Ask HN: Small town lots of FiOS infra. no residential FiOS keep pushing?

9 points by jordanbaucke 9 years ago | 5 comments

My small town has a lot of fiber infrastructure (conduit etc.), almost the entire city has conduit laid for a fiber based CCTV/Traffic monitoring system.

I contact the city council to see if anyone had contacted them about doing residential FiOS: they referred me to a systems administrator, he stated that the city was a missing piece of "link" between the two major piece of conduit and that he thought it would be another 2 years before it was complete.

This was the extent of his answers. He did not think anyone had "contacted them" about using the existing infra. for residential FiOS

I've been very interested in community-based FiOS initiatives and I'm wondering if I should keep pushing them (the city council)?

Perhaps there is a company/group that can do a feasibility study- but I don't know what to look for on the internet so I can contact them and find out the costs of doing a study like this to submit to city council? Or should I just drop it? A bridge too far?

supertrope 9 years ago |

"FiOS" is a Verizon trademark, not a general term. Fiber to the home is an entirely different matter from commercial and municipal fiber optic links, mainly in that they do not have to reach almost every single address. They connect only businesses, government buildings such as town hall, schools and a community center, cellular base stations, etc. The most expensive portion of the physical manifestation of the Internet is the "last mile" between neighborhood hubs and residential modems. Hence why ISPs re-use existing cabling such as copper twisted pair and coaxial cable originally laid for telephony and television respectively. Large capital expenditures are required to get in the game and barriers to entry such as pole access regulations, customers expectation of a bundled TV service, telephone service regulations, customer support staffing, etc. make it hard for plucky startups to get a foothold. Some states have even banned publicly owned ISPs! Of course once an ISP is big enough and is one of the duopoly it can raise rates annually and cap, throttle and assess overage fees.

wsh 9 years ago |

As another commenter has noted, FiOS is Verizon’s trademark for service delivered using what is known generically as a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP) network.

A typical network of conduits and fiber optic cabling installed along major streets for traffic signal synchronization and similar municipal purposes is unlikely to reach or pass many homes directly. Extensive “last mile” construction may be required between the existing network and each location to be served, and the cost of this is often a major factor limiting broadband deployment, especially in suburban and rural areas.

Your city’s network could be useful to businesses or telecommunications companies that need point-to-point dark fiber connections, and many local governments and electric utilities with fiber optic networks find it attractive to lease some of their excess capacity. The economics of this--a few sophisticated customers, willing to pay, in advance, the full cost of connecting their buildings to the nearest conduit--are completely different from those of mass-market consumer offerings, which generally need a very high take rate to keep the prices reasonable. Achieving this can be difficult, especially in overbuild situations with established competitors.

You might be interested in these two studies, both prepared by the same consulting firm, discussing the costs and opportunities of municipal FTTP development:

City of Palo Alto Fiber-to-the-Premises Master Plan

https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/48...

City of Seattle Fiber-to-the-Premises Feasibility Study

http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Broadband/2016-...

sfrailsdev 9 years ago |

See I'd see if I could tease a local reporter into writing a story. A system administrator that said it would or at least could be complete in two years. The benefits of Google Fiber, etc.

Feasibility only matters if people are interested. Get people interested.

jlgaddis 9 years ago |

There's been similar interest in my City and we've recently "got the ball rolling", just barely.

Here's an article that'll give you some background: https://muninetworks.org/content/bloomington-indiana-may-blo...

smellf 9 years ago |

Sorry I can't help you, but I do have a question - how did you find out that your town has the existing fiber infrastructure?