RCN why not in more towns?

[robr2]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

You could offer Internet as a municipal service just like water and sewer. With low power small cell 5G, it would be pretty cost effective if you could get past the crazies who claim 5G gives you COVID or kills your children. You fund it by selling backhaul bandwidth to the cell phone companies on your muni fiber network you string to get to all those small cells.

That is an option but it still requires the municipality to develop and maintain some sort of infrastructure. But will the incumbent operators allow it? I'm sure somewhere in the agreement there is a clause discussing this.

[mdovell]

Again there's a difference between a cable provider and internet provider. You can get wireless internet via satellite but it's slow.

Kinda related but DSL looks like it's going to be discontinued. Not that I know anyone that has it but it was faster than a phone line but not quite cable.
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...any-kills-dsl/ That reminds me that the old copper wire for phones is dead. Verizon if they put in FIOS will take out copper and put FIOS in, FIOS stays in the house.

The future is now and it's pretty much wireless. 5G will take some time but like anything else it gets better. I've dealt with people that cling to things like cable tv and copper wire phones but they just cost way too much to maintain vs wireless. the regulations are much harder to deal with as well.

As for muni internet I can say that there were plans in Springfield. That is until they saw the cost per pole by Verizon. It scaled back to some areas of the city. Many major employers have their own so frankly there's a fair amount of overlap. Post covid comcast has provided a fair amount of lower cost options for learning.

Starlink is starting to look good in initial tests. I'd hate to put it bluntly but rural areas pretty much have to either develop it on your own, go with satellite or move to a more populated area.
https://arstechnica.com/information-...ildfire-areas/

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by robr2

That is an option but it still requires the municipality to develop and maintain some sort of infrastructure. But will the incumbent operators allow it? I'm sure somewhere in the agreement there is a clause discussing this.

Contracts expire. They’re usually 10 year deals. A lot of towns don’t grant exclusive contracts.
I think you’re Burlington? I only see the contract from 2007 that expired 3 years ago. 2.2 on page 10 says non-exclusive. I imagine the 2017 contact was similar.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/burlington-...-1007/download

There’s also the issue of space on phone poles. The town would have to negotiate that with Verizon or the electric company. That varies by town.

All money is cheap now but towns can fund this with tax free munis. The price of 5G small cell base stations is dropping quickly. There’s new unlicensed spectrum in the microwave band. CBRS is up around 3.5 GHz and will perform ok with rain, snow, and trees for neighborhood distances. As soon as you don’t have to drag fiber to every house, the labor costs drop dramatically.

A “cable tv” franchise is obsolete. There have been threads here complaining about DOCSIS upstream bandwidth limitations with lots of Zoom sessions. DOCSIS 4.0 fixes this but that won’t deploy for a while. 2023 for initial trials, maybe. Small cell 5G should be price competitive by then with far lower labor costs.

[Shrewsburried]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

Contracts expire. They’re usually 10 year deals. A lot of towns don’t grant exclusive contracts.
I think you’re Burlington? I only see the contract from 2007 that expired 3 years ago. 2.2 on page 10 says non-exclusive. I imagine the 2017 contact was similar.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/burlington-...-1007/download

There’s also the issue of space on phone poles. The town would have to negotiate that with Verizon or the electric company. That varies by town.

All money is cheap now but towns can fund this with tax free munis. The price of 5G small cell base stations is dropping quickly. There’s new unlicensed spectrum in the microwave band. CBRS is up around 3.5 GHz and will perform ok with rain, snow, and trees for neighborhood distances. As soon as you don’t have to drag fiber to every house, the labor costs drop dramatically.

A “cable tv” franchise is obsolete. There have been threads here complaining about DOCSIS upstream bandwidth limitations with lots of Zoom sessions. DOCSIS 4.0 fixes this but that won’t deploy for a while. 2023 for initial trials, maybe. Small cell 5G should be price competitive by then with far lower labor costs.

Informative post - thanks.

My town is currently exploring fiber for residents, but I've been wondering out loud ... from a naive position ... whether it's financially prudent given the the dropping costs of 5G.

Having taken a peak into my underground conduit, which runs a good 500'+, I'd prefer the 5g path because pulling another cable through it looks both difficult and expensive.

[robr2]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

Contracts expire. They’re usually 10 year deals. A lot of towns don’t grant exclusive contracts.
I think you’re Burlington? I only see the contract from 2007 that expired 3 years ago. 2.2 on page 10 says non-exclusive. I imagine the 2017 contact was similar.

https://www.mass.gov/doc/burlington-...-1007/download

There’s also the issue of space on phone poles. The town would have to negotiate that with Verizon or the electric company. That varies by town.

All money is cheap now but towns can fund this with tax free munis. The price of 5G small cell base stations is dropping quickly. There’s new unlicensed spectrum in the microwave band. CBRS is up around 3.5 GHz and will perform ok with rain, snow, and trees for neighborhood distances. As soon as you don’t have to drag fiber to every house, the labor costs drop dramatically.

A “cable tv” franchise is obsolete. There have been threads here complaining about DOCSIS upstream bandwidth limitations with lots of Zoom sessions. DOCSIS 4.0 fixes this but that won’t deploy for a while. 2023 for initial trials, maybe. Small cell 5G should be price competitive by then with far lower labor costs.

The non exclusive is due to having three cable companies in town.

Yes, the town could decided to offer the service but I doubt they would want to. All three companies provide payments to the town and supply free service to all town and school buildings. 5G will be a cheap way to offer service but not every town wants to be in the utility business.

Given the opportunity a few years back to buy the poles from Verizon and the power wires from Eversource in order to offer municipal electric, it was determined that it wasn't financially viable to do so.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by Shrewsburried

Informative post - thanks.

My town is currently exploring fiber for residents, but I've been wondering out loud ... from a naive position ... whether it's financially prudent given the the dropping costs of 5G.

Having taken a peak into my underground conduit, which runs a good 500'+, I'd prefer the 5g path because pulling another cable through it looks both difficult and expensive.

The 5G small cell base stations are still pretty expensive. IMO, it will be another five years before it's a commodity. I would hope that with a political leadership change, it's more likely that the FCC will carve out lower frequency spectrum for this sort of application rather than auction everything to the wireless companies and wannnabe wireless companies. I recall from photos that you live in the Forest Moon of Endor with the Ewoks. The higher frequency stuff doesn't do well with trees. I'm sure you've lived with WiFi where 2.4 GHz works in your yard and the fancy 5 GHz 802.11ac stuff doesn't make it through the exterior walls. The higher frequency stuff is good for boiling water but less good for broadband when you don't have a clean line of sight. It's a really big deal for rural people where they're stuck with "two tin cans and a string" DSL technology.

[robr2]

One other interesting thing will be the ability of subscribing to "cable" from a provider that doesn't have any infrastructure. I believe that AT&T TV is offering service to anyone anywhere that has high speed internet. They send you a "cable box" that works like a Firestick or you use the app on a Roku TV.

[Shrewsburried]

Originally Posted by GeoffD

The 5G small cell base stations are still pretty expensive. IMO, it will be another five years before it's a commodity. I would hope that with a political leadership change, it's more likely that the FCC will carve out lower frequency spectrum for this sort of application rather than auction everything to the wireless companies and wannnabe wireless companies. I recall from photos that you live in the Forest Moon of Endor with the Ewoks. The higher frequency stuff doesn't do well with trees. I'm sure you've lived with WiFi where 2.4 GHz works in your yard and the fancy 5 GHz 802.11ac stuff doesn't make it through the exterior walls. The higher frequency stuff is good for boiling water but less good for broadband when you don't have a clean line of sight. It's a really big deal for rural people where they're stuck with "two tin cans and a string" DSL technology.

Yeah, I believe topography and land area are the primary drivers for the town exploring residential fiber runs as opposed to waiting out the 5g commoditization. The town has spent the last year plus installing fiber, with cooperation from neighboring communities (W. Boylston, Boylston, Shrewsbury), to connect all the town's municipal buildings.

I believe now that a fiber connection is in town, town management is now exploring expanding the fiber to residents after many years of complaints regarding the currently available DSL services. The current explosion of Zoom meetings is feeding further chirping on the matter. I'm assuming that if the town is exploring this option, the telecoms haven't lobbied the town muni option out in MA as they have in other states.

[mdovell]

Sort of related but there is a test of ATSC 3.0 in Idaho. Basically it would enable for more content over the air. USDTV tried this in SLC around 2002 but now they'd take internet streams and put them over the air as well. This might bridge the gap for places out of the range of wireless and where wired just costs too much.

https://evoca.tv/

I'm wondering when smart tv's might have a data (5G probably) along with wifi. If we get to the point where there's streaming but no need for wifi then that means some heavy competition.

[GeoffD]

Originally Posted by mdovell

I'm wondering when smart tv's might have a data (5G probably) along with wifi. If we get to the point where there's streaming but no need for wifi then that means some heavy competition.

Probably never. 5G runs on too many different frequencies so a universal solution embedded in a panel would be very expensive. WiFi only runs on two frequencies so the front end and antenna solution are much cheaper. They'll all have WiFi 6 which brings the fancy WiFi features for high data rates to the 2.4 GHz band that passes through walls better. 5G still has the problem of any other cellular technology. Limited spectrum. Too many devices sharing the spectrum. The higher frequencies don't pass through walls, trees, or downpours very well. You have to bunch the base stations really close together and chop to power to keep the number of users on any individual base station low.


My Verizon LTE service wants me to use WiFi as much as possible to stay off that scarce shared licensed spectrum. Streaming video is the big bandwidth hog in the network. 5G isn't all that much of an improvement over LTE and it's going to have the same problem. Finite bandwidth and a streaming video application that is a bandwidth hog.