What are your thoughts on fiber through the city?

originalucifer, 1 year ago

ive been making jokes about 'fiber to the desktop' since 1996. funny we still are not quite there are we. so close!

in my experience, the faster the pipe, the less inspection. its a cost thing.. when we were paying 500$/moonth for a 64k pipe (yeah thats right), you bet your ass we're going to sit on people doin illegal/hogging shit. every bit was expensive. when we updated to 1.54mbps t1 things got slightly more lax, but still, usage mattered, hence DPI, packet shaping and the like. when broadband came people just stopped paying attention.

melmi, 1 year ago

I’ve heard of people doing fiber to the desktop in their homelabs. Seems a little overkill, but it’s the cool factor that counts!

WarmApplePieShrek, 1 year ago

There’s no realistic scenario where the fiber for the street comes to your desktop. Some homelabs have fiber from the street to a switch/router, then more fiber from there to the desktop.

melmi, 1 year ago (edited 1 year ago)

Connecting to a switch/router doesn’t change anything, that’s just how the Internet works. The fiber from the street is almost certainly connected to switches before it gets to your house as well.

If anything would break the “fiber to the desktop” meme, it’s the fact that most residential ISP ONTs I’m aware of do not support SFP, which means that you’d have to get copper out of the ONT, then convert it back into fiber. You’d have to get lucky with an ISP that has compatible options.

Kazumara, 1 year ago

My father just had the electricians pull in Cat 7 Ethernet at a friends place, but they used Cat 6 terminators. After that fiasco we were also discussing if it woulnd’t have been simpler to have them pull fiber and use media converters plus a switch with some SFP+ and SFP slots.

originalucifer, 1 year ago

seeeems like overkill, but i also remember optimizing my 40MB hard drive making jokes in IRC about someday having a 1GB hard drive! no way!

Illecors, 1 year ago

All the possibilities are up to your vpn.

Fiivemacs, 1 year ago

I am indifferent…while I agree that it should be, I think ISPs should be absorbed into the government and made as a service like power/water. I’m sick of the big 2 here raping everyone and acting like it’s our fault that we got raped.

I refuse to get fiber until resellers are allowed to use the infrastructure that the citizens already paid for but is held by a monopoly.

weedwhacking, 1 year ago

Really harsh language there

SaltySalamander, 1 year ago

I refuse to get fiber until resellers are allowed to use the infrastructure that the citizens already paid for but is held by a monopoly

No one cares.

Fiivemacs, 1 year ago

About your comment? I agree…no one cares about your comment.

Baku, 1 year ago

🍬

Morgikan, 1 year ago

While I understand the sentiment, I kind of disagree with this. Cities implement fiber in different ways. Not all of them focus or care about residential service. In my city, they essentially set themselves up as a backhaul carrier. So when ISPs move into town rather than building out large infrastructure they connect into the city’s and pay the city for interconnect. That money then goes to city services which is why we have so many parks and different programs.

Usually resellers are allowed to use it. It might be prohibitively expensive for them, but there is availability. Again that depends on how the city has it set up, but typically you as a citizen are getting a return on that investment either way.

Imgonnatrythis, 1 year ago

So you get to pay for it with your taxes and then again when the ISPs hook up to it? Why not have the city be the isp? They would still get the money but there is more opportunity for regulation to prevent for profit price gouging and the money stays local. Only a portion of the money you give to isp goes back to the city now instead of all of it.

Morgikan, 1 year ago

I think the issue with what you’re saying here is that you’re assuming an ISP is going to pay the same amount that residential customers pay. They will ultimately pay several times more than what would the same amount of residential customers of your own pay. There is a general rule that you do not build fiber where fiber already exists. It is just that expensive. So if a city’s fiber network is laid down first, ISPs typically will not cross those boundaries. They would rather pay for hand off as that is actually cheaper than building and maintaining the infrastructure.

One of the big differences between backhaul carriers and ISPs is the amount of actual personnel required as well. Backall carriers don’t need giant call centers filled with customer service reps and residential techs. They don’t need an army of field services to go out and install local services for residents.

Final point I can make to that is that regardless if it’s an ISP or it’s a city-based service, nobody builds fiber networks with residential in mind. When you build a fiber network you build it to businesses because the same service that you could sell to a residential customer you could sell to a business customer with a 10x multiplier on it. After you establish business services, you backfill residential. I worked accounts where one business client equaled 10,000 residential.

In the end, cities that establish themselves as backhaul carriers make more money for the city because they will cost less to build, less to maintain, and have the advantage of business billing.