Re: [Cerowrt-devel] 10GigE nics and SFP+ modules?

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike@swm.pp.se>]

On Tue, 9 Sep 2014, Dave Taht wrote:

> I have been a big advocate of municipal fiber, but have not had a good
> handle on the costs involved. I have generally heard it's 80% labor,
> 20% materials, and the cost of fiber cabling alone, at least at retail
> is kind of intimidating.

I'd say this depends on the market, considering such things as "how much 
does it cost to dig up the street", labor cost per hour etc.

If you're looking at last-mile in dense high-rises, I'd say fiber cabling 
doesn't cost that much more than copper, but what costs is that for fiber, 
the operator has to provide a CPE and make sure there is power nearby. I 
did a procurement of this for my condo with 750 apartments and compared 
FTTH and CTTH and CTTH is cheaper, but also more bulky and requires to 
have switches all over the place, whereas FTTH means you can aggregate all 
apartments in a single place.

Cost of indoor copper cabling alone here in Sweden was around 100USD per 
apartment. Fiber was more expensive both in materials and labor, but not 
hugely so. What drives the cost of fiber was the cost of the media 
converters and the power cabling to the media converters or the 
alternative, cabling within apartments to get the fiber to where there was 
power and at the same time convenient for the user to have the media 
converter. All in all, in highrises, I'd say it's approximately 50% cost 
of labor+cabling for the physical cabling needed (power+fiber), and then 
another 50% for equipment (media converter and aggregation equipment). 
Total cost of install was around 150 USD per apartment for copper and 
300-400 USD per apartment for fiber.

For houses, this is of course very different, since digging is involved. 
Digging is very expensive. If you ever dig, put in ducts. Large ducts, and 
lots of them. Typical cost of FTTH in Sweden to houses, (and now we're 
talking fairly dense developments with 500-1000sqm lots next to each other 
with one house on each), is around 2500 USD per house.

> I see a lot of tradeoffs being made with GPON that for example, single
> mode fiber deployments such as amsterdam's didn't make.
> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/03/how-amsterdam-was-wired-for-open-access-fiber/
> - and kind of concerned about the "bumps in the wire" there.

I don't like when people create their cable plant to match what GPON 
needs. It's done because of the illusion that long-haul fiber is 
expensive. It isn't, if you have to dig anyway. The difference in cost of 
a 12 fiber cable, and a 1000 fiber cable, isn't huge compared to the 
digging costs. Splicing a 1000 fiber cable isn't huge either. 
Point-to-point fiber cabling is the way to go. If you then decide to light 
it up using PON of some kind, fine, that's up to you, at least you have 
the flexibility to change technology in the future.

> and several costs there have dropped significantly, routerboard is
> making a SFP+ capable
> 5 port switch for like 50 dollars

URL?

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike@swm.pp.se