
Ask HN: Small town lots of FiOS infra. no residential FiOS keep pushing? - jordanbaucke
My small town has a lot of fiber infrastructure (conduit etc.), almost the entire city has conduit laid for a fiber based CCTV&#x2F;Traffic monitoring system.<p>I contact the city council to see if anyone had contacted them about doing residential FiOS: they referred me to a systems administrator, he stated that the city was a missing piece of &quot;link&quot; between the two major piece of conduit and that he thought it would be another 2 years before it was complete.<p>This was the extent of his answers. He did not think anyone had &quot;contacted them&quot; about using the existing infra. for residential FiOS<p>I&#x27;ve been very interested in community-based FiOS initiatives and I&#x27;m wondering if I should keep pushing them (the city council)?<p>Perhaps there is a company&#x2F;group that can do a feasibility study- but I don&#x27;t know what to look for on the internet so I can contact them and find out the costs of doing a study like this to submit to city council? Or should I just drop it? A bridge too far?
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supertrope
"FiOS" is a Verizon trademark, not a general term. Fiber to the home is an
entirely different matter from commercial and municipal fiber optic links,
mainly in that they do not have to reach almost every single address. They
connect only businesses, government buildings such as town hall, schools and a
community center, cellular base stations, etc. The most expensive portion of
the physical manifestation of the Internet is the "last mile" between
neighborhood hubs and residential modems. Hence why ISPs re-use existing
cabling such as copper twisted pair and coaxial cable originally laid for
telephony and television respectively. Large capital expenditures are required
to get in the game and barriers to entry such as pole access regulations,
customers expectation of a bundled TV service, telephone service regulations,
customer support staffing, etc. make it hard for plucky startups to get a
foothold. Some states have even banned publicly owned ISPs! Of course once an
ISP is big enough and is one of the duopoly it can raise rates annually and
cap, throttle and assess overage fees.

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wsh
As another commenter has noted, FiOS is Verizon’s trademark for service
delivered using what is known generically as a fiber-to-the-premises (FTTP)
network.

A typical network of conduits and fiber optic cabling installed along major
streets for traffic signal synchronization and similar municipal purposes is
unlikely to reach or pass many homes directly. Extensive “last mile”
construction may be required between the existing network and each location to
be served, and the cost of this is often a major factor limiting broadband
deployment, especially in suburban and rural areas.

Your city’s network could be useful to businesses or telecommunications
companies that need point-to-point dark fiber connections, and many local
governments and electric utilities with fiber optic networks find it
attractive to lease some of their excess capacity. The economics of this--a
few sophisticated customers, willing to pay, in advance, the full cost of
connecting their buildings to the nearest conduit--are completely different
from those of mass-market consumer offerings, which generally need a very high
take rate to keep the prices reasonable. Achieving this can be difficult,
especially in overbuild situations with established competitors.

You might be interested in these two studies, both prepared by the same
consulting firm, discussing the costs and opportunities of municipal FTTP
development:

City of Palo Alto Fiber-to-the-Premises Master Plan

[https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/48...](https://www.cityofpaloalto.org/civicax/filebank/documents/48723)

City of Seattle Fiber-to-the-Premises Feasibility Study

[http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Broadband/2016-...](http://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/Broadband/2016-6SeattleReport-
Final.pdf)

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sfrailsdev
See I'd see if I could tease a local reporter into writing a story. A system
administrator that said it would or at least could be complete in two years.
The benefits of Google Fiber, etc.

Feasibility only matters if people are interested. Get people interested.

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jlgaddis
There's been similar interest in my City and we've recently "got the ball
rolling", just barely.

Here's an article that'll give you some background:
[https://muninetworks.org/content/bloomington-indiana-may-
blo...](https://muninetworks.org/content/bloomington-indiana-may-bloom-rfi)

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smellf
Sorry I can't help you, but I do have a question - how did you find out that
your town has the existing fiber infrastructure?

