This is a great bill. It creates a slight public subsidy for broadband, but the total amount of subsidy is minimized by tying it to digging that's already going to be done. This should be extended to power line and water pipe construction. No reason you can't put in some dark fiber while you've got someone up there hanging new power line (which I imagine is way more expensive).
Most importantly, it minimizes market distortion. Inatead of making it more expensive to deploy broadband (which is the ironic side effect of many broadband deployment policies), it makes it cheaper for competitors to enter the market.
More importantly: we already did this. Remember when they overhauled the highway system in a lot of areas back in the late 80s and through the 90s? While they were digging, they dropped a lot of fiber.
Almost all of the major routes we use today for teleco/internet routing were laid or substantially upgraded then. Almost all the dark fiber laid was laid then.
The hilarious part? Most of the fiber laid could do at least 40gbit, thus the cost of upgrading a lot of the existing backbone could be as easy as just swapping the line cards on either side.
IMO, we may not actually need more fiber (outside of last mile usage, which this bill is directed at), but just better use of existing fiber. If you're wasting fiber on anything less than 10 gigabit, please stop. It costs you next to nothing to upgrade compared to what it cost a decade ago: upgrading to equipment that can handle 10GBase-LR/ER/ZR or OC-192/STM-64 or better is worth every dime.
Literally, if the US government passed a law stating, say, any fiber over 5 miles long must have a line rate of at least 10 gigabit, and heavily subsidize upgrading equipment that is simply too old to handle it, a lot of Internet speed WTFery would go away in rural and suburban areas.
You'd be surprised how many LTE/4G cell phone towers, DOCSIS 3.x headends, or modern ADSL2+/VDSL2/possibly G.Fast DSLAMs do not have 10gbit or greater backbones. It's just absurd in 2017 that we're using stuff that is 90s era at best.
I think the idea is to get fiber into the last mile. Vast parts of the country are still under construction. New subdivisions are being built, and people are moving there from established northeastern/midwestern states. Requiring conduit to be put underground as you build the roads for a new subdivision, for example, would dramatically reduce the costs to deploy fiber in these places.
> think the idea is to get fiber into the last mile. Vast parts of the country are still under construction. New subdivisions are being built
Such an interesting subject is this; we have freaking building codes, regulations and requirements - esp re: elec and structure and such...
We need to take a step back and make a freaking INFRA code that requires what the data line requirements to a building should be.
DATA SHOULD BE A UTILITY - just like the sewer, water, etc...
we should stop bitching about FCC this and that - and REQUIRE that construction includes the data plan as well. This will alleviate much of this kvetching.
Please give me your opinion on the above as I respect your perspective.
I think the breakdown should roughly be: developers must wire out to the property line (and if they're building a subdivision, out to the main road). The county should wire anywhere a public road is being built and bring glass to some reasonably convenient place (because otherwise developers would have nothing to connect the other end of the line to). Private companies should handle everything that's not dumb glass.
I think counties are reasonably capable of burying fiber in the ground as they build and repair roads, but that's about all I trust them to do. I live in the DC metro area. Our public sewers dump raw sewage into the Anacostia river every time it rains. The city has an extensive network of old lead pipes that are poisoning kids. The Metro was almost unusable last year because tracks were catching fire. These problems exist all over the country, and are all caused because by prices for services being set too low, because they are set by elected officials and not the market.
Meanwhile, we have had FiOS in MD/VA since 2006-ish. In that time the top speed has gone from 50 mbps to 750 mbps as Verizon upgraded OLTs, backhaul, etc. Yeah, I pay $100 per month for 300/300 service, while my water/sewer bill is so small I don't even know what I pay. But I don't see that as evidence my internet bill should be lower, I see it as evidence that my utility bill is too low.
>These problems exist all over the country, and are all caused because by prices for services being set too low, because they are set by elected officials and not the market.
They exist because the US continues to insist on spreading responsibility out of thousands of local governments instead of having a single set of rules and standards for everyone.
Why are we even building suburban subdivisions and strip malls still? Maybe if we utilized the infrastructure in urban areas (and even existing suburbs) we wouldn't have the need to keep investing in new infrastructure while our old infrastructure crumbles.
A "radical" idea I'm advocating for, is that all of the following is concidered nessesary for the society, and thus should be done by the government, or heavyly regulared (non profit, enduser owned type of companies):
- Roads
- Water
- Sewer
- Community heat
- Healthcare
- Education
- Pension
- Internet connectivity
- Banking (including loans for 1 family houses) and card payment
Off the top of my head, you're also missing electricity, food, shelter, clothing, and entertainment. Those are more necessary than some of the things you've listed here.
So I guess we'll have the government own or heavily regulate 90% of the economy. Gee, that's historically worked so well in the past... :)
Banking as a utility? I love it. Credit unions are already a thing, and we have the National Credit Union Association, it's a small jump to the idea of a National Credit Union.
This would only apply to projects receiving federal funding, which I don't imagine includes most subdivisions. Most likely just interstates, state highways, and maybe county highways. That wouldn't necessarily get fiber through your front door, but it should get it far enough out to provide a viable high speed option for rural households that are currently stuck with dial up or satellite.
They can make taking federal highway funds contingent on adopting a dig once policy for locally funded projects. This is how the speed limit and drinking age was standardized across the country.
But if this goes through on a national level it would spark off local legislation as well. This would be a great half-a-loaf for politicians who can't afford to oppose these monopolies.
Resurfacing, especially in rural areas, is exactly that -- the existing road is scored and then paved over. There's not enough room there to insert a conduit without actually digging a channel.
I'm not saying that work shouldn't be done, but it wouldn't be a case of just throwing down a pipe during normal resurfacing work.
SONET was replaced with DWDM a decade ago. With 100GHz ITU Grid C, you would get 40 channels of up to 10Gbps each. More recently, most long haul providers have been upgrading to coherent using 50GHz spacing with 80 channels of 200Gbps, further broken down into 10Gb and 40Gb TDM or PDM circuits. Long haul density is not the issue.
For a real life example, on a recent quote we received, fiber down the west coast from 2001 6th Ave in Seattle to 624 S Grand Ave in Los Angeles was only 1/3rd the cost of going from 624 S Grand Ave out to Malibu.
The issue is not with long haul density, but with last mile due to restrictive municipal regulations and procedures, and lack of collaboration between different metro networks.
I think your intention is good - and I agree we should put in modern fiber.
But only a small percentage of fiber put on long routes uses single wavelengths. Most fiber going more than 5-10km uses DWDM and that is indeed an important place to put in modern fiber.
However, most of the railway routes in 1998 used fiber that supported 32*40G lambdas, so the problem with most of the fiber laid over the last 20 years is not that it can't handle more than 1gbps. Most of the problem is the equipment, not the type of fiber used.
I didn't know about any of this prior to reading your post, so please forgive my naivete.
100% municipal internet access in the US is a game changer for education as education laws like California's CA 61199[1] requires that primary instructional materials be available to 100% of students in both the classroom and at home
In other words, 100% internet deployment or municipal wifi or whatever form it takes, literally changes what is allowable to primary instructional material content in public education in the united states.[2]
[2] IANAL and different states have different laws, what I am speaking about should be considered California specific as that is the only domain of my knowledge
"outside of last mile usage, which this bill is directed at"
How is that? It applies only to federally funded projects. Most homes and businesses are not on federally funded roads. This bill is not a FTTH driver.
FTTH is a type of last mile, FTTH is not the only consumer of last mile fiber.
The future of America is not, and never will be, FTTH. The future of America is FTTF/FTTDP (fiber to the frontage/distribution point) to a street/basement cabinet that houses current generation micro-headends and micro-DSLAMs that are setup to handle the last 500-1000 feet, speaking G.fast and DOCIS 3.x as very small greenfield installations.
Current gen G.fast tops out at 1000/1000 in less than 300ft installations, slows to 100/100 at 1500ft (about a third of a mile) using existing installs of standard 80s and 90s era unshielded phone wire, the numbers go up with brand new copper, and next gen G.fast is aiming at increasing these speeds several fold (talk of 10gbit in under 300ft and 1gbit at much further distances).
Current gen DOCIS 3.1 tops out at 1.3gbit down, 245mbit up, and there are already existing gigabit-on-cable customers getting what they paid for on 90s era coax.
I see absolutely no reason to roll out actual FTTH ala FIOS, and I agree with Google Fiber's decision to drop actual FTTH, and they should be aiming for taking over unmaintained networks that can be rebuilt as modern DOCIS 3.x or G.Fast, or deploying micro-towers doing shorter range LTE-A fixed.
Current gen LTE-A maxes out at somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 10gbit per tower/frequency band, and fixed LTE-A "modems" with outside directional antennas can get gigabit connectivity; next gen LTE (LTE-A Pro, aka 4.9G) at least doubles this.
All of this is useless without Congress pushing for more fiber between towns, or inside large metro areas (which means burying more fiber along federal highways and major state roads).
There is literally no reason why, today, we don't have at least 50/10 to every goddamned home in America. Every goddamned home, no matter how far you are out in the sticks. This is a drain on our economy every second we aren't working towards this actually rather easy to achieve goal.
Fun fact: I don't even have reliable cell phone connectivity at my house. I'm maybe the only person on HN that bothers to maintain a POTS line and use it as my primary phone number.
> There is literally no reason why, today, we don't have at least 50/10 to every goddamned home in America. Every goddamned home, no matter how far you are out in the sticks.
Because the country is huge, and building adequate backhaul to sparsely populated areas is very expensive.
> This is a drain on our economy every second we aren't working towards this actually rather easy to achieve goal.
I find this sort of argument to beg the question. How much would it really increase overall GDP to get at least 25/3 (the current FCC standard) to the 10% of the country that lacks it? Especially considering that everyone can get satellite broadband, which covers the core things people need internet for: job applications, access to online educational resources, electronic payment processing, etc.
We are talking about less than 1/1,000th of our current GDP so no, it's not a question of having a larger GDP. GDP is simply not the problem, it's local monopolies that keep getting funded to fix a problem have no incentive to actually fix the problem.
Remember, we rolled out copper wire to every home with a far smaller GDP, doing the same for fiber is relatively speaking a smaller investment.
Every home is probably overkill. But every home that is also connected to a road, electricity, water and sewage should also have decent internet. Laying fiber for 50/10 everywhere is expensive, but so is building roads everywhere.
There is literally no reason why, today, we don't have at least 50/10 to every goddamned home in America.
Where I live in the Texas Hill Country, I get 300MB in the center of town. Outside the town there are a few companies providing wireless Internet connections, but this is limited by topology - the hills for which the region is named tend to get in the way.
I also have a cabin in upstate New York, in the foothills of the Catskills. I can't even get a cell signal there without hiking to the top of the mountain - and even then, a plain voice connection, non-data, is iffy. And I'm doing OK, I know of people up there who don't even have electricity.
The "dig once" policy is a public subsidy for broadband in the same sense that a national roads network is a subsidy for FedEx or Amazon.com -- it indeed reduces the costs that operators need to pay to get into the market but there's a panoply of benefits to the public beyond those of a literal, "paying government money to broadband operators" subsidy.
Infrastructure, whether broadband or highways, has positive externalities that are hard for infrastructure builders to capture, so the free market under-invests in infrastructure. However, government investment in infrastructure also is distortionary and needs to be considered in every instance.
For example, it's great that we can get products delivered overnight from Amazon. However, as you point out, that is effectively a public subsidy of Amazon's business model, and that has negative effects too. Subsidizing public road infrastructure makes shipping products across the country artificially cheaper compared to making and selling them locally. That essentially strips away an advantage local retailers and manufacturers would otherwise have against big, national companies like Amazon.
In theory Amazon/FedEx pay for their share of road maintenance costs, via gas taxes. In reality, gas taxes apparently only cover about half of such costs (overall) [1], but that still doesn't sound like a huge distortion to me.
It's even worse than that, gas usage (tax revenue) scales linear with weight at low speed. Road damage scales as the fourth power of axle weight! Large trucks pay nowhere near the cost they impose on our infrastructure.
> That essentially strips away an advantage local retailers and manufacturers would otherwise have against big, national companies like Amazon.
Indeed -- my hope for "dig once" policies would be that they have an opposite effect on competition; namely, that national-scale incumbents (who can currently afford to throw a million dollars here or there to put in fibre of their own in a new region/market) can get effective competition from local ISPs (who don't have a comparable ability to throw cash around).
In the UK we've had laws requiring common access to telecoms infrastructure since at least the early 2000s, and its had exactly that effect. In almost any home you have a choice of a dozen or so providers, ranging from super cheap basic providers who'll give you a few megabits and a stingy data allowance right up to business specialists who can provide multiple redundant lines on different backbones with 4G backup, generally without any sort of installation being required because. We've also got a big cable provider who run their own lines and give pretty competitive pricing because of all the other options.
I agree entirely. If you're building a road or doing construction, why not put in conduits that allow installation or upgrades for years to come, rather than having to dig repeatedly? And if you have to re-dig an area because it doesn't have conduits, don't just bury a wire, install conduits.
This is directly the job of local government: to build infrastructure. And this wouldn't force the use of any particular service; rather, it would make it possible for many services to exist.
I'm definitely on the same page - that said, a big determining factor of success is the efficiency of the local gov in question. For example, dig once already exists in San Francisco (http://sfgov.org/dt/dig-once). I've had a conversation with someone who project manages fiber installation across the city, and he mentioned it takes many months for any dig to actually happen, because every potential stakeholder has to sign off before going forward.
Again, am on the same page that dig once makes a lot of sense, but there are some practical roadblocks that could make it less desirable.
$3B is pretty small on the large scale. Especially when you consider the cost of adding them later (while it may not be paid for up front by the government, costs of doing construction, like closures, do add to gov't costs)
Someone said it's not a lot of money. Someone else said it was. I provided a relative reference. Not the most monumental - but my intention was to add perspective.
In normal human terms, yes, but 3B is only .08% of the federal budget.
Also, there is some economic gain from this activity...paying construction workers to install it, and whatever the end users decide to do with it. Is that gain > 3B? I don't know.
There is a down side to this. It would use government money to create a new finite resource and there will be battles over it just like spectrum. From TFA:
"Dig once requirements are often opposed by deep pocketed incumbent telephone and cable companies, who build their own infrastructure and would prefer that smaller competitors not have access to cheap and freely available conduit,"
I suspect the big incumbents would simply lease the space and throw their own fiber in there to monopolize this new federally funded conduit. Then some of the maintenance burden falls on the government. Such wonderful corporate welfare well see down the road!
I think the government here is taking a good approach by putting down at least empty pipes, which can be filled by anyone who wants to run fiber through them. This is a reasonable compromise in my opinion.
Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out, while also giving others the ability to pull their own lines through the pipes.
>> which can be filled by anyone who wants to run fiber through them.
No, there is only so much space in the pipe. It has a limited capacity so the next logical step is to charge for access.
>> Personally I'd rather they put the fiber in themselves and lease it out...
At that point why not just have the government be an ISP an route any and all packets that come their way? See, they're proposing to take care of the hard part - digging and laying the pipe - on behalf of companies. The biggest companies will have the least trouble filling those pipes with light pipes.
Couldn't you plausibly argue that you're in either case you're constrained - in one, by money, and in the other, by money? If so then doesn't it make sense to pick the approach the best benefits consumers (which this seems like it does)?
...which can be filled by AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast who use their lobbying firms, teams of lawyers, and war chests to destroy anyone else who wants to run fiber through them.
Our footprint is big enough without us burying plastic pipes underground. We really shouldn't be expanding the amount of artifacts humankind will leave in this world for those in the future to find and click their tongues at.
I think this bill is a great idea. All of my hassles with AT&T and Google wouldn't have come up if this law existed when my neighborhood in Austin was being built.
Time Warner installed cable when the homes were being built. Then about 10 years ago AT&T went through and installed their "fiber" (their words, not mine), and tore up everyone's lawn in the process. This last year Google came in... and just made an enormous mess[1]... but the good news is they did lay pipe that other services can run cables through.
[1] I've commended on this recently in other posts -- Google isn't supervising the contractors they hire in Austin and the work is getting done shoddy... and Google hasn't been doing much of anything to remedy the situation.
They just did this to mine and a few neighbors, even though they weren't supposed to. They had a Ditch Witch (DW) Directional Drill [0] that would tunnel under all the lawns, and only make a little hole every few houses. However, they didn't count on the coral rock, and the DW broke, so they had to bring in a bigger one which was going to take a week or two.
Well, they weren't getting paid if they weren't working, so instead of waiting for the bigger DW, they started digging trenches through the lawns. They did this to about 5% of them, with mine being the last one before the new DW got there. They did resod, but it's all dying because they just threw the dirt back in without putting the soil back on top, and everyone's tree rings and other landscaping are ruined.
All the neighbors are pissed. I had to explain to a lot of them what fiber even was. They still don't understand why I'm too excited to be pissed.
Or for me, accidentally cut the copper line to the rest of the neighborhood and had to dig a trench in my front yard to repair it. I'm on the corner and towards the front of the subdivision, so I had quite a bit of work being done over the past 6 months.
And they leave a pile of dirt, plant the wrong grass sod, put the sprinklers in the wrong place, and then tell you that they are done because it's just "cosmetic" issues left? Sounds so familiar.
They cut my neighbors water main in the process, and then blamed it on inaccurate (spray painted) markings. I'm a novice, but even I could tell that the markings were accurate. They also managed to put a speed bump in his driveway when they were tunneling under it - big enough to spill a beer. I got pretty lucky with my dead grass and misshapen tree rings.
Understood. My contact issue is in my profile. I saw you might be a "neighbor" and wanted to say hello. It is pretty easy to discern where I live, but I have become inured to the risk. :)
"All of my hassles with AT&T and Google wouldn't have come up if this law existed when my neighborhood in Austin was being built."
This law would apply only to federally funded road projects, which likely carry the vast bulk of auto traffic but are a small fraction of the total road mileage; it will not affect most neighborhood streets with lawns.
But who owns the infrastructure? Would the government own it? Would the municipalities? Is this just one way for the NSA to be able to tap into the major backbone now by mandating this type of stuff?
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for it, but what are the downsides to this? Where is that explored?
> Is this just one way for the NSA to be able to tap into the major backbone now by mandating this type of stuff?
I'm pretty sure NSA manages to get access to backbones just fine without the benefit of policies that try to expand the role of fibre in the last mile. NSA has ample access to backbone fibre, both at exchange points and undersea (they have submarines). This is an utter red herring.
> But who owns the infrastructure? Would the government own it?
The conduit would presumably be owned and managed by the government. The fiber in it by the people who pulled it presumably the provider.
But here is the thing. Conduit size is not infinite. If not large enough it could get filled. I can even see a case where a particular company may put in extra fiber just to prevent someone else from doing so (and then either not using or renting that fiber). The government is not particularly good at preventing this type of gaming and manipulation.
It might work out fine, but we need to hear from the people who would carry the actual the burden under this proposal, such as those in the construction industry that will have to lay the conduit under 'Dig once', and those who currently make money from laying cable who will have their business taken away. We also need to hear from experts in that field about how much it will cost and how it is best done.
As written it sounds like those IT projects devised by people who have no knowledge of the field, who imagine that their idea must be easy, who make and sign off on a plan, and only then get me involved. These are almost universally poorly conceived, unnecessarily expensive, and produce bad results. In fact, in those respects it reminds me of another great public networking idea, public, city-wide WLAN networks (and in that case too, many IT professionals drank the Kool-Aid without thinking through the details).
Also, when we talk about how easy it is - it is always easy when someone else has to figure out how to implement it, do the work, and pay the bill.
I don't think those who presently are contracted for the cable laying work will have their work taken away from them. If anything, I think this is likely to guarantee work for some time.
Say a road construction company wins the bid and gets a contract to work on a section of federally-funded road. I think it is likely they would already have some of the work, equipment or supplies sub-contracted out to specialists. Does it make more sense for them to own the entire supply chain for making concrete, from mining and refining the minerals, to mixing, delivery and pouring? Or does it make more sense for them to sub-contact out to a number of suppliers who they can call and say "I need $foo cubic feet of concrete, with $bar properties, delivered to $baz location at $quux date/time,"? I think the latter is more likely as it gives them more flexibility. Owning and operating the equipment and infrastructure to manufacture concrete has overhead costs like anything else.
Similarly, if laying fiber becomes a requirement of taking the contract to build the roads, I think those fiber-laying companies will find themselves subcontracted those projects.
That sounds reasonable, but my point is that we all (or most of us, myself included) are ignorant and speculating, and so are the reporter, the article, and possibly everyone quoted in it.
You wouldn't believe a story about the costs, feasibility, impact, etc. of an IT project if the reporter only talked to people in the construction industry and not to any IT professionals.
I'm surprised more large planned developments haven't planned for very high speed Internet. CondoInternet up in Seattle, WebPass in SF, and others do well for multi family large buildings, but if I were building out a housing subsidivision, fiber to each house brought back to a central point seems like a no brainer.
I'm specifically moving to a place in WA which has its own fiber network in the neighborhood; hopefully will get involved with the advisory board. I'd love to experiment with 10G on a wave to my cabinet at the Westin. :)
> [The bill] requires states to evaluate the need for broadband conduit any time they complete a highway construction project that gets federal funding
It is a shame that this is just being discussed for use by fiber. If they are going to dig up the roads, you need to put in multiple types of conduit for use by telecom, electric, water, etc.
Possible my numbers are wrong, but based on the "1% of the project cost" appears this will cost 3.5 billion dollars in total; $305 billion total cost [1] * 1% of total =
three billion fifty million for "dig once"
[1] "Congress passed the five-year, $305 billion “Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act” on Dec. 3, 2015, and President Obama signed the bill the next day."
This has already been done on many long-haul routes. Fiber to the home is tougher. You can lay a tube past all the houses, but connecting to it means putting in an access box, a tube to the house, and somewhere nearby, a concentrator.
My grandmother's house got fiber this way in sleepy rural Minnesota. They were digging up and replacing all of the streets in town and laying fiber (including the runs to the home) as they went. It seemed really smart to me.
I have to admit I was pretty surprised to go down into her basement for a jar of homemade pickles and seeing an ONT bolted to the wall. She doesn't even have a computer or cable TV, it was only providing POTS. It's going to be quite the perk for whomever moves in after she dies though.
Honest question. Is there something better/faster than fibre that they should be laying instead? Seems like fiber is just enough to catch up, but we'd rather get ahead.
Actually, a single fiber strand can support over 1 Terebit per second in real world applications and even more in a lab setting. Fiber-to-the-Home ISPs today can easily provide 1 and 10 Gigabit per second connections using low cost optics on either end of the fiber cables (and some do!). When you see fiber Internet offerings like Verizon FiOS that has speeds of 50-500 Megabits per second, you are seeing the result of a business decision (price discrimination), not a technological or economic hurdle.
Just as another data point, CenturyLink in Denver offers gigabit to your home with fiber. Considering most people don't have 10g NICs at home, I think it is a pretty good offering.
IMO we need to concentrate on wireless delivery methods. We've learned by now that this process of digging up the ground is not remotely conducive to an accessible marketplace, not to mention mind-bogglingly slow, expensive, and disruptive.
The article you posted is light on details. But as I read it, the research was a multi-channel approach on normal fiber. So in that case, it would be a question of upgrading the equipment connected on either end (though you'd also probably need short hops between equipment to keep SNR high in such a scheme.)
Most importantly, it minimizes market distortion. Inatead of making it more expensive to deploy broadband (which is the ironic side effect of many broadband deployment policies), it makes it cheaper for competitors to enter the market.