[LINK] Fibre gets nimble: small telcos weaving fiber web

[Tom Koltai]

An interesting article at Ars Technica that counters The Telstra
Economist Ergas' position on th NBN

If small CLEC's (American local Exchange Carrier) can aford to do a FTTH
rollout - then how can it be that Mr. Ergas considers the Australian
eceonmy can not. Is he in fact suggesting that American CLEC's are
better funded then the Australian Government?
---------------------------------------------------------------
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/08/how-paul-bunyan-brought-
fiber-to-bemidji-mn.ars

Fiber to the home is associated with Verizon, but half of the rural
telcos around the country are installing it, too, a few hundred lines at
a time. The strange result: Bemidji, MN gets fiber but Chicago does not.

Paul Bunyan <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Bunyan>  and his blue ox,
Babe, may have cleared the North Woods, but Bunyan's tremendous axe and
prodigious appetite for pancakes vanished from the scene before the
gentle giant had the chance to do something really useful for
Minnesota-provide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections to rural
residents. That task would be left to his namesake, the Paul Bunyan
Telephone cooperative, which has been stringing fiber to homes in
northern Minnesota since 2004.

While Verizon gets most of the US press for its FTTH FiOS rollout, small
operators like Paul Bunyan have quietly been laying fiber of their own
for years. According to quarterly trade journal FTTH Prism
<http://www.chaffeefiberoptics.com/nwsltr/ftthprismvol6no3.pdf> , half
of all rural telcos are now deploying fiber of some kind, and many are
choosing to run it all the way to customer homes.

David Chaffee, who edits the journal, says that he has "been disturbed
by some of the attitudes exhibited towards our rural communities by
people that should know better." One common attitude: rural residents
may need broadband, but they surely don't need (or expect) good service.
As Chaffee notes, this short-sighted attitude means five or ten years
from now, rural residents with their slow broadband connections will
face the same connection issues that dial-up users do today.

Smaller operators like Paul Bunyan are trying to change that. The
company serves small Minnesota communities like Bemidji (where one of
the Jammie Thomas-Rasset retrial jurors attended college), Cass Lake,
and Grand Rapids. The company began using fiber to wire up its local
exchanges starting in 1998, but it didn't feel comfortable about a "lack
of middleware and end-user equipments that would reliably allow for
phone, Internet, and television services." When robust gear appeared in
2004, Paul Bunyan began work on its FTTH system.

Bunyan has currently wired 30 percent of users in its 4,500 mile service
territory with fiber connections that can offer up to 40Mbps symmetric
connections. The goal is to make the entire network, even the truly
rural bits, fiber-only within the next decade. Once that's done,
advances in backoffice gear like multiplexers should ensure a
(relatively) inexpensive upgrade path.

Does this sort of thing matter to rural residents? Paul Bunyan's Brian
Bissonette says that it does, and gives the following illustration. "One
specific example the fiber optic network capacity can have on a business
is Northwood DNA, Inc. This is a business operating in a very rural
area, Becida, MN, that provides DNA sequencing and genotyping services
globally. The services they provide require receiving and sending large
data files electronically. Prior to the deployment of the fiber optic
network, their business was only able to report two to three test
results per day. Today, with the benefits of the all fiber optic
network, they report over 50 test results per day."

It sounds great, but the service has some caveats. First, it's expensive
(1Mbps connections cost $36.95/month). Second, it's slow; Paul Bunyan's
current plan list
<http://www.paulbunyan.net/completepackages/index.html>  tops out at
5Mbps. Much of the available bandwidth appears to be taken up with TV
service, which allows the company to compete directly with cable and
satellite.

Still, a 5Mbps connection is good enough to stream video and otherwise
participate in the Internet, and the fiber rollout puts the necessary
infrastructure in place for decades of upgrades.

The story is similar at SCTelcom <http://www.sctelcom.net/> , which
serves rural Kansas and Oklahoma. The company began its FTTH deployment
back in 2000 and in 2007 decided to switch from being a "telephone
company" to a "broadband company." It has so far deployed 340 miles of
fiber (reaching 80 percent of their customers) and reports that after
rolling out FTTH, "the number of troubles reported dropped
significantly."

Reaching that last 20 percent, though, "will be very expensive."
SCTelcom has so far resorted to 700MHz wireless to reach its most remote
customers, but it hopes to use money from the recent federal stimulus
bill to lay another 110 miles of fiber in order to reach every home with
a strand.

Such experiments with rural fiber deployment are encouraging. It's clear
that people want broadband, even in rural areas (SCTelcom says that 55
percent of the homes it passes subscribe to its broadband offering, and
residents are always asking for faster speeds).

Other small players like Midcontinent are bringing 50Mbps DOCSIS 3.0
speeds to cable modems in places like South Dakota; the company's press
release points out proudly that "previously, DOCSIS 3.0 services have
been partially launched and then only in larger cities."

Rural broadband may not turn out to be the cheapest connection in the
country, and it will probably never be the fastest, but at least modern
infrastructure is being put into place-even without Babe the Blue Ox to
help do the trenching.




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