Having deployed extensive optical networks both aerially and underground throughout Iowa, my recommendation would be to locate a community that would value your contribution as a starting point. I would then deploy physical plant for specific customers overbuilding the fiber optics (e.g. if the customer wants 12 fibers, deploy 48 selling 12 and keeping 36 for your own future use).
In my experience VERY few people in the optical networking space understand how to engineer a municipal fiber optic network - they invest thousands of dollars per customer when it can be done with best practices for well under $1k per customer (let me just say that 802.1w RSTP is your friend). You need to combine all the different ISO networking layers into a SINGLE business model (ie. physical plant and Ethernet/VLAN circuits all by the SAME engineer not by different departments, otherwise things get unnecessarily over-engineered).
Even more important than the technical engineering is the financial engineering.
Once you understand you will never produce more capital from selling customers than it will cost to provision those customers, you need to consider more advanced financial engineering models - the one that worked great for the cellular industry and several optical networks is commercial paper. Find a lawyer that REALLY understands commercial paper - then every contract signed by a customer actually IS cash and does not need to be converted to cash. It's one of the only ways I know of releasing capital invested into physical plant.
On top of that: avoid engineering consulting firms. Hire an engineer that can stamp and sign off on plans to do the work for you. Pole surveying is not all that expensive to do yourself, and there are multiple technology solutions in that space now that didn't exist 10+ years ago. The first engineering consultants I had to pay were billing $6/m. Doing it myself with a P.Eng reviewing is under $1/m.
I cannot agree enough. Design engineering of an FTTH solution is not the domain of a single engineering discipline. If you "locate a community that would value your contribution as a starting point", that city council will move heaven and hell to ensure you have the rights to enhance their town. If you do everything underground, then the city can usually sign off on your easement rights and access (plus they will give you the friendly coordination of the water and sewer department and maybe other local utilities). Going aerially will be quicker and cheaper, but it will be fraught with more potential obstacles from the incumbents. Directional boring, plowing and trenching have become commodity priced construction costs ($ per ft), with massive competition. Many underground construction firms will give you the credibility you need to work responsibly and with accountability (bonding and liability insurance).
Once the physical plant is design engineered, your Ethernet and Internet engineering is virtually unregulated. You will want specialists to set up your BGP constellation and other things that will only be done once, but if you have a good working knowledge of routing and Q-tagged VLANs and other core Ethernet technologies, you will be amazed how much you can do yourself.
(Though I am curious why RSTP is so deserving of a call out - I mean, yes, but there's a lot of basics here that someone starting out would need to know, including things like avoiding fate sharing and basic planning, equipment realities, etc. if laying fiber.)
I consider RSTP a core foundational technology for FTTH, not some condiment sprinkled on the network afterwards. Plus it is the Ethernet technology I find most typically missing from FTTH network design.
Let me explain by way of an example: imagine a typical small town, population less than 50,000, with 2.60 people on average per household => less than 19,231 households. Traditional FTTH networks were modeled much like a POTS network in a star pattern with a dedicated optical fiber to each household from a central office. That then evolved (or should I say got bastardized) to a HFC (hybrid fiber coax) model by the MSO's as they already had a coax local loop going to each house. Clearly any kind of centralized distributed FTTH is doomed to financial ruin.
As an alternative, image this: same community. You get the local school district as your first customer (or other geographically dispersed participant), where you deploy a ring of fiber circumnavigating the community, interconnecting every school. As above you over build their fiber, keeping some for yourself. Of course, you will have a peering point (or two) to interconnect 10 gigabit Ethernet with a tier one provider. You now have a ring of optical fibers less than a few miles from every home in town (typically less than a mile). Built on top of RSTP, the ring of fiber gives every node on the network route-diversified redundancy and protection. But not every residential customer is going to sign up with you, so the last thing you want to do is build out to every home. Instead you build out from your ring to those households that do sign up, where every home has a route-diversified optical connection extending the RSTP ring to the customer premise. This topology negates the need for a massive star network emanating from a central office. Literally with a handful of fibers you can provide for an entire community at a standard of engineering and quality of service the MSOs cannot even fathom. Massive reduction in physical plant requirement, massive reduction in capital per customer.
Can you dumb this down for someone who understands Internet networking (incl. internet backbone routing), and vaguely understands shared-medium networking like wi-fi and cellular networks, but who knows next to nothing about coax, and especially nothing about fiber?
What does a fiber loop (bus?) let you do hardware-wise, that a star topology wouldn't? Either way, you're running a piece of fiber to the home from somewhere, and connecting it to your network somehow; and I would assume that it's that connection that's inherently expensive, because of the equipment involved. In star topologies, that's a switch, or a hierarchy of switches. For a shared medium, that's a hub—or, I guess, some kind of direct splice, if that's somehow cheaper in TCO.
Is the goal of using a loop, to avoid the cost of having neighbourhood-distribution-box optical network switches, instead directly splicing customers onto the ring, making the customer's fiber "part of" the shared medium of the loop, and then allowing customer equipment to directly push packets / transmission cells onto the loop?
If so, why does it sound like you're implying that in a traditional FTTH star topology, there wouldn't be per-neighbourhood optical network switches, and instead only one wide-branching layer where all customers' lines terminate directly at one central location? That seems kind of ridiculous. Are optical switches really that expensive, that those are the only two options? Especially when neighbourhood-distribution-box optical switches would be relatively-low fan-in + relatively-low bandwidth, and therefore could be built to use simple low-frequency TDM circuit-switching protocols like coax's ATM?
Also, is client-accessible fiber head-end equipment really trustworthy to do TDM (FDM?) onto a shared fiber medium, without ruining it for everyone else? We don't trust client equipment to do that on enterprise Ethernet networks (if we can at-all help it); we use switches instead of hubs, and we even put VLANs in place to further isolate flows in the merged path for QoS purposes. Is the difference just a matter of a fiber provider only certifying specific (presumably robust) equipment; and of that equipment not being coupled to power delivery issues of an arbitrary host device? Is that enough to get you peace-of-mind that your shared-medium network won't be being blasted with noise from new failing head-end equipment every few days?
The misunderstanding is due to the grandparent getting things wrong.
It’s the building out of fiber to each premise that is the expensive part, not the topology or the equipment. Those are rounding errors. What is expensive is undergrounding the fiber or hanging it on poles.
This. I'm not sure why L2 is even being discussed at such a high level. I've worked for Tier 2 carriers and have deployed fiber across multiple states (transport) and have experience dropping out into FTTH solutions. The last thing you want is an unscalable L2 dependent solution that's a royal PITA to debug when things go wrong (and, they will).
IMO one of the core components to think about when doing a buildout is your total solution. I've worked with Infinera in the past for both long haul and PON solutions and the important thing is getting the most return on investment out of your deployed glass. DWDM / band splitting is where you really need to engineer up front.
Even if the cited $1k per customer varies by density etc., and perhaps you mix in some fixed-wireless, then how about a business model in which you sell your network to providers (internet providers, telco providers, tv providers...and likely specialty content, business app and service providers...who then sell to the end users)?
You sell B2B (you would need to solve for multi-tenancy), and help facilitate a lot of consumer choice and competition by decoupling the pipe from the services...
In my experience VERY few people in the optical networking space understand how to engineer a municipal fiber optic network - they invest thousands of dollars per customer when it can be done with best practices for well under $1k per customer (let me just say that 802.1w RSTP is your friend). You need to combine all the different ISO networking layers into a SINGLE business model (ie. physical plant and Ethernet/VLAN circuits all by the SAME engineer not by different departments, otherwise things get unnecessarily over-engineered).
Even more important than the technical engineering is the financial engineering. Once you understand you will never produce more capital from selling customers than it will cost to provision those customers, you need to consider more advanced financial engineering models - the one that worked great for the cellular industry and several optical networks is commercial paper. Find a lawyer that REALLY understands commercial paper - then every contract signed by a customer actually IS cash and does not need to be converted to cash. It's one of the only ways I know of releasing capital invested into physical plant.
Good luck!