Here's some wonderful news via Geoff Daily's excellent Broadband blog, Apprising. Brigham City Utah is offering its citizens the chance to own their own fiber connection from their premises to the Utopia network where they can pick and choose among a growing number of services and service providers.
Some highlights from Geoff's post:
Today in Brigham City, for $3,000 you can buy your own fiber. And in fact more than 1,600 local residents have already bought in to this new opportunity.
The biggest problem with the economics of deploying fiber is that you have to carry a massive debt load and begin paying it off before much revenue starts coming in. Plus you have to invest a lot of money into neighborhoods without any real idea of how many people are going to sign up for service.
The user-owned model totally changes these dynamics. First off, by having users pay for their own pipes you disaggregate most of the debt. Just look at Brigham City. They're building a $5.5 million network and the city's putting up less than $700,000. So no massive debt load for the city (or a private provider for that matter) to carry.
Of course the other issue with is fiber builds is take rate - what percentage of the prospective customers actually sign up? For Verizon FiOS it's 21%.
With user owned fiber the take rate is 100% ! and the churn is zero.
Best of all, the owner controls their destiny while multiple service providers compete for the business.
This is the second city in the US that appears to be giving their citizens decent bandwidth thanks to Fiber To The Home (FTTH) over the last mile. The other city is Wilson N.C. and the company is Greenlight; 100Mbps / 100Mbps for $100 per month. Even FIOS only offers 50Mbps / 5 Mbps for $119.
I have already bought and sold four homes over the years, the next home I purchase will have Fiber or I will not buy it! Having Fiber is a must, but a sustained bandwidth is also required.
The only concern / question is how much bandwidth will the different providers allow a home owner / neighborhood to have via that $3,000 "User owned Fiber" link to their home. For instance the Cable companies market "up to" 16Mps downstream / "up to" 2Mbps upstream, but throttles the service back (restricts, bandwidth shapes, limits) to < 400Kbps downstream / < 40Kbps upstream... The only time you see higher speeds is the seconds during the Speed Test, as soon as the Speed Test finishes the DD-WRT software shows the actual throttled bandwidth.
Getting a provider to allow you, the customer to have a sustained upstream bandwidth above 40Kbps is hard to find. Probably because they are protecting their TV and Cable Tiered pricing plans. From a technological standpoint there is no reason to limit the upstream bandwidth to such a low throughput. It just does not make sense.
It would be interesting to get a home owner of one of these User owned Fiber links to run the DD-WRT software on a Firewall/Router supported hardware device so that they could monitor their bandwidth 24 X 7 and report back what the actual sustained bandwidth is downstream and upstream.
My Hypothesis is that you need a sustained 300Kbps minimum to get decent streaming content. Less than .05% of the American population is getting this, they just do not have the monitoring tools to see this fact. Sad.
Posted by: cbemerine | November 17, 2009 at 02:37 AM