“Dig once” bill could bring fiber Internet to much of the US
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Most importantly, it minimizes market distortion. Inatead of making it more expensive to deploy broadband (which is the ironic side effect of many broadband deployment policies), it makes it cheaper for competitors to enter the market.
Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then.
The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at least 40gbit, thus the cost of upgrading a lot of the existing backbone could be as easy as just swapping the line cards on either side.
IMO, we may not actually need more fiber (outside of last mile usage, which this bill is directed at), but just better use of existing fiber. If you're wasting fiber on anything less than 10 gigabit, please stop. It costs you next to nothing to upgrade compared to what it cost a decade ago: upgrading to equipment that can handle 10GBase-LR/ER/ZR or OC-192/STM-64 or better is worth every dime.
Literally, if the US government passed a law stating, say, any fiber over 5 miles long must have a line rate of at least 10 gigabit, and heavily subsidize upgrading equipment that is simply too old to handle it, a lot of Internet speed WTFery would go away in rural and suburban areas.
You'd be surprised how many LTE/4G cell phone towers, DOCSIS 3.x headends, or modern ADSL2+/VDSL2/possibly G.Fast DSLAMs do not have 10gbit or greater backbones. It's just absurd in 2017 that we're using stuff that is 90s era at best.
I'm not saying that work shouldn't be done, but it wouldn't be a case of just throwing down a pipe during normal resurfacing work.
Such an interesting subject is this; we have freaking building codes, regulations and requirements - esp re: elec and structure and such...
We need to take a step back and make a freaking INFRA code that requires what the data line requirements to a building should be.
DATA SHOULD BE A UTILITY - just like the sewer, water, etc...
we should stop bitching about FCC this and that - and REQUIRE that construction includes the data plan as well. This will alleviate much of this kvetching.
Please give me your opinion on the above as I respect your perspective.
I think counties are reasonably capable of burying fiber in the ground as they build and repair roads, but that's about all I trust them to do. I live in the DC metro area. Our public sewers dump raw sewage into the Anacostia river every time it rains. The city has an extensive network of old lead pipes that are poisoning kids. The Metro was almost unusable last year because tracks were catching fire. These problems exist all over the country, and are all caused because by prices for services being set too low, because they are set by elected officials and not the market.
Meanwhile, we have had FiOS in MD/VA since 2006-ish. In that time the top speed has gone from 50 mbps to 750 mbps as Verizon upgraded OLTs, backhaul, etc. Yeah, I pay $100 per month for 300/300 service, while my water/sewer bill is so small I don't even know what I pay. But I don't see that as evidence my internet bill should be lower, I see it as evidence that my utility bill is too low.
They exist because the US continues to insist on spreading responsibility out of thousands of local governments instead of having a single set of rules and standards for everyone.
Not everyone wants to live in an apartment building.
- Roads
- Water
- Sewer
- Community heat
- Healthcare
- Education
- Pension
- Internet connectivity
- Banking (including loans for 1 family houses) and card payment
Perhaps that was your intent?
And we need single payer healthcare yesterday.
So I guess we'll have the government own or heavily regulate 90% of the economy. Gee, that's historically worked so well in the past... :)
How is that? It applies only to federally funded projects. Most homes and businesses are not on federally funded roads. This bill is not a FTTH driver.
The future of America is not, and never will be, FTTH. The future of America is FTTF/FTTDP (fiber to the frontage/distribution point) to a street/basement cabinet that houses current generation micro-headends and micro-DSLAMs that are setup to handle the last 500-1000 feet, speaking G.fast and DOCIS 3.x as very small greenfield installations.
Current gen G.fast tops out at 1000/1000 in less than 300ft installations, slows to 100/100 at 1500ft (about a third of a mile) using existing installs of standard 80s and 90s era unshielded phone wire, the numbers go up with brand new copper, and next gen G.fast is aiming at increasing these speeds several fold (talk of 10gbit in under 300ft and 1gbit at much further distances).
Current gen DOCIS 3.1 tops out at 1.3gbit down, 245mbit up, and there are already existing gigabit-on-cable customers getting what they paid for on 90s era coax.
I see absolutely no reason to roll out actual FTTH ala FIOS, and I agree with Google Fiber's decision to drop actual FTTH, and they should be aiming for taking over unmaintained networks that can be rebuilt as modern DOCIS 3.x or G.Fast, or deploying micro-towers doing shorter range LTE-A fixed.
Current gen LTE-A maxes out at somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 10gbit per tower/frequency band, and fixed LTE-A "modems" with outside directional antennas can get gigabit connectivity; next gen LTE (LTE-A Pro, aka 4.9G) at least doubles this.
All of this is useless without Congress pushing for more fiber between towns, or inside large metro areas (which means burying more fiber along federal highways and major state roads).
There is literally no reason why, today, we don't have at least 50/10 to every goddamned home in America. Every goddamned home, no matter how far you are out in the sticks. This is a drain on our economy every second we aren't working towards this actually rather easy to achieve goal.
Fun fact: I don't even have reliable cell phone connectivity at my house. I'm maybe the only person on HN that bothers to maintain a POTS line and use it as my primary phone number.
Because the country is huge, and building adequate backhaul to sparsely populated areas is very expensive.
> This is a drain on our economy every second we aren't working towards this actually rather easy to achieve goal.
I find this sort of argument to beg the question. How much would it really increase overall GDP to get at least 25/3 (the current FCC standard) to the 10% of the country that lacks it? Especially considering that everyone can get satellite broadband, which covers the core things people need internet for: job applications, access to online educational resources, electronic payment processing, etc.
Remember, we rolled out copper wire to every home with a far smaller GDP, doing the same for fiber is relatively speaking a smaller investment.
Where I live in the Texas Hill Country, I get 300MB in the center of town. Outside the town there are a few companies providing wireless Internet connections, but this is limited by topology - the hills for which the region is named tend to get in the way.
I also have a cabin in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Catskills. I can't even get a cell signal there without hiking to the top of the mountain - and even then, a plain voice connection, non-data, is iffy. And I'm doing OK, I know of people up there who don't even have electricity.
But only a small percentage of fiber put on long routes uses single wavelengths. Most fiber going more than 5-10km uses DWDM and that is indeed an important place to put in modern fiber.
However, most of the railway routes in 1998 used fiber that supported 32*40G lambdas, so the problem with most of the fiber laid over the last 20 years is not that it can't handle more than 1gbps. Most of the problem is the equipment, not the type of fiber used.
For a real life example, on a recent quote we received, fiber down the west coast from 2001 6th Ave in Seattle to 624 S Grand Ave in Los Angeles was only 1/3rd the cost of going from 624 S Grand Ave out to Malibu.
The issue is not with long haul density, but with last mile due to restrictive municipal regulations and procedures, and lack of collaboration between different metro networks.
In other words, 100% internet deployment or municipal wifi or whatever form it takes, literally changes what is allowable to primary instructional material content in public education in the united states.[2]
[1] http://www.cde.ca.gov/ci/cr/cf/textedcod60119.asp
[2] IANAL and different states have different laws, what I am speaking about should be considered California specific as that is the only domain of my knowledge
This is directly the job of local government: to build infrastructure. And this wouldn't force the use of any particular service; rather, it would make it possible for many services to exist.
Again, am on the same page that dig once makes a lot of sense, but there are some practical roadblocks that could make it less desirable.
For example, it's great that we can get products delivered overnight from Amazon. However, as you point out, that is effectively a public subsidy of Amazon's business model, and that has negative effects too. Subsidizing public road infrastructure makes shipping products across the country artificially cheaper compared to making and selling them locally. That essentially strips away an advantage local retailers and manufacturers would otherwise have against big, national companies like Amazon.
Indeed -- my hope for "dig once" policies would be that they have an opposite effect on competition; namely, that national-scale incumbents (who can currently afford to throw a million dollars here or there to put in fibre of their own in a new region/market) can get effective competition from local ISPs (who don't have a comparable ability to throw cash around).
[1] http://www.frontiergroup.org/reports/fg/do-roads-pay-themsel...
Maybe it's me, but $3 billion is not a small amount of money:
Also, there is some economic gain from this activity...paying construction workers to install it, and whatever the end users decide to do with it. Is that gain > 3B? I don't know.
"Dig once requirements are often opposed by deep pocketed incumbent telephone and cable companies, who build their own infrastructure and would prefer that smaller competitors not have access to cheap and freely available conduit,"
I suspect the big incumbents would simply lease the space and throw their own fiber in there to monopolize this new federally funded conduit. Then some of the maintenance burden falls on the government. Such wonderful corporate welfare well see down the road!
Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out, while also giving others the ability to pull their own lines through the pipes.
FTFY.
No, there is only so much space in the pipe. It has a limited capacity so the next logical step is to charge for access.
>> Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out...
At that point why not just have the government be an ISP an route any and all packets that come their way? See, they're proposing to take care of the hard part - digging and laying the pipe - on behalf of companies. The biggest companies will have the least trouble filling those pipes with light pipes.
Time Warner installed cable when the homes were being built. Then about 10 years ago AT&T went through and installed their "fiber" (their words, not mine), and tore up everyone's lawn in the process. This last year Google came in... and just made an enormous mess[1]... but the good news is they did lay pipe that other services can run cables through.
[1] I've commended on this recently in other posts -- Google isn't supervising the contractors they hire in Austin and the work is getting done shoddy... and Google hasn't been doing much of anything to remedy the situation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13878909
They just did this to mine and a few neighbors, even though they weren't supposed to. They had a Ditch Witch (DW) Directional Drill [0] that would tunnel under all the lawns, and only make a little hole every few houses. However, they didn't count on the coral rock, and the DW broke, so they had to bring in a bigger one which was going to take a week or two.
Well, they weren't getting paid if they weren't working, so instead of waiting for the bigger DW, they started digging trenches through the lawns. They did this to about 5% of them, with mine being the last one before the new DW got there. They did resod, but it's all dying because they just threw the dirt back in without putting the soil back on top, and everyone's tree rings and other landscaping are ruined.
All the neighbors are pissed. I had to explain to a lot of them what fiber even was. They still don't understand why I'm too excited to be pissed.
[0] https://www.ditchwitch.com/directional-drills#content-304
This law would apply only to federally funded road projects, which likely carry the vast bulk of auto traffic but are a small fraction of the total road mileage; it will not affect most neighborhood streets with lawns.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but what are the downsides to this? Where is that explored?
The conduit would presumably be owned and managed by the government. The fiber in it by the people who pulled it presumably the provider.
But here is the thing. Conduit size is not infinite. If not large enough it could get filled. I can even see a case where a particular company may put in extra fiber just to prevent someone else from doing so (and then either not using or renting that fiber). The government is not particularly good at preventing this type of gaming and manipulation.
I'm pretty sure NSA manages to get access to backbones just fine without the benefit of policies that try to expand the role of fibre in the last mile. NSA has ample access to backbone fibre, both at exchange points and undersea (they have submarines). This is an utter red herring.
As written it sounds like those IT projects devised by people who have no knowledge of the field, who imagine that their idea must be easy, who make and sign off on a plan, and only then get me involved. These are almost universally poorly conceived, unnecessarily expensive, and produce bad results. In fact, in those respects it reminds me of another great public networking idea, public, city-wide WLAN networks (and in that case too, many IT professionals drank the Kool-Aid without thinking through the details).
Also, when we talk about how easy it is - it is always easy when someone else has to figure out how to implement it, do the work, and pay the bill.
Say a road construction company wins the bid and gets a contract to work on a section of federally-funded road. I think it is likely they would already have some of the work, equipment or supplies sub-contracted out to specialists. Does it make more sense for them to own the entire supply chain for making concrete, from mining and refining the minerals, to mixing, delivery and pouring? Or does it make more sense for them to sub-contact out to a number of suppliers who they can call and say "I need $foo cubic feet of concrete, with $bar properties, delivered to $baz location at $quux date/time,"? I think the latter is more likely as it gives them more flexibility. Owning and operating the equipment and infrastructure to manufacture concrete has overhead costs like anything else.
Similarly, if laying fiber becomes a requirement of taking the contract to build the roads, I think those fiber-laying companies will find themselves subcontracted those projects.
You wouldn't believe a story about the costs, feasibility, impact, etc. of an IT project if the reporter only talked to people in the construction industry and not to any IT professionals.
I'm specifically moving to a place in WA which has its own fiber network in the neighborhood; hopefully will get involved with the advisory board. I'd love to experiment with 10G on a wave to my cabinet at the Westin. :)
Perhaps what we need is something like this, but at the state/local level.
Per the article:
> [The bill] requires states to evaluate the need for broadband conduit any time they complete a highway construction project that gets federal funding
By far most last mile areas do have sidewalks, if you consider population served as opposed to geographic area.
Which is by far the most reasonable metric, because only humans use the internet...
[1] "Congress passed the five-year, $305 billion “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act” on Dec. 3, 2015, and President Obama signed the bill the next day."
I have to admit I was pretty surprised to go down into her basement for a jar of homemade pickles and seeing an ONT bolted to the wall. She doesn't even have a computer or cable TV, it was only providing POTS. It's going to be quite the perk for whomever moves in after she dies though.