5 ms·

what do you think makes it expensive? I can assure you that the fiber cable itself is cheap, the equipment to install the cable is inexpensive, and even the lab

by pyvpx 11y ago

what do you think makes it expensive? I can assure you that the fiber cable itself is cheap, the equipment to install the cable is inexpensive, and even the labor required is not that expensive. lawyers and red tape/delays/time are very, very expensive.

amazon_not 11y ago
I respectfully disagree. The labor part is very expensive. 80% of the cost is in civil works.
douche 11y ago
If you upgrade every house from copper wire that can pull 10 mb/s down to gigabit fiber, all of your backbone network needs to get boosted. That's not cheap.
- amazon_not 11y ago
  Not cheap in absolute dollars, but not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Backhaul and IP transit are fairly small expenditures compared to the last mile. There's the 90/9/1 rule of thumb for expenses in last mile/backhaul/IP transit. Furthermore a gigabit fiber customer does not on average use 100x more bandwidth than a 10M copper customer. There is only a small multiple.
  - douche 11y ago
    Could very well be true. I'm mostly going off what I was told by relatives of an ex-girlfriend, who were fairly high up in ATT engineering and loved to brag about how much captial expenditure and investment into infrastructure ATT was making. I suspect that the networks are already woefully underprovisioned for the level of traffic they are already selling. I'm supposed to have 25/5 cable internet, but I've never been able to get more than about 20% of that in practice.
- twistedpair 11y ago
  True, but once that glass is hooked up, we can use it for the next 40+ years and just swap out transceivers. No more need to upgrade the stuff in the ground. As for backhaul, you can cram 8Tbps+ over each individual fiber, if you need to (like they do for undersea links). So, every X years, you just swap out the racks in some IDF and get 10x-100x the backhaul capacity. In the near term, 1Gbps it plenty for home use. We can drop ship you a 10Gb setup in 2025 when you need it.
rayiner 11y ago
Labor (usually well-paid and unionized) is what makes it expensive: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all-created-equal http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all.... > The investment per connection of a full fiber access line to the home replacing all copper or coax is between 850 and 1100 Euro (1,143-1,479 USD) in the Netherlands, all-included. The equivalent number in the USA as quoted by Verizon is in the same ballpark per home connected. > But wouldn’t the investment level of the access line be elevated by the fact that fiber cabling is used? That appears to be not the case. The investment in access infrastructure, i.e., stringing or digging new cables, consists mainly of labor, not materials (exceptional conditions excluded). In dense cities, the bill of materials is as low as 20 percent. Also, not having a monopoly makes it expensive: http://www.videonuze.com/article/google-s-fiber-to-the-home-experiment-could-cost-750-million-or-more http://www.videonuze.com/article/google-s-fiber-to-the-home-... It cost Verizon about $1,000 to pass each house, and $500 to hook up a house that's already passed. But in areas with competition from cable, at best they can hope to get 30-40% of houses they pass to subscribe. So you pass three houses to connect one (3 x $1,000 + $500 = $3,500). And that's for the company that is in many places the wireline incumbent.
qaq 11y ago
Building permits and labor is their main expense it's not really prohibitive though from what I've seen they will have way higher ROI then say a datacenter and unlike a datacenter they basically have 0 competition.

by pyvpx 11y ago

amazon_not 11y ago

I respectfully disagree. The labor part is very expensive. 80% of the cost is in civil works.

douche 11y ago

If you upgrade every house from copper wire that can pull 10 mb/s down to gigabit fiber, all of your backbone network needs to get boosted. That's not cheap.

amazon_not 11y ago
Not cheap in absolute dollars, but not expensive in the grand scheme of things. Backhaul and IP transit are fairly small expenditures compared to the last mile. There's the 90/9/1 rule of thumb for expenses in last mile/backhaul/IP transit. Furthermore a gigabit fiber customer does not on average use 100x more bandwidth than a 10M copper customer. There is only a small multiple.
- douche 11y ago
  Could very well be true. I'm mostly going off what I was told by relatives of an ex-girlfriend, who were fairly high up in ATT engineering and loved to brag about how much captial expenditure and investment into infrastructure ATT was making. I suspect that the networks are already woefully underprovisioned for the level of traffic they are already selling. I'm supposed to have 25/5 cable internet, but I've never been able to get more than about 20% of that in practice.
twistedpair 11y ago
True, but once that glass is hooked up, we can use it for the next 40+ years and just swap out transceivers. No more need to upgrade the stuff in the ground. As for backhaul, you can cram 8Tbps+ over each individual fiber, if you need to (like they do for undersea links). So, every X years, you just swap out the racks in some IDF and get 10x-100x the backhaul capacity. In the near term, 1Gbps it plenty for home use. We can drop ship you a 10Gb setup in 2025 when you need it.

rayiner 11y ago

Labor (usually well-paid and unionized) is what makes it expensive: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all-created-equal http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/fiber-its-not-all.... > The investment per connection of a full fiber access line to the home replacing all copper or coax is between 850 and 1100 Euro (1,143-1,479 USD) in the Netherlands, all-included. The equivalent number in the USA as quoted by Verizon is in the same ballpark per home connected. > But wouldn’t the investment level of the access line be elevated by the fact that fiber cabling is used? That appears to be not the case. The investment in access infrastructure, i.e., stringing or digging new cables, consists mainly of labor, not materials (exceptional conditions excluded). In dense cities, the bill of materials is as low as 20 percent. Also, not having a monopoly makes it expensive: http://www.videonuze.com/article/google-s-fiber-to-the-home-experiment-could-cost-750-million-or-more http://www.videonuze.com/article/google-s-fiber-to-the-home-... It cost Verizon about $1,000 to pass each house, and $500 to hook up a house that's already passed. But in areas with competition from cable, at best they can hope to get 30-40% of houses they pass to subscribe. So you pass three houses to connect one (3 x $1,000 + $500 = $3,500). And that's for the company that is in many places the wireline incumbent.

qaq 11y ago

Building permits and labor is their main expense it's not really prohibitive though from what I've seen they will have way higher ROI then say a datacenter and unlike a datacenter they basically have 0 competition.