David Isenberg has convened those concerned with infrastructure at meetings called Freedom To Connect for many years. This year, he’s Senior Advisor to the FCC’s National Broadband Taskforce and instead of Freedom to Connect, he convened a group of eminent speakers for a panel called Workshop: Future Fiber Architectures and Local Deployment Choices.
While much FCC policy has been inward looking, refusing to treat the world as a laboratory in which alternate polcies are tested, some failing and some succeeding. Both failures and successes provide useful lessons.
Two representatives of successes were present, Herman Wagter of citynet.nl in Amsterdam and Johan Henæs Norwegian equipment maker INS Communications.
Lessons from Europe
Wagter pointed out that up to 90 percent of the U.S. populations lives in areas that are at least as densely populated as Europe, and therefore that the same economics of density that favors high speed deployments there should favor high speed deployments in the urban and suburban areas of the U.S.
Wagter also pointed out that middle mile deployments can be repurposed to other customer while last mile deployments can serve only the one home to which they connect. This makes middle mile projects safer to build, in theory.
Finally, Wagter said that fiber would be a good stimulus project because it delivers jobs. “10 percent of the cost of a fiber project is the fiber, 10 percent is the equipment, and 80 percent is the labor (although labor costs decrease in rural areas).”
In his experience, it costs about 900 Euros to connect each home, far lower than the $3,000 estimate common in the U.S.
Henæs said that a lesson learned in Europe is that nobody can predict what broadband will be used for. The fiber builders expected to deliver a specific set of services but could not imagine apps like YouTube.
He agreed with Wagter that fiber builds should be open. “Fiber builds should not only support FTTH,” he said. They should also support wireless backhaul, business-to-business service, and enable the consolidation of COs. I would add that fixed wireless, not just cellular, should be part of any fiber middle mile project.
Benoit Felten, Yanke Group’s fiber analyst, contributed to the global perspective by showing the panel where 100 Mbps service is available — and the three places in the world where 1 Gbps service is available (Japan, South Korea, and Hong Kong). He predicted that in the future, 1 Gbps service will be available across the world.
Of course 100 Mbps service is available in the U.S., from Cablevision, but it is asymmetrical and not widely available — and it costs more than the same service anywhere else in the world.
Lessons from the U.S.
Tim Nulty, project director of the Eastern Vermont Community Fiber Network said that fiber could be deployed nationwide across the U.S. now.
He pointed out that the Universal Service Fund (USF) spends about $7 billion each year — equivalent to the broadband stimulus. “With it, we could wire the entire rural America, 40 million people,” he said (I think he was excluding Alaska).
He said (and Felten backs me up on this extraordinary quote) that anywhere where you can get 10 subscribers per mile, you can build fiber. At 20 people per mile, each fiber node supports 6,000 to 8,000 subscribers. At 10 per mile, each node supports about 30,000 pepople.
He added that if you build fiber properly, the network is transparent to the technology you hang on it. He said that EC Fiber is able to upgrade.
Joanne Hovis, of NATOA, said that there are 57 municipal FTTP networks in the U.S., mostly in rural areas, plus countless county networks that serve the government and educational and utility providers.
Craig Settles tweeted a link to 10 profiles of community fiber networks.
The lesson from the U.S. is this: it is possible to build fiber anywhere (except maybe Alaska).
John Cioffi, the DSL professor, noted that many fiber deployments use DSL for the last mile, and that fiber deployments are small compared to the number of customers served by DSL.
David Reed of MIT said that Wi-Fi MIMO (802.11n) is far superior to 4G cellular. I agree that for the past decade, cellular interests have unfairly presented themselves as the sole providers of wireless broadband, when cheaper, easier to deploy systems were available and are still available — and the cheaper fixed wireless systems are also better.
“Wireless is much more than just a third pipe,” said Reed.
Reed also made a complex point about personal mobility. He said that he believes the application of the future will be the “amulet” by which he meant the applications that use your identity — your contacts, you location, you activities.
Fiber’s business model should be the support of local wireless networks, according to Reed.
Tags: fcc, felten, fiber, Internet, isenberg, nulty, reed, wagter