 3 miles from the CO, upgrading some of their double ended carrier and putting in DSL capable remotes. Given they probably can't recover costs on some of the existing plant, it is doubtful they'll put in more fiber than necessary.
Jack
Jack Bates wrote:
Roy wrote:
The problem that the FCC faces is making a realistic definition that
can apply to the whole US and not just cities.
If I'm reading this question right, the issue is that Congress
appropriated some pork for "rural broadband" and now it's up to the FCC
to guess what Congress intended that to mean so they can determine which
applicants will be allowed to feed at the public trough.
I'd say that most laymen currently consider "broadband" to be an
always-on service at 1Mb/s or faster, regardless of the particular
technology used. FTTH sounds attractive, but there's just not enough
pork to actually do it for a non-trivial number of rural homes; it's
barely feasible for (sub)urban homes. FTTC is the only realistic
option, with the last mile being either existing copper or existing
coax. The "curb" has a slightly different meaning in a rural area, of
course, but that doesn't need to be specified in the definition anyway.
How does fiber (home or curb) figure in the rural sections of the
country?
It figures in nicely, thank you. Of course, our definition of curb
might be 1.5 miles further than your definition.
2 miles is the cutoff for > 10mb/s reliability, but to deal with
future stuff, most of my telco customers have dropped it down to 1.5
miles.
My ILEC's techs claim they can run VDSL2 several miles but lose about
1Mb/s per 1000ft from the head end. Luckily I'm about 1500ft from mine,
and my line tested out at ~58Mb/s -- though they'll only sell me 10Mb/s
of that for data and 25Mb/s of it for TV. It's amazing how far we've
come in the last two decades since I got my first 2400bps modem.
If VDSL2 can't go far enough for rural areas and/or would require more
remote units than is feasible, I'd say that ADSL is fast enough that it
should also qualify. Supporting triple-play should not be a
requirement, IMHO, as customers can always use DBS for TV and most
people who claim to have "broadband" today don't have or can't get
triple-play. I wouldn't go as far as accepting ISDN/IDSL, though, if
anyone is even still selling that junk.
S
Fred,
I picked Aroostook, Washington, and Lincoln counties for a 4g wireless
with backhaul infrastructure proposal. A wireline infrastructure
proposal for these counties (BIP) would, for some arbitrary amount of
capital expense, serve some of the population in towns, but leave the
non-in-town populations with no change in infrastructure. I thought
about adding a western (mountainous) county to the mix, but for a
proof-of-concept those three are representative of most of rural Maine.
All qualify as "rural remote", being more than 50 miles from a city of
20,000, or a suburban area of 50,000 (USDA RUS definition of "rural
remote"). Not many of either of those in Maine anyway.
As I wrote yesterday, "triple play" simply hasn't sold "broadband"
(source: USDA stats and Maine ISP experience), therefore uptake and
post-stimulus subscriber retention are wicked important. The BTOP
vehicle provides two additional non-infrastructure grant opportunities,
for "public computer centers" and for "sustainable broadband adoption",
so as I wrote those I attempted to make best use of link properties and
to-the-centers (not home, or curb) and whatever "sustainable" might mean
and the available statutory purposes and therefore services above link
to propose something innovative.
My guess (its in my proposal so I guess its my proposal writing money
bet) is that "rural broadband" means something other than IPv4 DHCP
provisioned, fat but flaky pipes allowing access to asymmetric content.
That works in the suburban and urban markets, but its failed, according
to the USDA and my Maine ISP competitors, in rural USA and Maine.
While I share (other hat, we signed our first zone last year and our
second zone will be signed this year) the "suggesting special favors for
deployment of DNSSEC" discussion with myself, I think this misses the
gambled mandatory-to-implement-feature (see "gamble", above) of
locality. {Packet|Connection} users in rural areas have some requirement
more pressing than parity of access to the service model that meets the
requirements of non-rural {Packet|Connection} users.
Eric
Fred Baker wrote: