amazon_not

Aggressively throttling comments. I think it's about five comments and then HN cuts you off from commenting. Not really conducive to discussions.

So what's stopping you? :)

Just get some neighbors together and go for it.

Manhattan?

Title III crowdfunding is limited to $1M.

What happened to Citynet? They were supposed to wire the whole of Amsterdam with open access fiber. Did they stop after the Reggefiber/KPN acquisition?

"A little longer" == 25 years if your returns are 10% and grow 10% annually.

Other than than all true. Telecoms infrastructure is an utility play, steady long term returns. Something pension funds like, but they on the other hand don't like risky startups, so it's a challenge to get funded until you are established and have a solid track record.

No, the returns aren't there to make infrastructure investments attractive to VCs.

A software startup can exit at 10x, an infrastructure investment won't.

> However, from my understanding, a direct connection to the internet backbone is what gives tier q ISP's their God-like monopolizing power in a given region (like Comcast in most parts of Baltimore city).

No, the reason Comcast and other incumbents dominate is that they built out the last mile infrastructure. The backbone costs are a minor expense.

How are you covering costs?

A Netflix cache appliance isn't dependent on the number of customers, it's on dependent on the amount of traffic from Netflix. You don't need 5000 Netflix customers, you need 5 Gbps of peak traffic to qualify.

However that isn't your only option. You can just peer with Netflix, they have an open peering policy.

Even a single cable in the sewer can require digging up the street if the cable causes an obstruction in the pipe.

Rule #1: Never install new copper in the outside plan.

That being said, there are companies specializing in installing fiber cables into sewers. They use tracked robots to install steel bands inside the pipes that keep the fiber cable in place. It's not cheap, but it is cheaper than ripping open the streets in a city.

There are also techniques to install fiber cable into water pipes.

I recall the NYCmesh people having free bandwidth from an employer or sponsor. That obviously helps. Not exactly scalable or replicable tho.

Anybody with enough money can connect to one or more IP transit providers ("the Internet backbone"). It will usually set you back a few thousand dollars per month.

> Fiber like GPON is shared physically-ish, but DWDM isolates individual waves so thoroughly that it's hard to think of that as a shared physical medium unless you're thinking about backhoe fade and the like.

This is incorrect. GPON does not use DWDM, or any individual waves per subscriber. GPON is a shared medium with one wavelenght used in the upstream and one wavelenght used in the downstream direction. Each subscriber is allocated bandwidth on the shared medium.

Not even next generation PON uses DWDM. Next generation PON still uses on upstream and one downstream wavelenght per PON tree, but there can be multiple PON trees on the same backhaul fiber. It's more like a CWDM overlay of PON trees.

The only PON that uses DWDM is WDM-PON, but it isn't deployed commercially at scale yet.

Your numbers are way off.

In 2006, Verizon's cost to pass a property was $850 and trending towards $700 in 2010. This includes not only the outside plant, but also the OLTs. The majority of the cost is in the outside plant, so the GPON OLTs are only a fraction of this.

Verizon deploys at scale and does not pay list prices. Furthermore Verizon would not be deploying NG-PON2 if it wasn't profitable and would definitely not be doing it if it was cutting into their margins. Therefore there is no reason to assume their NG-PON2 costs will be higher than their GPON costs.

No, if you wanted "fair pricing" you'd have congestion pricing. Hard data caps are just a way of bilking the subscribers for more money.

OLTs aren't that expensive, especially since you can potentially split the costs of each port over 128 subscribers. Obviously the total dollar costs add up when you put thousands of subscribers on one OLT, but the cost per subscriber is quite low.

NGPON-2 isn't being deployed at scale yet, so prices are still to come down, but GPON OLTs are bulk items. You can buy a GPON OLT for a few grand which ends up being a few bucks per subscriber.

Unless you compare the latency to a live broadcast, you'll never know how bad the latency is.

Most P2P systems are terrible, which makes them pretty useless since you can hear who scored from your neighbor seconds or even minutes before you see it.

Like I wrote in the grandparent, it's a density thing. How many subscribers have line of sight (or close enough) for the 5G small cell to work? At some point it's going to be more cost effective to do FTTP.

The CPE cost is negligible. You can pick one up for $20. True, the drop will cost you, but it has a far longer lifespan than the small cell. It's not like the small cell, it's installation, permits, engineering, pole rental or tower, power, etc. are free either.

Like I stated earlier, 5G may be cheaper than FTTP. Or it may not. It may not even be available in your area due to insufficient density. Even if 5G is cheaper, it's not going to be massively more cheaper.

What's the latency like? Live broadcasts are hard enough to keep realtime without mixing in P2P problems like buffering and limited upstreams.

While technically feasible, content owners won't allow it, so it's a moot point.

5G might end up cheaper than FTTP, but I wouldn't get my hopes up on it being massively cheaper.

Higher frequencies will require either line of sight or very short distances to the small cell. The small cells themselves will incur costs both CAPEX and OPEX.

Basically the only part 5G will replace in a FTTP network is the drop. And that's where the density and the topography is cooperating. Whereas if you install a fiber drop, you'll be set for 20+ years and you won't have to install, maintain and power a small cell forever.

5G networks require lots and lots of fiber. This means a lot of digging is required.

Yes. With the usual caveats.

I'm not saying there won't be A market. I'm saying there won't be THE market you are hoping for.

Satellite has it's uses, but replacing terrestrial broadband networks isn't one. The satellite industry is littered with roadkill, bankruptcies and wasted billions. It's not the first time somebody would be wrong.

> In order to do that, the congress has to change the law so the ISPs have to share the cables they own in a building like phone lines,

No can do. We already had that law and it was revoked in the Brand X decision.

> Only if you exclude wireless options, which is becoming an ever-less rational thing to do.

Maybe some day wireless will become a meaningful substitute for wireline broadband, but that day is not here yet. Thus it's very much the rational thing to do to exclude it.

P2P isn't very useful for real time video.

> They already are: multiple low or modest cost, high speed satellite providers are targeting the US market for deployment in the next four or five years.

Hoping satellite will solve your bandwidth problems is wishful thinking of the worst sort. There simply isn't enough spectrum, and thus bandwidth, to go around.

Can't beat physics.