[116950] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alexander Harrowell)
Thu Aug 27 04:59:41 2009
From: Alexander Harrowell <a.harrowell@gmail.com>
To: nanog@nanog.org
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:58:22 +0100
In-Reply-To: <4A95B431.70102@enger.us>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
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On Wednesday 26 August 2009 23:16:17 Robert Enger - NANOG wrote:
> As tedious as the downstream can be, engineering the upstream path of a
> cable plant is worse. A lot of older systems were never designed for
> upstream service. Even if the amps are retrofitted, the plant is just not
> tight enough. Desirably, fiber should be pushed deeper; the quantity of
> cascaded amps reduced, coax fittings and splitters replaced and so on.
>
> On 8/26/2009 10:25 AM, Richard Bennett wrote:
> > The trouble with broadband in rural America is the twisted pair loop
> > lengths that average around 20,000 feet. To use VDSL, the loop length
> > needs to down around 3000, so they're stuck with ADSL unless the ILEC
> > wants to install a lot of repeaters. And VDSL is the enabler of triple
> > play over twisted pair.
> >
An interesting question: as the population gets sparser, the average trench=
=20
mileage per subscriber increases. At some point this renders fibre deployme=
nt=20
uneconomic. Now, this point can change:
1) as we deploy fibre we'll get more efficient at it - I think VZ's cost pe=
r sub=20
has come down quite a lot since they started the FIOS rollout.
2) the flip side of the cost to serve a subscriber is of course revenue, an=
d if=20
you can find other services to sell'em you can go further. may also be scop=
e=20
for tiered pricing
3) public sector investment
Going the other way, as the population gets denser, it becomes harder to=20
provide an acceptable broadband wireless service because of spectrum=20
limitations. You either need more and more cells (=3Dmore and more sites an=
d=20
more and more backhaul), or more and more spectrum.
Where's the crossover point? There are clearly places where some fibre=20
investment (like L(3)'s proposed deployment of many more POPs) would make i=
t=20
possible to get good service out using radio from the end of the fibre,=20
precisely because they are sparse. There are clearly places where fibre to =
the=20
home will eventually arrive.
Is there a broadband gap between the two groups, however, where it's not de=
nse=20
enough to ever deploy fibre and too dense to deploy good wireless? Or can w=
e=20
rely on FTTH for one lot and RTTR (Radio to the Ranch) for the other?
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