4 ms·
> Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate? At least in NYC most of the buildings are older buildings that have already been wired for copper and are very tou
by mason55 13y ago
> Why is SF or NY not an obvious candidate?
At least in NYC most of the buildings are older buildings that have already been wired for copper and are very tough to rewire. It's a much bigger task to rewire a building than to run a drop to a house. So then you end up having no idea whether fiber is available in any specific building. Plus many buildings have signed exclusivity agreements. FiOS has the exact same problems and so is generally just available in newer buildings.
- kalleboo 13y agoThat sounds strange to me. I live in Sweden and went apartment-hunting last year. Not one of the apartments I looked at was without fiber (technically, ethernet in the apartments, fiber to the building). Including buildings that pre-date WW1. They all had pre-existing cable and DSL as well. If there's a will, there's a way. I guess in the US there just isn't much of a will yet.
- thedufer 13y agoVacancies in NYC are incredibly low, so a landlord doesn't gain much by being able to advertise fiber internet. This, added to the expense of wiring the old buildings, means that its not a worthwhile investment.
- ericd 13y agoActually, I and many others I know would pay a significant rent premium for a building that had fiber access, so I think a case could be made for it financially.
- tijs 13y agoIn sweden this sort of thing is done by the city/state not 'the market' which makes for a different set of arguments: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_country#Sweden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber_to_the_premises_by_count...
- thedufer 13y agoWhat about the actual building wiring? It doesn't matter whether there's fiber to the building if cable has enough bandwidth to fill the copper between the cable box and the apartments.
- caw 13y agoIt might work, assuming the building can support multiple cable providers (e.g. it's not all just 1 trunk from CableCo), but it would cost more in equipment. You would need to convert the fiber to coax (maybe with an intermediate step of ethernet), and then the customer would need a modem to convert from coax to ethernet. It'd be a pricey installation and continual maintenance of hardware.
- kalleboo 13y ago> Vacancies in NYC are incredibly low Same in Sweden. Often you need to be on a waiting list for 2+ years to get an rental contract in a large city in Sweden (longer in Stockholm[0]). The impatient among us flit around on 6-month second hand rentals. Or you buy an apartment with an untenable loan and hope the bubble keeps inflating... [0]The wait is currently on average 7 years in Stockholm municipality. 15 years if you want a centrally-located apartment. http://www.svd.se/nyheter/stockholm/lagenheten-ar-din-om-atta-ar_7821996.svd http://www.svd.se/nyheter/stockholm/lagenheten-ar-din-om-att...
- thedufer 13y agoIs there some sort of regulation going on there? In a normal market I would expect rent to rise until the wait time was down to something reasonable. You can always find an apartment within a week or so in NYC - its just going to be really expensive. COL here is about double the national average, largely driven by housing costs.
- kalleboo 13y agoYeah, there's some quite heavy rent control http://www.thelocal.se/20131113/rent-control-blamed-for-housing-shortage http://www.thelocal.se/20131113/rent-control-blamed-for-hous... http://www.thelocal.se/20130723/49206 http://www.thelocal.se/20130723/49206
- lflux 13y agoSame for me. My apartment building in Stockholm is from 1943. It has copper for phone (DSL) and cable, plus fibre right into my hallway.