You are right but that is usually how it works with fiber because that last drop to the home is a pretty expensive piece that you don't usually want installed until it is needed. The LECS usually don't even light a building unless there is a service that requires it. I was trying to make the point that $700 - 800 per premise as quoted seems extremely low to me. The cost of the cable, splices, cases, MPOEs, and especially labor make that number unbelievable to me. I am coming at this as someone who was in charge of a similar project that connected every building on US Air Force bases to a fiber backbone. An Air Force base is very similar to a suburb in a lot of respects in terms of density and utilities structure. I was responsible for the design, pricing, procurement, and contractor management on that project. We had 3,000 buildings in approximately a eight square mile area and the total project cost was in excess of $12 million dollars which equates to something like $4000 per building. Granted we were doing 12 strands per building but cable costs have fallen since this project so they should be pretty close.
That project included the backbone and the drops into each building. Between those two, the drops into each building was the biggest challenge for underground deployments since no underground conduits were usually available and there was a lot of existing infrastructure to be avoided. I would imagine that if it was a new subdivision it would be much easier but in a 50 plus year old neighborhood there are tons of unknown obstacles and challenges. The labor for splicing and cable pulling itself was provided by Air Force cable technicians so did not factor into the costs. The costs were mostly civil construction under streets where duct were full and the addition of many manholes and handholes because original manholes were not in the right positions to support the infrastructure or were decayed from being in ground for 50 plus years. I would say that about half of the money went for civil construction of duct infrastructure and the remainder went to cable and various hardware items. Yes, you could go all direct burial but under streets, that is a maintenance nightmare that you are going to pay for someday. The Air Force required manholes and conduit under streets to allow for future serviceability and it was probably a good move since we did use a lot of pre-existing conduit going from copper to fiber. Steven Naslund >>This assumes installing a single home on demand. >>In reality, if you're going to implement what Jay and I are suggesting, then >>you dig up a neighborhood at a time and drop a bunch of strands of fiber (I'd >>guess 8 or 16 as likely numbers) per >>household. >>Owen
