Law Proposes Fiber Conduit Be Laid With Highways

Heck, any new roads should have conduit laid beside them. The marginal cost of doing so is low, and it will make running fiber from point A to point B a snap.

Of course, owners of currnt fiber routes might insist that many routes don't need conduit to be laid. How like them.

It doesn't make sense for EVERY road to be conduited for backhaul capability
as far as local last mile service should the taxpayers be duplicating capacity that may already exist in the aerial or underground plant of an existing provider?
should we also require water and gas and steam lines under every road?
perhaps highspeed rail to every block?

Given that right now we can hardly afford to fix the roads we have and that new/improved highway projects have seen cost triple in the last 10-15 years due to all the EXTRA requirements, adding yet another unfunded public mandate with NO certain payback window unlikely to improve that situation.

Sinse public, mandated improvements/requirements are NEVER the cheapest way to get a task completed (in fact pretty much assure a high bid on that part of the project) suppose the end cost causes the lease cost of the public in conduit RoW to not be competetive with existing or even new privately built conduit within the same RoW or by alternete RoW to the same locations?

OR Suppose after being mandated to conduit every road and having invest billions upon billions on empty tubes other mediums (wireless, lightwave, quantum attachment, or something totally different) render most of it worthless?

At one point BPL was thought to likely be better than sliced bread, and some proposed that it be REQUIRED for all major powerlines. Those ideas now seem very foolish.

All that said, I'm no against universal broadband, and even some public investment in it.
But the very first thing we need is an actual public policy declaring the goals.
so far we have little knowledge of what exists, almost no knowledge of what are the best solution(s)*, and even less acknowledgement of the true scope and full cost of such a plan.
The stimulus broadband money wasn't spent so much to help broadband as it was to dump money into the economy and with broadband being in the buzz it was an easy sell.

Besides needing more better data from the survey of existing/available services, we need to carefully study in a total objective/non partisan way the results/plans vs rollouts/endresults of fiber and other" better" technologies.

That is, to evaluate every fiber project from the smallest muni to verizon's Fios both failures and sucesses to figure out did the end result match the original proposals, and what factors made them more or less sucessful.
FIOS would be a good example of a planned large widespread attempt (verizon originally expected to cover much of there then nationwide footprint) and as it progressed forced them to sell of much of their footprint to concentrate remaining funds within limited, high density areas of their remaining footprint (even that now seems to be a somewhat shaky effort)

What caused the change? new/improved wireless? (seems to be promoted as their way back in to abandoned teratory) lack of funding?
etc.

Most important, what role did all levels of goverment asssist discourage, damage or destroy the effort?

Can we reasonable change the barriers to allow, encourage a sucessful nationwide buildout by private companies without total reliance on the limited public dollar?

You are over-analyzing it. Are you trying to kill the idea? I don't think they do so much analysis for the roads themselves as what you are asking for. But photons are a much more efficient way to move information to people than roads are to move people to information.

The only figures you cite (below) are for additional lanes, which cost a lot. Your only evidence indicates that fiber would be a lot cheaper, and just the conduits cheaper still.

So you suggest extra hours of closure? Federal roads (which are really state projects with federal assitance, I doubt you'll find any federal only projects and if EVERY road that recieves ANY federal help, you and everyone else will be paying for conduit (and the costly federal supervison) up your driveway)
I'm not over analyzing, I'm suggesting that mechinism already exists and this legislation will apply it to the most basic road work WITHOUT thought or exemption, even if it makes no sense.

how many recent virgin territory federal highway project do you know of ? the last one I saw was Alsaka's "Bridge to nowhere"
Virtually every federal project is the takeover of a state road to improve or widen to federal standards or adding lanes to an existing Interstate/bypass roadway.

1. Conduit is only useless if you have cheap, super high capacity wireless links that can do the same thing. Such links don't exist now, and probably won't for awhile due to the laws of physics. FSO is too short range. 60-80GHz microwave is relatively short range and very expensive. Both of those techs max out around 2.5 Gbps if I remember correctly...you can do that on a single fiber pair.

2. If you're building roads, you are adding infrastructure. The cheapest time to add infrastructure in a greenfield situation (e.g. road-building) is when other infrastructure is being added anyway. Marginal cost vs. total cost. Adding conduit might cost $5-$10k per mile when done in conjunction with a road build. The road itself is a couple orders of magnitude higher than that...light rail tracks cost $1 million per mile to build and I'm betting that roads are comparable or more (please cite evidence if you want to prove me wrong).

Once the conduit is laid, pulling fiber through has a minimal additional cost, and will have lower maintenance costs than aerial strands. Make the conduit big enough and you can have multiple providers competing, each with their own fiber cables, because it wouldn't be all that expensive to do.

Contrast this to aerial installs or, worse, buried installs later on since no conduit is available. $20-$50k per mile, anyone? It's more expensive, even if the conduit is leased to the provider at X cents per foot per year, and as a result you'll get less interest in deploying anything (beyond copper/coax already there).

So, would a 1% increase in road building costs be worth a 30-50% decrease in communications infrastructure build costs? WOuld it be worth that decrease if it meant that another competitor to cable/telco provided service came into your area? What if that competitor paid for the conduit costs in the form of lease payments over a ten year period, and decreased telecom prices in the area by 20%?

You way under estimate federal highway costs which were 2.4 milllion per LANE mile in 2003. (this was adding a lane to an existing highway.
I'm watching 2 close by state projects which were bid around 1990 at $300k per lane mile (this is to add 1 lane each direction plus a legal shoulder and turn pockets as needed (6 locations)and all other current requirements, it just started construction this month at $24.5 million total (25% below engineer estimates due to the recession) that's $5.5 million for a 45MPH highway per lane mile.
Now Washington state HAS been allowing (that is buying the land a reserving a 10.-12 foot strip) RoW next to highway builds for fiber (and possible other uses) and has had good sucess in permitting companies to lay multiple ducts in return (besides lease fees) they provde one duct of the state DOT/state patrol (cameras, communcations and DOT IT data) and another for public access/needs purposes (ie schools library, state agency ,etc) needs without cost to the state.
So, yes, getting conduit in is good, the state/feds sinking money in to a hole(tube) in the ground, in the hope that "build it and they will come" works better than suggest it and THEY will build it.
On the current project they told verizon (now frontier) comcast and any other Exactly where the ROW will be and will/have provided each the chance to schedule bid and complete THEIR own conduit within that space
Because of the scope of the project ALL RoWs are being moved back from the roadway (everything from water to gas and electric, there will be NO manhole or digging allowed on the finished road)) from what I've seen so far comcast and frontier have put the longer haul plant underground and both still have local lines being moved to the new poles but at the first intersection (unfinished/barely started) the only airial thing left are the high tension power and CC local plant, guessing by the work on previous section of the road (a couple years ago) CC will also go underground for crossing the highway, local lines will continue along the new small (cable and phone) poles off the main/state RoW.

My point being that I think you greatly underestimate the cost of a FEDERAL contract to add conduit (how much 1 - 2" -conduit or 10- 6" ? remember once we decide to serve some, We (the public) MUST serve all equally) it's not just duct, it's vaults and access points and safety turnouts and signage and flagman and enforcement and????)
I just went through EVERY page of every blueprint on this »www.wsdot.wa.gov/project ··· 176thse/
and the detail seems insane, 1 0f the 35x sheets is where to place the bicycle detour route signs (since it is already a designated bicycle route you might think signs to direct people from the highway route on to the bicycle route would be enough, but apparently they must remove existing signs a DECLARE it a detour (which by the way requires it's own detour, flagger, and bypass route signage) and later remove the orange signs and replace the normal green and white ones.
As far as the RoW allowed they gave them 6 months for utility moving BEFORE the project began, now each or of "lane rental"
(lost lane usage from road users) costs $23,400 average (more during rush hour, less a night,( but add lighting and extra flagging operations is similar).
The Row is wide enough for all bidders to work offroad using a trencher before now or later, and avoids road and utiliy RoW conflicts.
I just think the presented legislation is ill defined and fails to recognize state planning, parallel roadways and other duplication situations.

Ill-defined, probably. But, once we figure out exactly what the specs will be, that's where we want to head.

I completely agree that costs will balloon if such a mandate has overblown gov't-grade specs. In response, I would say "leave it to the states" but in some states (including TX, my home state) leaving telecom regulations to the state government has meant that munis can't serve their own constituencies with services that compete with the telco/cableco duopoly's (sometimes poor) service.

Then again, if we're building in ducts that are large enough to be used by four or five private providers, in addition to a 48-strand cable laid by a public-sector entity, the private companies won't have a problem with it. Build minor roads with enough duct capacity to hold 6x 48-strand cables, and interstates with enough capacity for 6x 432-strand cables, and it may be a win-win (even though realistically, with DWDM and other fun technologies, you'll only ever use a handful of strands per provider).

Maryland did lay fiber with both new major highways and expressways (and improvements to same) under the two previous governors (both Parris Glendenning and Robert Erlich) under a contract for state-owned backbone (primarily for e-rate Internet with Level 3) - that is an example that makes sense (a state-by state, and where done, statewide, decision). Amazingly, VZ (the incumbent ILEC for the entire state, which also has a contract for connectivity with the state government) did not quibble about the deal; therefore, if handled right, that dog need not bark.

Laying utilities in the roadway, particularly ones where any future relocation costs are on the state DOT is not a zero sum game where only the installation costs are included. The utilities in the corridor greatly complicate future construction, emergency repairs and dozens of other problems including the installation of additional utilities. DOTs simply aren't staffed to design and install conduit systems that would be viable to telecommunication uses. Lets leave the telecommunication to the telecom companies instead of pouring additional costs into highways systems that are already severely underfunded.

More than 50% of the bridges in the US are considered structurally insufficient and close to 1 in 4 bridges are considered at risk of collapse. We have millions of miles of freeways, highways and other routes in serious need of repair and insufficient funds to repair them and people want to add to the complexity and cost with no clear benefit? There are states and county's in this country actively discussing the deliberate conversion of paved roads to dirt roads because they do not have the funding to maintain them.

We also have social security, welfare and Medicare. We also have the military.

Heck, with the few million dollars that are responsible for the recent FAA shutdown, counting $15k per mile marginal cost for conduit when roads are built (versus much more than that if you have to, as you said, add utilities later), you could add one thousand miles of conduit to areas that would see better telecom as a result...which could very well translate into better economic conditions (why outsource to India when you can outsource to people with English as their first language, with all the marketing benefits that that provides?) for the area served.

Oh, and I'm talking about $16 million in this case. Compared with the $3,456,000 million federal budget, it's a drop in a five-gallon bucket...or maybe my orders of magnitude are off and it's a drop in a 55-gallon drum.

Let me be clear: the conduit, once laid, would be leased to any private entity that comes along on a cost-recovery basis. Recovery might take ten years, or it might take five, depending on whether one provider puts their fiber in the conduit or three...and as long as governments selling the leases don't get greedy it will be more efficient monetarily for providers to use existing conduit rather than digging their own, so you have less headaches/costs due to private-sector telecom building, more providers along a given route, and thus lower bandwidth prices across the board.

Let's say there was conduit between my city of 12,000 and a carrier hotel 70 miles away. The city has a fiber pair all the way down the conduit, and uses it to interconnect with a 10 Gbps educational network, as well as provide itself with 1 Gbps of general purpose bandwidth, e.g. for telemedecine at the local hospital. Upkeep on those circuits would probably be more than the ~$1600 they're paying Time Warner Cable now for a 20 Mbit fiber circuit, because that's okay since the economic/productivity benefits of the new system would outweigh the costs.

Now factor in all that space left over in the conduit. A semi-local cable overbuilder decides to pull a fiber cable through to that town and starts offering ISP services to residents in town, as well as bandwidth to a local wireless ISP. At that point, bandwidth costs are maybe 2-10x what you'd find in a carrier hotel 70 miles away, rather than 10x-50x. The wireless ISP takes the cheap bandwidth locally instead of using a 30-mile wireless link to haul to a cheaper location, increasing reliability and performance to their subscribers.

The cable overbuilder, building on successes in other markets as a cellular backhaul provider, starts offering fiber-to-the-tower in the local area (ducts will help with this). Another backhaul company (who knows maybe it's Zayo Networks) jumps into the market as well due to relatively low costs, driving down the price of cellular backhaul bandwidth to the point that the town bubbles up the list for cell companies' LTE builds. Verizon decides to build out LTE in the area in a year rather than farming it out to someone else who will take far longer. Sprint comes in with LTE as well, and CricKet finally pushes more than a single T1 to their towers. Service quality improves on the consumer and machine-to-machine sides, and everyone benefits.

Dreaming? Sure. However if the infrastructure doesn't exist, this can't happen, or will take much longer to occur. Publicly-owned conduit that runs in intelligent locations (roads are good for this) and which can be leased by multiple providers isn't a terribly expensive proposition and can push further into the twenty-first century, even if we are a lot more spread out than, say, South Korea.

But too sensible for the government to do. It'll be a beaurcratic nightmare.

Some how conduits will end up being some horrible creation. Who knows who will take advantage of a law like that and twist it into some money drain. Many things should be left the private sector this being one of them. Easy enough to put conduit down the side of a highway in fact not even a factor in laying cables of any kind.

Anyway why not add $$$ more if you can't pay for it anyway.

we aren't going broke. we just have our money going into things that don't help us make money.... like defense.

The main cost of fibre is actually laying it, this solves that problem. The Fibre will be used by someone eventually, especially in this day and age.

Any road work should include conduit - and Utilities should be forced (with a reasonable timeframe) to move ALL services underground after... If you look at the US with all the above ground wiring and compare it to countries like Germany, France, etc... it still looks like the wild wild west here... It can't be cost efficient either to have crews out fixing things after every strong storm and snowstorm if you look at a 10/20/30 year cost to operate the cable/power distribution networks...

Take the case of electrical undergrounding it costs 5-12 times as much as an above ground plant to build and has a 30-40% lower lifespan. repairs and rebuilds are similarly expensive. You can't really compare the US to western europe as so much of the infrastructure was rebuilt after after WWII (a lot of which was on our dime BTW) the tax and other Gov't policies greatly influance the methods, and thegeographic size and population density makes it practical and the return on the investment is appropreate (energy costs in europe are many times what most americans pay)

Isn't alot of stuff in the Northern part of the US above ground to get to it easily during the winter??

I cant think that digging through frozen ground and three feet of snow would be fun when trying to fix a problem.

Then Japan makes the US look good in terms of underground wiring. I don't know if there is a single buried cable in Tokyo, every utility pole looks like a mutant rat's nest.

Think back...back...back a few years...the last time this was tried we had dark fiber to nowhere virtually everywhere you looked and much of that fiber has yet to be utilized to this day...apparently learning from ones mistakes isn't something the Dems are capable of...

very true in this case. Also who is going to maintain this project? the FCC? LMAO! Yah that's a good laugh there. DOT isn't going to do it. It's a ticking time bomb waiting to go off.

We don't need this. If a company wants to put in their own fiber and such let them pay for it.

That is why I said state-by-state; not nationally. One-size fits-all hasn't worked since the formation of the original Bell System (and even then, there were still pockets where Mother Bell refused to go). Even today, there are actually areas that are determined to stay below the viability threshold for broadband in terms of population by deliberately zoning for low-density - how do you deal with that? (In short, they are aware of the benefits of broadband and the population-viability requirements to entice it - yet are voting Heck NO on planning commissions.) A *free lunch* is NEVER free - the tab will, at some point, come due.

The problem isn't that laying fiber with highways is a bad idea. It is that this does nothing for the FTTH expansion. There is no shortage of long distance fiber for backbones and trunks. The shortage is in residential runs and this law does nothing to solve that issue.

The people pushing this bill fail to mention the above. They are marketing this bill as facilitating FTTH and it isn't that at all.

There's plenty of fiber that already criss-crosses the country. It is the lack of fiber to the individual buildings that is the issue.

Besides, most fiber is laid by private companies. Let them pay the costs of this endeavor. Why do we taxpayers have to be on the hook?

Because only dense urban areas will ever get it if left to private companies. It should be a national policy endeavor to ensure that broadband internet is available everywhere just like electricity is.

Even if we discount the constitutional issues here, building one highway out to the middle of nowhere and running fiber next to it won't do a thing to bring connectivity to any houses that might be in small towns along the route.

The issue is individual states and localities - not every state is well-provisioned. Even Maryland, which did this under two governors (and despite a balanced-budget requirement in the state constitution!) has its connectivity holes (primarily in heavily-rural (still) southern and western Maryland (these are also areas with few major highways, even of the divided, as opposed to expressway or Interstate-grade, type).

By the way - the two governors were Parris Glendenning and Robert Ehrlich - a Democrat and Republican, respectively.

But even this idea is not going to help bring connectivity to all of our state. I can somewhat understand the frustration because Verizon has written off all counties outside of Montgomery, PG, Howard, Charles, Anne Arundel and Harford for FIOS.

And don't forget this... when was the last time we actually built any new major highways here? And no, the why am I a toll road ICC doesn't count.

What does laying fiber in the highway right-of-way have to do with highway construction? The cables don't run under the pavement except when they cross on/off ramps.

Most federal highways already have fiber optics cables that follow along the edges of their right-of-way, as do railroad lines.

What do they use to bury fiber optic cable anyway, a ditch witch?

use the drainage system being it is already in place and simply drilling fasteners to wall would be simple..

Yea because there is never sand in drainage water. Imagine a nice sandblasting every few days. I'm sure that wouldn't damage the cable at all.

imagine the wind blowing against every day i am sure there is no sand blowing against it.

imagine the change in weather everyday i am sure that does not happen either.

we can both play the game and be smart asses..

Is there a single-source for info on the amount of 'dark fiber' already in-place? All of which was subsidized in some way by gov't (us) (indirectly or directly). In my area in Central Calif, there is dark & not fiber running along the railroad right-of-ways, as well as some major roadways buried 10-15 yrs ago.

From a 2008 article: "Throughout the 1990s, telecom companies, in anticipation of continued bandwidth growth resulting from the dot-com bubble, laid fiber in many key market segments. They were hoping to cash in on future increased bandwidth needs resulting from (then unknown) future services. After the dot-com crash in 2001, many of the companies owning dark fiber networks filed for bankruptcy protection, resulting in a huge unused asset in the United States."

The big corporations who will ultimately benefit most from this must agree to network neutrality once and for all.

they should limit it to areas where there's a real need to build this kind of infrastructure immediately.

These are highway projects and not FTTH. Do private companies really have a problem with running fiber in areas like this without this government subsidy?

The Problem isn't an issue of profitability, its pure ROI. That's why the private sector is happy with it's backhauls the way they are. Instead of increasing capacity which costs money they can claim a lack of capacity and implement caps.

Guess which one earns them more $$$. All they need to do is keep running commercials about super ultra high speed internet that will never be deployed close to you and people will believe we are making progress instead of falling behind.

the northeast is C R A W L I N G with fiber.. probably more fiber miles than ants crawling around... build the fiber WHERE it's needed.. namely outside the northeast! start building out POPs goiging westward through the mid-west and focusing southwest... then Qwest cant' complain when a competitor bangs on their doorstep saying: We'd like to deploy last mile which you've neglected to build for your customers as an incumbent telecom. oh, NO! you can't do that... we need a "level" playing field full of restrictions first... BAH, screw them.. oh yeah, Qwest is now Century-Tel... look how the merger did nothing to bring fiber to the masses..

One day I'd like to see my speed tests actually work at 100% capacity to ALL USA STATE isps.

Line it with new rails, subterranean power grid. Kill three birds with one stone. Of course, in the mid-west they could include Canals in this build out that will connect the Mississippi to the Colorado River.