Making aerial fiber deployment faster and more efficient
engineering.fb.com
engineering.fb.com
It's slowly coming. I've enjoyed Sonic fiber in the residential Richmond District for 3 or so years already. Sonic is still building out fiber in other neighborhoods (e.g. Marina and Cow Hollow are now coming online, I think), as is AT&T, but there are still considerable gaps where utility poles are oversubscribed. A single unusable pole can prevent reaching several city blocks simply because the replacement cost is so high it makes those remaining blocks unviable economically. In other neighborhoods with buried utilities, the city refuses to provide any assistance: no micro-trenching permitted, and no leaning on existing license holders to lease any pre-existing underground infrastructure.
Even the least dense areas of San Francisco are more dense than elsewhere in the Bay Area. Sonic provides residential fiber in many Bay Area cities, but rollouts are far slower. Regulatory costs (including review time) and less favorable RoI (less density) means it's taking much longer to build, even when theoretically profitable. Sonic doesn't have as much capital, and those with capital (e.g. AT&T) aren't very motivated to build new infrastructure, especially when they're already the incumbent. About two years ago I chatted with an AT&T linesman putting up fiber on the utility poles outside my house and he flat-out said he wouldn't be there if Sonic hadn't forced AT&T's hand.
EDIT: Sonic is further along than I thought: "Santa Rosa-based provider Sonic has deployed fiber to more than one-third of homes in San Francisco over the past five years, Sonic CEO and co-founder Dane Jasper tells SF Weekly." https://www.sfweekly.com/news/can-san-francisco-finally-clos...
I have a friend in SF who has been given the runaround by Sonic. He believes that Sonic's ticketing system is somehow integrated with AT&T and that AT&T is closing his install ticket after they finish an install at a different residence.
The City of SF bid on the utility infrastructure in the city that was formerly owned by PG&E. Hopefully this will allow the city to streamline installation of pole-based fiber installs, but I'm not sure how much PG&E ownership was causing problems before the auction.
If that 1/3 figure includes resold AT&T service, that would definitely be less impressive.
I'm not too optimistic about any city-planned communications infrastructure. The "progressives" hold onto a pipe dream of a free, city-wide public network[1], and they seem to balk at partnering with private companies for this purpose. Fortunately the "progressives" usually fall [just] short of majority control of the city council, and haven't won the mayorship in over 20 years, but they still manage to throw monkey wrenches into sensible plans.
[1] There was (still is?) a master plan to bury fiber with the city's water & sewer network, but I think the city is half done with a city-wide, multi-billion dollar water & sewer refurbishment and replacement project without having buried any fiber at all. I'm sure most people in the city, including myself, would love to see a public fiber built-out, but it's just not financially viable. The city has too much on its plate, and the situation won't ever change. The self-styled "progressive" faction is all talk, and stonewall everything else with feigned outrage, much like national Republicans.
This way there is a huge incentive for startups as the incumbent cant just follow them and do them out of business while ignoring other areas. At the same time it puts pressure on the imcumbant to roll out FTTP to reduce startups doing roll-out.
Probably also consider something similar with pricing.
Unfortunately, I believe this install was one of the last under the DIRECTV merger deal which required AT&T to deploy residential fiber.
The spools and amount of manual work to install the fiber lines was really something to see over the course of 3 months and I can really see the value of an automated robotic fiber deployment. The legacy cables are really huge.
Whatever the big picture national issues are, there is no reason the Bay Area should be lagging even compared to the rest of the US. Rich suburbs of tightly packed single family homes are prime fiber territory. Those are the very first places Verizon wired up with FiOS 15 years ago.
I live in NY, and each town or city gets to negotiate franchise agreements that always favor the telcos. You have to wield a big stick with these companies, who divide and conquer.
In my cities case, in exchange for some bullshit (public access tv and filming equipment for the high school) gave Spectrum an exclusive contract for TV.
So Verizon brought FIOS to every town around us, and we’re stuck in the internet ghetto.
The bay area needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but the NIMBYs won't even let adequate housing be built so the chances of that happening are about zero.
If cable internet was still stuck at 25 Mbps or similar, the pressure for fiber internet would be a lot stronger.
But cable internet got good.
The backwards and scandalous aspect of modern American internet is that the ISPs managed to roll out 1 TB data caps without being blocked by lawmakers.
Most consumers aren't willing to pay the monthly cost that ISPs would be need to charge to make overbuilding fiber economically feasible. DSL providers overbuild with fiber because they can't compete with cable and the rising cost of maintenance of a copper plant. Some cable providers will do new builds with FTTH or overbuild when upgrading the existing plant is cost prohibitive. But overbuilding a working coax plant almost never makes since. Spending millions of dollars to offer higher speeds at the same price just doesn't make business sense.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2020/07/the-r...
Sad to say but that's probably what communities in the US will have to do as well.
Certainly I know of at least one other guy with it myself and I cannot fathom that we're a third of all the guys with fibre in the Bay.
There are plenty of areas where cable meets or exceeds the fiber bandwidth that can be sold to the home.
Anecdata, Consolidated Communications will happily sell you fiber into your business - including an MRV to convert the fiber into copper inside your property. But... the bandwidth options start out with a 10/5 Mbps line.
Here is a forum topic (in French) detailing how it was attempted in France [0] ca. 20013 to bring the network up to speed. A technician explains[1] that this method is no longer used on new deployments, because of an unexpected issue: hunter's stray bullets often severed the cables. An interesting video [2] is linked in the top post.
Maybe the real innovation is that there is no need for a technician to supervise the thing. But I doubt it: it could be cheaper to pay someone to watch it than to deal with the consequences of a failure. Though I am not sure the one I linked could cross pylons, and as such could be only for HV, not MV lines.
As usual for a press release, a lot of marketing speech, light on technical details, and the infographics is bullshit, comparing top-end, almost-future fiber optics with previous gen technologies (100Mbps twisted pair vs 25Tbps fiber)
[0] https://lafibre.info/techniques-deploiement/fibre-sur-les-py...
[1] https://lafibre.info/techniques-deploiement/fibre-sur-les-py...
IMO the entire point of the post is that they can now run the fiber on the Medium Voltage lines. That allows cost effectively running fiber on existing infrastructure thats much more widespread and passes closer to homes.
From the article, MV is the harder challenge for running helical cable than HV because the lines are bunched closer together, can't carry as much weight and have far more obstructions. The cool thing this new approach does is make a compact robot that can run smaller cables and handle obstacles. This is going open up fiber as an option to way more communities where it previously was not cost effective to do so.
Wait, what? If stray bullets are randomly severing cables - and doing so "often" - they should often be randomly hitting other things, in a frequency corresponding to the size and distribution of the thing(s) being hit.
Pardonnez moi for not reading the article. Je ne parle pas Francaise. But this doesn't seem like it could possibly be the reason for why this method is no longer used on new deployments.
This also surprised me, hence the "hard to anticipate" bit in the linked post. I guess it stems from multiple factors: high voltage lines being very long, high above ground, and crossing remote areas that might be hunting grounds. Plus, some prey might actually rest on the wires or pylons.
I should have written "lead shot" instead of "bullets", as that's a better translation. Such ammunition is commonly used for shooting birds, that can be located in front of or behind the lines. Fiber twisted around the cable also increases its cross-section.
It's actually quite likely that they often hit other things, but not human ones (stats say ~140 hunt accidents per year on average there, ~15 deadly, ~20 non-hunters). The cross section of high voltage lines present during hunts on hunting grounds is likely bigger than the human one. Plus, hunters tend not to fire at people or in their general direction, while they don't care about HV lines.
Birds are also known to perch upon wires, which is another factor that I hadn't considered before. (Actually, I wasn't even thinking about birds at all... I was only considering mammals.)
See: https://pegconference.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Polariz...
From the page 4 of the link below you can see that Africa has the highest density of lightning strikes.
https://www.ofcconference.org/getattachment/d0ec1565-ce81-48...
That means not noticeable for most fiber use cases. The only use case I can imagine that would suffer from this a bit, is telerobotics (i.e. remote surgery). Unless the fiber path is so long, and the lightning storms so large that there is a continuous stream of those disruptions.
BTW, Florida was where this phenomenon was first observed; every summer there would be multiple outages.
The large amount of traffic on the fiber can be an issue and cause congestion and other problems (25T is a lot of traffic). Furthermore service and equipment providers have SLAs and outages can cost each money.
Sorry to hear that you felt forced to read a set of slides on the matter.
https://www.aflglobal.com/Products/Fiber-Optic-Cable/Aerial/...
One of the problems with this new thing is that in the event of a fiber cut, restoration times will be VERY long.
For everybody who's saying "This will be great for fiber to the home!". Sorry, no. From an ISP perspective this is possibly useful for intercity fiber and medium to long haul DWDM applications. You're not going to be breaking in/out of it to add or drop circuits. It'll go point to point from electrical substation to electrical substation, at each end there will be something like a 10' cube shaped telecom equipment shelter with the optical line terminal equipment in it.
> ...the resulting [cable] design uses G.657 200 micron fibers with a specially tailored aramid configuration and a high-strength, high-temperature, track-resistant polymer jacket to survive the requirements of this application within a small form factor.
...and the first thing that popped into my mind was a certain pain-in-the-ass-to-repair weapon subsystem which uses a certain HP/LF transmission line that also leverages a "specially tailored aramid configuration" inner jacket. Cool tech, but yikes if commercial ISPs embrace this without seriously considering sustainability implications.
Seems like this also produces a lot of waste over time if you wrap a power line, then have to re-do the work 30 years later (or sooner).
I have no specific expertise in this area. A quick Google search shows MV power lines have a life of 20-30 years, and aerial fiber lines designed for ~25 years. Facebook's goal is to get people online.
Ideally you'd be wrapping younger power lines and decommission everything at the end of its useful life. It may be viable to get people reliable high-speed internet now, and in 20 years the area is developed enough it can support even better infrastructure that they fund themselves.
Internet now might allow a merchant can list a product for sale online and post a picture, notably increasing sales. Internet in 20 years might be 1,000x as fast as it is today, and doing things we can't even imagine at the moment.
Hopefully innovation like this helps minimize the disparity in opportunity between rural and urban areas, and rich and poor countries.
Using existing powerlines is a double-edged sword. That infrastructure really does exist everywhere in the world. At the same time, if a powerline is cut or severed, requiring special machinery (or robotics?) to replace the fiber line is going to be a real challenge and can keep people offline for a very long time. Hopefully they're thinking of that scenario.
Poor connectivity in the US is a political problem, not a technical one. Google Fiber tried to solve this by getting cities to make permitting not terrible with mixed results.
Correct. Lawmakers in your state have to take steps to clear the way for broadband. Otherwise lawsuits fly when rent seekers gouge whomever has right-of-way when data services try to come through. Also, utilities have to be forced to get off the dime. If they're required to offer non-discriminatory access to poles and trenches, for instance, then they either seek to operate the broadband service themselves or come to terms with someone who can. Otherwise they behave like it's 1975 forever and squat on their power lines.
Also, having the fiber mounted lower on the pole means one can repair one or the other in isolation.
The FB method seems like it could be dangerous for repairs, but I would like to see it applied in real life, too.
So, legal and liability issues.
There are quite a few routes built on HV power lines. Problem is you get weird problems like lightning strikes inducing magnetic field that affects polarization and other things that cause outages. E.g. https://www.ofcconference.org/getattachment/d0ec1565-ce81-48...
In certain locales, it will require the cooperation of several legal entities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtbtlgAGRaA
Also related, videos of people walking on the cables after being dropped off by a helicopter onto the live lines:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tzga6qAaBA
A youtube search for 'helicopter lineman' turns up a lot of other material in this vein.
I would be interested to hear about these considerations from someone knowledgeable in electric and fiber nets, maybe fiber is somehow different?
has a video that shows this robot in action
Still very early so thought I'd add it here to see if people are interested?
The idea is to get a quick map of where the installations would be and give you a distance cost which can be adjusted based on other factors (aerial v underground, existing assets etc).
-/ Heaven forfend transferring wealth to the local laborers, to pay them to install this infrastructure. Why waste all that money by converting it into Ugandan wages when it can be spent on robots instead?
-/ Hopefully the fibre and connectivity is only leased to the Ugandans, for a more efficient return on the capital investment.
Hmmm.
Don't know who is going to go up to middle voltage lines to do a fiber cable splice.
But yeah, you'd have to splice it. I wonder if it would be possible to have the fibers that need splicing take a short detour down a pole to near ground level and have someone do the splice there.
The cable is designed to be strung in the air - it has a core to help it do this as I understand it (and many others are done without a supporting cable).