Jared Mauch's Comments

It’s been a year since I started my research into building fiber to my home to solve the problem of no willing providers (eg: Comcast, ATT) in my area.

I thought I’d provide some updates.

I no longer have a T1 at home, it has been replaced with a wireless link using the Ubiquiti Nanobridge M5. This allows me to bridge the 3 mile gap (shorter in another direction, but no line-of-sight that way) to pick up another connection. Cost savings: about $200/mo. Speed increase, roughly 10x. The link actually gets ~60Mb/s but the wired part of the network isn’t fast enough to allow those data rates.

I submitted data to the Google RFI, but don’t believe any project in Michigan will be successful. Despite high-ranking U of Michigan alums at Google, I suspect the state laws and climate will not be favorable to such a project.

A lot is being made these days about Comcast and their network management practices.  Constraining how much internet access they buy is a legitimate business action they can take.  I can defend their choice to make that decision.  The problem I have is the monopoly (or duo in some areas) for local internet access.  Some people may have little or no choice what access they receive.  Alternatives such as Cellular aren’t real alternatives with individual software updates around 1GB in size.

If you have a spare $1 to $50 million to spare, I would be interested in pitching the idea of a large fiber project to you. I think there’s benefit as well to provide infrastructure for smartgrid and other communications in parallel with a countywide wired network. If you tie in meter reading (electric, water, gas) there could be significant savings and value.  I do wish that the utility companies (eg: DTE, Consumers, etc) would leverage their existing RoW for placing fiber to deliver further competition to supplement their electric and natural gas business.  I think this combined with changing state laws is the only method that will be viable in the future.

Local schools and counties have unused fiber assets, but are unwilling to make them available as they were paid for out of school budgets.  I do wish they would reconsider to provide additional school funding, but also to make those routes available for less.

I doubt logic will prevail here, but there is hope.  If the current incumbents stumble in a major way, change will become necessary and possible.

It’s no shock that some networking companies are having trouble keeping up with traffic growth and customer demand. It appears the current FCC broadband plan (should hit the US Congress in about 2 weeks) has a mandate to deliver services capable of 100mb/s to each home in the USA. I think this is a reasonable thing, and can be done for cheaper than most companies have determined in the past. The Active Ethernet and PON service offerings provide the ability to dump the old copper/POTS networks and attain these speeds for the same or nominal increase in costs.

What strikes me as most interesting is there are a few different responses to these trial balloons.

1) Comcast – We can do it, DOCSIS3 can bring the speed.
2) Verizon – We can do it, our GPON (FiOS) offering can deliver these speeds either with same hardware or through simple upgrades
3) AT&T – We can do it, but it’s gonna cost us. (AT&T has been a major player in breathing life into their copper plant with their U-VERSE offering/FTTN strategy). This would require a PON or similar architecture to be delivered to subscribers.
4) Qwest – (And I quote) – “A 100 meg is just a dream,” Qwest Communications International Inc Chief Executive Edward Mueller told Reuters. “We couldn’t afford it.”

The differences in network strategies are apparent. Verizon has been pushing their fiber build plans to capture subscribers, and has one of the highest levels of customer-satisfaction. I have believed in a FTTH strategy for many years, and if the FCC mandates 100Mb/s services either directly or through congressional action, we will see significant investment before long.

There currently exist a few classes of service today, I want to briefly touch on them in regard to the above….

Dial-Up – Max Speed – 56Kb/s (very narrow band, depends on line quality)

Basic Broadband – Max speed 5Mb down, 384k upload (useful for moderate local internet access; DSL based)

Broadband – Max speed 20Mb/s, 1Mb/s upload (useful for most common home users; Usually DSL based)

High Speed – Over 20Mb/s, over 5Mb/s upload (useful for home backups/restores of small volumes of data)

We need to attain the goal of having universal High Speed internet access.  Most hotels typically have lower speed access, on the order of something below Basic Broadband speeds.  Closing this gap is important to realize the value of the internet to small businesses and enterprises.  Setting for something less in a first-class economy and country is doing us a disservice.

There are a number of different ways one can pay for building the infrastructure that we care about. The most well known model is the Municipal one. Here you have your water and sewer delivered to you at some point (usually when your home is built) and you pay utilization fees for access.

I’ve started to look at applying the same model to building fiber to every home in Washtenaw County. Let me start with my basic premises, so you have a reference of how I’m thinking before I am destroyed in any comments.
(more…)

Various news media are ramping up coverage of the federal networks “cybersecurity” policies. Personally I loathe anything starting with “Cyber”, but the review will be completed today and the report will be sent to the presidents desk.  Some other media coverage are items like:

• Should the NSA Take the Lead for US Cybersecurity?

• Private sector to be play key role in cybersecurity

There have been recent media reports of infiltration of water and power companies by attackers.  I’m not sure what the federal role would be without increased regulation.  This is likely to be met with resistance from industries that see pervasive compromises in their enterprise networks.  Government networks are just large enterprise networks, protecting their secrets the same way a company protects their secrets.

A few days late, but the CSIS released their report to the president on how to secure cyberspace. It’s a bit long but available via their website and worth a review of at least the executive summary, if not a more detailed read.