[116958] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: FCCs RFC for the Definition of Broadband
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Paul Timmins)
Thu Aug 27 10:46:55 2009
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:47:01 -0400
From: Paul Timmins <paul@telcodata.us>
To: nanog@nanog.org
In-Reply-To: <20090827140459.GA64392@ussenterprise.ufp.org>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
Leo Bicknell wrote:
> If you have to reach someone 20km from the CO, the cost of running
> the ditch-wich down the road in a rural area is not the dominate
> cost over the next 20 years. It's equipment. If the copper plant
> takes 4 repeaters to do the job, that's 4 bits of equipment that
> can fail, and will need to be upgraded at some point. Running
> something as simple as point to point fiber they can be provided
> with GigE speeds today with no intermediate equipment; the cost of
> a 20km GBIC is far less than the cost of installing 4 repeaters.
>
> The problem with all of these is ROI, not cost. Somewhere along the
> line we've decided very short ROI's are required. Do you work at a
> company where an ROI of over a year is laughed at? When the original
> rural telephone network was pushed ROI's of 50 years were talked about.
> There's plenty of infrastructure built every day with ROI's of 20 years.
>
> So it would cost $2000 per home to put in fiber. The margin on the
> service is $5 per month. It's a 33 year ROI. That's ok with me, it's
> infrastructure, like a road, or a bridge. We're still using copper in
> the ground put in during the 60's, 70's, and 80's
>
Seems like a good idea to the technical side of me, but the business
side sees a problem: that the employees like to eat in the 33 year span
wherein the company isn't making a dime on its customers.
-Paul
