This is surreal: We are getting fibre to the home!!!

R

Red Squirrel

[H]F Junkie
Joined
Nov 29, 2009
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I cannot believe this is actually happening and I never thought I'd live to see this, but it's been officially announced that we will be getting fibre to the home service here! It has TV, internet, and phone in one fibre stand that terminates to a termination box that has it's own battery backup. The internet service will be 50mb down and 30mb up. This is just incredible. Will be a huge upgrade from my current 8/1 connection.

I work for the ISP so I knew about this for a while as I saw each piece of equipment go in, but I could not talk about it till recently. It feels like this is all a dream, I just can't believe we're actually getting this. I'm not sure when the actual installs are going to take place, and they're not quite done running all the cabling throughout the city yet, but the fibre shelves are up and fully operational. I'm so excited, I can't wait to get hooked up!
 
What vendor are you using for OLT/ONT's? AE or some type of PON?
 
You must now stream all the things.

Theres tons of fiber going past my house, but they wont let residential customers on it. Knowing that its there but I can't get it is very frustrating.
 
Haha there is a transport fibre cable that passes very close to my house, it's always bugged me too that it's RIGHT THERE and I can't use it. Heck, if it requires a OME fibre shelf to handle the transport/splitting I'd host it. The service we're getting is even better though as it's 1 strand per customer right from the CO, much like POTS works.

The system appears to be all Alcatel-Lucent based. I'm not too familiar with the tech but it looks quite sharp to see all those fibre shelves. I think there is more equipment to it out of town though, what we have here is probably just termination equipment and transport.

And yeah with this much bandwidth I'll definitely stream lot of stuff now. I might even download the internet so I can have an offline copy right here. :D
 
Red Squirrel said:
Haha there is a transport fibre cable that passes very close to my house, it's always bugged me too that it's RIGHT THERE and I can't use it. Heck, if it requires a OME fibre shelf to handle the transport/splitting I'd host it. The service we're getting is even better though as it's 1 strand per customer right from the CO, much like POTS works.

The system appears to be all Alcatel-Lucent based. I'm not too familiar with the tech but it looks quite sharp to see all those fibre shelves. I think there is more equipment to it out of town though, what we have here is probably just termination equipment and transport.

And yeah with this much bandwidth I'll definitely stream lot of stuff now. I might even download the internet so I can have an offline copy right here. :D
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The fiber in my area isn't just a backbone, its actually set up for business use. A lot of it feeds some WISP towers in the area, and a lot of businesses (gotta love living in a town of 4000 residents, and 15 business/industrial parks). I *could* get it hooked up for my home business, but i'd be paying big business payments. I'd love some gigabit fiber, but not at $2500 - $5000 a month.

Those EXP100's any good? Theres some too-good-to-be-true deals on those on eBay. Just looking for something to mess around with at home.
 
Until now the only fibre in town was to feed branch COs, and major businesses like schools and the hospital. Now it's 1 strand per customer right from the CO. Some of the cables coming in have like 100 individual strands in them, pretty crazy. Wish I could post pics. I'll have to ask but probably not allowed.

The EXP100 are ok but what sucks is there is no easy way that I know of to use your own drives. You can't just stick any random drive in there, it has to be the IBM ones. They have some kind of firmware lock. I got them for free, but I would not buy them, there's probably something better that will allow you to add your own drives. The Supermicro server on top is new and will be used as a NAS. What is cool is they are fibre channel so it's cool to see fibre in a home environment like that. :D
 
it's cool and all but you sound like this is going to be a turning point in your life or something
 
It will be! The same as when ADSL was turned up, but that novelty has long worn out considering how superior services exist now.

Only down side is that it's against the TOS to run servers. Once the service is more extablished and everything I will try to see what I can do about that though, such as pay extra. If I can pay an extra 50 bucks to be allowed to run a server, I'm still going to save money by not needing to rent a dedicated server anymore. On the other hand the big advantage here is that offsite backups and any upload will be way faster now and I can actually take advantage of the dedicated server for backups and other stuff. I may even move some of my local stuff to it such as email given it wont be so "distant" now and will sorta be as if it was local.
 
If you ever get bored with those proprietary IBM expansion shelves, just let me know ;-) I'm running a DS4300 at home that will drive them.
 
Our town is getting fiber as well. The problem is they went with a local telephone company that has been in business for years, but has no idea how to do internet. Their max speed is 50/10 and they have bandwidth caps. They won't sell it without caps as even their business plans have the same caps as residential.
complete and utter fail.
 
aaronearles said:
If you ever get bored with those proprietary IBM expansion shelves, just let me know ;-) I'm running a DS4300 at home that will drive them.
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I've thought of selling them but shipping would be a killer, probably cost more to ship than what they're worth. :p

feffrey said:
Our town is getting fiber as well. The problem is they went with a local telephone company that has been in business for years, but has no idea how to do internet. Their max speed is 50/10 and they have bandwidth caps. They won't sell it without caps as even their business plans have the same caps as residential.
complete and utter fail.
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Wow that's a kick in the face. Our service will be uncapped, which is awesome. It is with the local phone company too. Even the cable company has caps on their internet here, and the upload is only 1mb. I loled when I got their pamflet in the mail for 250mb service... with 1mb upload. :D I think this fibre service will eventually have a 170/170 (or something like that) service, I could have sworn I saw it on their site at one point. Nice thing with fibre is it's practically unlimited what it can do.
 
I'm not jealous at all, I am very happy with TWC! :( Very happy indeed
:( ok I'm not happy at all
 
I got FTTH connected yesterday. Went from a 2500/800 ADSL2 service to 100M/40M service.
It was unreal to see things load in an instant :)
 
trick0502 said:
OP

What city are you in?
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Timmins, Ontario. They have a test setup up and running as of today, I'll probably go play around with it tonight if it's quiet. :D I'm curious to see what the router setup is like, I'm hoping there's no NAT or that I have the option to disable it, as I have a pfsense firewall so rather let that see the external IP.
 
I have been on fiber connection for about 6 years but my connection is 7/5 for 40 dollars and highest my cable company offers is 15/5 for 65 when I can go TWC get 50/5 for 80 dollars.
 
I just went out back to test it out real quick, I can't be away from my PC for long periods as I'm doing surveillance but for the 5-10 minutes on and off that I was there, let's just say this is IMPRESSIVE! The TV is crystal clear as well. I so can't wait to get it installed! I'm guessing mid august or so but I'm not sure yet.
 
LOL 4/1? Why bother when DSL could get that lol. I guess they figure it will sell better just because people associate fibre with very high speeds.
 
Haha cool. Yep, I'm pretty surprised myself. When Sudbury got it, I figured it was a matter of time till we get it here but did not realize it would be so quick. It's funny, when I'm driving I'm always looking up at the poles to see if I notice any fibre. :D Getting closer and closer to my place every day.
 
timreichhart said:
I have been on fiber connection for about 6 years but my connection is 7/5 for 40 dollars and highest my cable company offers is 15/5 for 65 when I can go TWC get 50/5 for 80 dollars.
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With TWC you get huge helping of:
1- Technicians canceling appointments cause they decide to leave work early
2- Rolling black outs, where tv freezes, then lights go off on the modem and phone service becomes dead( if you have their voip)
3- Out dated equipment that other companies that has long since discontinue using
4- Overcrowding on their hubs, where your 50/5 connection turns into dial up
5 and so on
 
That sounds like my TWC 'bundle' at home!!

We are on AT&T 10/10 fiber at work and are upgrading to 20/20 :D
 
Red Squirrel said:
LOL 4/1? Why bother when DSL could get that lol. I guess they figure it will sell better just because people associate fibre with very high speeds.
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They had to do something because their copper was falling apart, both telecom and tv. Now they have the infrastructure, but aren't utilizing it.
 
joblo37pam said:
They had to do something because their copper was falling apart, both telecom and tv. Now they have the infrastructure, but aren't utilizing it.
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I wish they would do that here, when its windy the sidewalks get covered with pieces of insulation that fall off the wires. I live out in the country so our wiring is newer, but it always surprises me how the infrastructure in the city is absolute crap. I now understand why so many smaller ISPs ran their own backbones into the state from Canada and Mass. Fairpoint's response to their copper network falling apart was to bump all their customers down to a lower tier. The best you can get in most places is 3mbit/0.5mbit. 10 years ago I had 7mbit/1mbit with Verizon DSL on the same lines.
 
I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.... until next year when Austin gets Google fiber. :D 1gig/1gig... time to add more hard drives to my SAN. ;-)
 
I just learned that this service is not actually 1 strand per customer straight to the CO, but it's rather multiple wavelenghts per strand, and there are boxes where it's passively muxed at the neighbourhood. For all intent and purposes it is still one beam of light per customer though and is not shared. Makes a lot more sense because it did not seem to me that there was enough ports for all the houses. They're only doing overhead fed houses though, thankfully mine is. If not, I'd probably be moving. :p

Though I can't wait to get a full run down of how the tech works, I'm just going by what I hear from others right now.
 
It's likely EPoN which we're beginning to dabble in. Our first FTTH deployment is going in a green fields project, but initially we're servicing DOCSIS and qam setops over the glass. HFC is cool and all, but straight glass is where it's at.
 
Red Squirrel said:
I just learned that this service is not actually 1 strand per customer straight to the CO, but it's rather multiple wavelenghts per strand, and there are boxes where it's passively muxed at the neighbourhood. For all intent and purposes it is still one beam of light per customer though and is not shared. Makes a lot more sense because it did not seem to me that there was enough ports for all the houses. They're only doing overhead fed houses though, thankfully mine is. If not, I'd probably be moving. :p

Though I can't wait to get a full run down of how the tech works, I'm just going by what I hear from others right now.
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Aerial installs only due to cost I am assuming? Directional boring is expensive per foot. When my neighbor cut my fiber I was talking to the dig crew. The boring alone cost Frontier about $4k to re-run fiber.
 
Everytime I read another thread like this it makes me want to move to carrier level network engineering. That and it makes me hate that I have 500/500 in my office, and 2.7/.3 ADSL at home.
 
I know the feeling. Me and my wife just bought a house and when I saw that FIOS box on the front of the house I smiled ear to ear. I could not justify the 300/65 but we did opt for 150/65.
 
NotSoSimple said:
Aerial installs only due to cost I am assuming? Directional boring is expensive per foot. When my neighbor cut my fiber I was talking to the dig crew. The boring alone cost Frontier about $4k to re-run fiber.
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Cost and logistics I think. Ripping up sidewalks, roads, people's driveways etc is bound to get lot of people angy. The competition actually ran some fibre to the node for cable and used a method where they did not have to rip anything up, problem is you are blindly drilling horizontally hoping there's no utilities, and they hit quite a lot of stuff and it was a big mess. I also noticed that lot of people's driveways have a crack right across at the end of it, probably from the ground being disturbed below.

So I think they just want to avoid that, and now that those cables are there there's also more chance of hitting them. What the city/builders would have to do is run conduit across the board when making subdivisions, and all utilities could use it. That would make too much sense though. :p
 
Red Squirrel said:
Cost and logistics I think. Ripping up sidewalks, roads, people's driveways etc is bound to get lot of people angy. The competition actually ran some fibre to the node for cable and used a method where they did not have to rip anything up, problem is you are blindly drilling horizontally hoping there's no utilities, and they hit quite a lot of stuff and it was a big mess. I also noticed that lot of people's driveways have a crack right across at the end of it, probably from the ground being disturbed below.

So I think they just want to avoid that, and now that those cables are there there's also more chance of hitting them. What the city/builders would have to do is run conduit across the board when making subdivisions, and all utilities could use it. That would make too much sense though. :p
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i'm in the middle of an enormous fiber rollout at work and mostly TWC has this giant ditch witch boring machine, they don't dig up any sidewalks or driveways or anything...

it's a beastly machine though, i think TWC is paying near enough to 2 million in construction to do all of our sites... i think the only reason they are offering to do it is because they're realizing if they don't build their infrastructure they're gonna be screwed...
 
Red Squirrel said:
I just learned that this service is not actually 1 strand per customer straight to the CO, but it's rather multiple wavelenghts per strand, and there are boxes where it's passively muxed at the neighbourhood. For all intent and purposes it is still one beam of light per customer though and is not shared.
Click to expand...

Either EPoN or XG-PoN assuming you're using the 7360 series stuff from Alcatel, doubt you'd deploy something as outdated as GPoN. Speeds will end be being based off how large of a splitter you use, if it's XG-PoN or EPoN, or if you run them symmetrical/asymmetrical. 1x64 split will net you 160 down and any where from 16-40 up depending on other factors.

As far as construction goes I've been involved in 20+ FTTx builds (mostly cell towers and full town FTTH) over the last 5 years and buried construction isn't really that destructive. I can count the number of cables/pipes/etc that have been hit by the boring crews on one hand. Most of the damage to companies facility is due to things being either mis-located or not located at all (I'm looking at you Windstream and Mediacom).
 
From what I've been told we got "the newer better version" so yeah I'm guessing it's whatever the latest gen is. Would be something cool to take pics of, I'd have to ask, but probably still too early to be allowed to do that. I'll have to check anyway.
 
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