[GRLUG] FiOS -- NOT

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Sat, 2010-03-27 at 14:36 -0400, Bob Kline wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 26, 2010 at 5:03 PM, Adam Tauno Williams
> <awilliam at whitemice.org> wrote:
> >Verizon never committed to bringing FiOS to its entire local-phone
> > service area.
> And what company, anywhere, has "committed" to bringing broadband to
> its entire market?
> The FCC.  Not a company?  Well, 
> think of GM.  Almost 100% taxpayer

Your correlation is spurious; these are legally two entirely different
categories of organizations.

And the FCC has made no "commitment" to universal broadband.  Conflating
a "goal" or "aspiration" with "commitment" is false.

> owned.  Of course to the FCC broadband
> means 200 Kbps or more, not the 100
> Mbps that FiOS was offering at first.
> Or the 1Gbps that Google calls broadband. 

To categorize service you have to pick a number; ultimately that number
will be arbitrary.  Having used ~256KBps Internet I can say that it is
entirely serviceable for common uses; so I'd have no objection to that
number.  [And working at a location with 10MBps iber-to-the-door... it
isn't that much faster for many purposes - the remote will throttle
you.]

> > It has introduced FiOS in 16 states, but the deployment is
> > concentrated on the East Coast,
> Which has dramatically higher customer-per-square-miles
> Probably a factor, but AT&T and Comcast 
> say they have fiber to the street, and then
> twisted pair to the home.  How much would
> it cost to run fiber that last distance? 

A LOT!  Fiber installation and splicing is an order of magnitude more
labor intensive - and sensitive to error - then copper.

And there is little or no benefit for last hop fiber;  it will just be
more expensive to repair or install.  100MBps service can be delivered
over short hauls with copper.

> > > Moffett believes the end of FiOS expansion means that cable 
> > > companies will lose fewer subscribers, starting next year.
> > With Comcast cutting of analog service market by market I think the
> > shedding of customers will continue.
> To?  Someone here said AT&T U-verse is not widely available.

Define "widely".  Numbers I have been told indicate it is available to
the majority of residents within Grand Rapids city limits and the
immediately adjacent municipalities. [Note: "residents", not "area"].

> I called Comcast late last fall and the person said it would "roll
> out" 22 and 50 Mbps services in Q1.Q1 is over in a few days.  

I have no knowledge of what Comcast offers.

> You can get a "business service"
> at each of those rates, for a mere
> $100 and $190 a month, respectively.
> FiOS was about $35 a month for those
> rates.

It would be very interesting to see real-world benchmarking of such
services;  but I've not seen any [you'd need to connect each service to
the same place - which would be expensive - otherwise your tests
wouldn't be comparative].  On the other hand I'm pretty confident that
paying for "50MBps" would land squarely in the "waste of money" category
as I doubt you will get any substantial improvements of real-world
performance once you past 10MBps.  You rather quickly run into
constraints [very possibly administrative] on the remote.