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

[Anurag Bhatia <me () anuragbhatia com>]

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