nanog mailing list archives

Re: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)


From: Anurag Bhatia <me () anuragbhatia com>
Date: Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:55:25 +0530

Thanks Jacob and Alex.


Appreciate your reply.

On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 8:39 AM, Jacob Broussard <
shadowedstrangerlists () gmail com> wrote:

While I can't provide an average, I can say we generally have anywhere
from 2-5 microwaves on most sites (with a few exceptions that only have 1,
and a few that have more.)  Our MWs go up to 1.6gbps.  The sites aren't
provisioned a set amount of bandwidth, they can use as much as they want
(up to the capacity of the aggregate of their links), which almost never
puts our BH anywhere near capacity, unless the ring gets cut near the pop
and we have to move lots of data through just a couple of sites. (Sorry for
the crappy formatting, small and barely usable phone screen.)

Thanks!
-Jacob
On Mar 28, 2012 1:45 AM, "Anurag Bhatia" <me () anuragbhatia com> wrote:

Hi

Nice discussion. Just a small question here - how much backhaul  at
present
2G, 3G and LTE based towers have? Just curious to hear an average number.
I
agree it would be  a significant difference from busy street in New York
to
less crowded area say in Michigan but what sort of bandwidth telcos
provision per tower?

On fiber - I can imagine virtually unlimited bandwidth with incremental
cost of optical instruments but how much to wireless backhaul based sites?
Do they put Gigabit microwave everywhere?

If not then say 100Mbps? If so then how end users on Verizon LTE people
individual users get 10Mbps and so on? Is that operated at high
contention?

Thanks!

(Sent from my mobile device)

Anurag Bhatia
http://anuragbhatia.com
On Mar 27, 2012 10:26 PM, "Alexander Harrowell" <a.harrowell () gmail com>
wrote:

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 1:45 AM, William Herrin <bill () herrin us> wrote:

On Mon, Mar 26, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Jacob Broussard
<shadowedstrangerlists () gmail com> wrote:
Who knows what technology will be like in 5-10 years?  That's the
whole
point of what he was trying to say.  Maybe wireless carriers will
use
visible wavelength lasers to recievers on top of customer's houses
for
all
we know.  10 years is a LONG time for tech, and anything can happen.


Regarding lasers. I agree that modulating a laser beam to carry
information
is a great idea. Perhaps, though, we could direct the beam down some
sort
of optical pipe or waveguide to spare ourselves the refractive losses
and
keep the pigeons and rain and whatnot out of the Fresnel zone. We might
call it an "optical wire" or "optical fibre" or something. no, it'll
never
catch on...

Hi Jacob,

The scientists doing the basic research now know. It's referred to as
the "technology pipeline." When someone says, "that's in the pipeline"
they mean that the basic science has been discovered to make something
possible and now engineers are in the process of figuring out how to
make it _viable_. The pipeline tends to be 5 to 10 years long, so
basic science researchers are making the discoveries *now* which will
be reflected in deployed technologies 10 years from now.



I recall an Agilent Technologies presentation from a couple of years
back
that demonstrated that historically, the great majority of incremental
capacity on cellular networks was accounted for by cell subdivision.
Better
air interfaces help, more spectrum helps, but as the maximum system
throughput is roughly defined by (spectral efficiency * spectrum)*
number
of cells (assuming an even traffic distribution and no intercell
interference or re-use overhead, for the sake of a finger exercise),
nothing beats more cells.


As a result, the Wireless Pony will only save you if you can find a
10GigE
Backhaul Pony to service the extra cells. After a certain degree of
density, you'd need almost as much fibre (and more to the point, trench
mileage) to service a couple of small cells per street as you would to
*pass the houses in the street with fibre*.


One of the great things FTTH gets you is a really awesome backhaul
network
for us cell heads. One of the reasons we were able to roll out 3G in the
first place was that DSL got deployed and you could provision on two or
a
dozen DSL lines for a cell site.


You can't have wireless without backhaul (barring implausible
discoveries
in fundamental mesh network theory). Most wireless capacity comes from
cell
subdivision. Subdivision demands more backhaul.


There is *nothing* promising in the pipeline for wireless tech that
has any real chance of leading to a wide scale replacement for fiber
optic cable. *Nothing.* Which means that in 10 years, wireless will be
better, faster and cheaper but it won't have made significant inroads
replacing fiber to the home and business.

20 years is a long time. 10 years, not so much. Even for the long
times, we can find the future by examining the past. The duration of
use of the predecessor technology (twisted pair) was about 50 years
ubiquitously deployed to homes. From that we can make an educated
guess about the current one (fiber). Fiber to the home started about
10 years ago leaving about 40 more before something better might
replace it.

Regards,
Bill Herrin



--
William D. Herrin ................ herrin () dirtside com
bill () herrin us
3005 Crane Dr. ...................... Web: <http://bill.herrin.us/>
Falls Church, VA 22042-3004







-- 

Anurag Bhatia
anuragbhatia.com
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