wierdo
join:2001-02-16
Tulsa, OK
 ·Future Nine Corpor..
·Teliax VOIP
| Re: My Take on Lightspeed Very few people around here even have sprinkler systems, and those that do need to keep them out of the utility RoW 
BTW, what's the going rate on a GPON splitter these days, if you know?
I'm still in favor of the active electronics in the field capable of bringing 400Mbps unshared to each home, but that's mainly because I'm a bandwidth whore and a firm believer that this whole asymmetric speed thing is bad for everyone. Do a little uploading, and unless you own a router doing QoS, your download speed suffers immensely due to the increased RTT.
Of course, that architecture isn't cheap..I priced it out at about 16MM to serve the entirety of a spread out city of a little under 70,000 including fiber, cabinets with A/C, big switches, fiber converters, an IPTV headend, and STBs. That said, it is quite literally scalable up to the current limits of fiber technology, being able to bring 10Gig circuits across town with ease.
The only problem is the same that SBC has and will be continuing..after the power is out a couple of hours, there goes the cable and internet. It's hard to cram all the equipment into 22U, much less battery plant that will last more than 4 hours, after all. 
That said, going with PON right now isn't at all stupid, as the standards are constantly evolving, and it probably won't be long until they get OC-192 on the downstream and OC-48 on the upstream, and anyone with a PON network can just change out a little hardware and be operating at those speeds, even without a change of existing customer hardware if they use WDM. I just have a philisophical problem with providing what I consider to be substandard asymmetric service, so if I was going to do such a thing, I'd do it right, since it'd be profitable doing it "properly" anyway.
With bandwidth prices what they are, if you can cut out the local loop, it's not even unaffordable to provide 10Mbps symmetrical at $40/mo or less for a small outfit, and it's easily affordable for someone doing a deployment on the scale of Verizon or SBC.
Back down to planet Earth, I think it's immensely stupid to buy a bunch of active electronics you're going to can shortly anyway. VDSL isn't going anywhere. It turns out I'm a mere 1kft from an RT, and the best I can get is around 4Mbps thanks to interference. If people have the usual DSL problems with their TV service, they'll drop it like a hot potato. People really have a problem when their DVR doesn't record their show because the "cable" was out. |
