Tech industry looks to broadband for salvation

The poor rbocs claim the stiffled broadband deployment issue is because they can't expect to make the largest amount of money possible from new installs and upgrades.

Waah this goes back to the fact that dsl technology was stiffled for 20 years before the 1996 telecommunications act opened the doors to clec's and wildcatters looking to provide affordable bandwidth.

Verizon cleared 29 billion dollars in the 1st quarter of 2001 alone. If we really want expansion in this market we need to give the infrastructure back to the people who financed it in the first place. That's right the taxpayers. No ILEC deserves to have this stranglehold on development and deployment and until we wise up and get rid of the monopolies in America we are going to be chasing our tails waiting for MaBell to make it easier for us.

If the high tech industry wants the taxpayer to pay for broadband infrastructure, then like our highways and streets it should be owned and maintained by the taxpayers, not the telecommunication industry.

Go Tacoma! Go Click! Network!

I do not see how this kind of initiative will go anywhere if it's just a government subsidy of the status quo (more coax, more ill-conceived copper DSL).

If the feds really want to issue a mandate, it should be for ubiquitous fiber deployment. And I think the government should lay underground conduit to absolutely every location: eliminate all overhead wiring in the cities where it remains, and provide sufficient underground capacity for competitive utility services over the next 30+ years.

This would be more expensive than the Apollo space program so it too won't fly. But there is more justification for it from the long-term government point of view than simply propping up cable and RBOC companies. Do it right, and there will be much less need for digging up streets in decades to come (pave the roads once instead of every few years following a crazy-quilt series of street digs). And with all utility infrastructure underground, the country's strategic interests are served: it's much more difficult to destroy underground electric/telecom cabling in a war or terrorist situation.

In my suggested scenario, each company would lease conduit space from the government (at the state level, with the state providing fee income to the cities/towns), and install its own cables.

A couple of details which need to be figured out: where does the other end of the cables go? What about tower rights for wireless systems, and how are they interconnected to the fiber infrastructure (if at all)?

I just don't think the federal government is going to do anything at all about broadband deployment other than re-iterate its laissez-faire approach. In fact I would hazard a guess that they'll even back away from the deployment schedule set up in an unrelated initiative for HDTV (a 10-year migration scheduled in 1996 which is clearly falling behind schedule, and which requires government help if the system is to be kept running at all).

To put a $ figure on rich's post. My understanding is the cost of FTTH is ~$1,500US. These are old numbers and assume a fairly low take rate. There are about 100 million US households. So to deliver FTTH the first mile cost is $150 billion. Not chump change but not an insurmountable amount. Other infrastructure will of course need to be upgraded but that is already working well in a competitive marketplace.

I share rich's concern that after investing in DSL or cable modems we will have to deal with yet another legacy technology that will need to be amortized for 20 years before FTTH is really deployed.

Not to invite a flame war but the cost to deploy FTTH is the same order of magnitude as the missile defense shield. I know which one I'd rather invest in!

a better cost number for fiber is roughly $15 per foot if on a pole and $90 per foot if in a trench.

in my town, it would cost roughly $10 million to deploy fiber for 5000 houses which means, each house would need to contribute roughly $2000 to cover deployment costs. Amortized over 10 years and it is $200 per year or $17 per month. I do not consider this an unreasonable burden.

if you want fiber to the home, it's cheap enough that one could do it as a local bond issue. Get involved in town/city government and make it happen!

BTW, It would be interesting to compare the costs of universal fiber to the home against the amount of money organizations have spent on licenses for 3G spectrum. I have heard that the Great Britain 3G license fees would have more than paid for running fiber throughout the entire country.

We did some investigation and prototyping Locating fiber in sewers.

We ran into two problems, internal politics and the cost of backhaul. Even if we wired the town we would still have to rent expensive bandwidth from Verizon to connect to an IXC.

When you consider that FTTH is about 2-3X the cost of cable TV and 1.5-2X the cost of a single copper POTS pair all the effort going into legacy extension is really sad.

As for 3G there have been a number of articles discussing the amount of money going into 3G for services that may or may not be profitable, vs the unmet demand for high speed residential connectivity. I'm sure there will be lots of interesting wireless application. But it is hard to imagine lots of bandwidth hungry ones because of bandwidth and the size restrictions of portable devices.

There are two considerations in the cost of backhaul worth noting:

(1) Once you get connected to one of the major urban long-distance data centers, the prices are dropping fast owing to the long-haul glut;
(2) If you managed to get one of these projects launched at the state level, the backhaul into one of those data centers (at least a couple exist in every state) could be done using the newly-laid fiber instead of a leased RBOC line.

But of course, the politics get even thornier as you move up from local government into state or federal. I do wish Intel's CEO would stop backing the RBOCs and start talking about the regulatory framework needed to build a whole new independent system.