Am I totally insane for considering pulling fiber for home broadband?

[Mark R]

This is a bit of an odd question, but a friend of a friend lives in one of a small collection of houses in the middle of the boonies, about 10 miles from the nearest town. They can't get broadband, apart from ludicrously expensive and slow satellite, so they're currently using a 56k (but connecting is rarely better than 28.8).

The local telecom companies have basically told him he is SOL, and that they have no plans to even consider providing him with broadband.

As he owns all the land continuously up to a more civilized area, he was considering setting some sort of link. The option that he has settled on has been a series of tower-mounted wi-fi repeaters. These are basically consumer grade wi-fi repeaters, on quick-erect 30-50 ft towers, with solar and wind generators and battery backup. The idea is that about 10 of them with directional antennas should be able to relay the signal from his 'neighbour'. The towers cost about $800 each, and installation should be pretty straightforward.

My feeling is that he's going to a lot of effort to get a very substandard solution. It probably will be better than 28.8, but i don't know by how much, and I can see maintenance and reliability being a massive problem.

So, I was thinking - would it be feasible to pull your own fiber? Buy a few 6 km drums of direct burial steel armored SM fiber. Get a guy with a cable plow to plow it in (it's all reasonably benign agricultural land). Get a fiber dude in to splice the runs and terminate the fibers into patch panels, and buy some cheap ZX ethernet stuff off ebay.

I'm probably missing something, but would be interested to hear thoughts - even though I'm pretty sure that the towers have already been ordered.

 

[Eug]

Interestingly, someone in my sis's neighbourhood did this. They couldn't get broadband because they were in the boonies, so the guy pulled fibre to the house. However, he was super rich, and IIRC he didn't have to go far.

Then a few years later much of the land around him was built up and broadband became available. However, I'm sure he didn't care about the extra cost because he got his broadband years before everyone else in the neighbourhood, and like I said he was super rich. (He built 3 houses on his property. One for himself, and two guest houses, as well as stables for horses.)

I have no idea how he worked it out with the ISP though or how much it cost.

 

[w0ss]

It can be done. As long as he owns the property all the way to the place with broadband it shouldn't be an issue. With 10miles you might be able to get away with LR it is out of spec but it has been known to work. Are there any WISP's in the area? would be easier to put up just one tower at his house if someone already has infrastructure.

 

[theevilsharpie]

As he owns all the land continuously up to a more civilized area, he was considering setting some sort of link. The option that he has settled on has been a series of tower-mounted wi-fi repeaters. These are basically consumer grade wi-fi repeaters, on quick-erect 30-50 ft towers, with solar and wind generators and battery backup. The idea is that about 10 of them with directional antennas should be able to relay the signal from his 'neighbour'. The towers cost about $800 each, and installation should be pretty straightforward.

Consumer-grade repeaters only have one radio, so you bandwidth is cut in half and there's a latency hit.

 

[Evadman]

I would rather trench than use wireless. If you are trenching agricultural land, you will have to go pretty deep to get below the turned portion of the soil when plowing. Maybe 4 feet? I'm sure the land owner would know.

 

[w0ss]

Good point I had assumed if you were putting up towers you would be getting a pair of radios at each towers. If not you will lose half the bandwidth at each tower not over the whole length. With good radios 10 miles can be done with nothing in the middle but it is dependent on line of site and height.

 

[wirednuts]

fiber might be the way to go. at 10miles+, it would be hard to get a reliable wireless signal even through repeaters (probably work ok but you wont be doing much gaming on it)

if you buy that armored fiber, youre correct you dont have to do anything else. just bury the stuff and hook it up.

 

[cmetz]

Mark R, fiber is definitely the best solution to the problem, but remember that you're going to have to have somewhere to interconnect to at the far end. How is he going to get IP connectivity to his demarcation point?

As for the actual design and installation of the fiber, there are professional companies who do this kind of work. (the telcos themselves sub a lot of it out) If your friend has real money, he might consider hiring a pro to handle it, that will take a lot of risk out of the physical plant problem.

You also might consider the question of who maintains the fiber. There will be outages, and expert repair crews can't be hired from scratch on a moment's notice. If you hire pros to figure out the install, they can also help you figure out who to set up a service contract with. (in this case, it might be worth it!)

 

[jackofalltrades]

I believe I would just go satellite until broadband was available faster than 56k and alot cheaper than fiber or wireless.

 

[rockchalk]

Do you need permits to dig those trenches for the fiber?

 

[drebo]

10 miles is easy for good quality wireless point-to-point gear. Find someone in town with a 100ft tower and pay them a bit to drop a Ubiquiti PowerBridge M5 on it, get some kind of broadband on it, and then put a 100ft tower up at the house and put another PowerBridge M5 on it.

Probably looking at a couple hundred bucks a month to use someone's tower and then ~$2500 one-time for the radios and the tower. Much, MUCH cheaper than running 10 miles of fiber and buying the required optics.

 

[Specop 007]

You've never priced fiber, optics and install have you? I think its something like 10-15 grand per mile.

Go wireless and use commercial grade gear. You can do a 10 mile span with one good radio. Well, 2, one on each end.

Never mind the fact the fiber market is horribly undersupplied right now due to the problems in Japan. You might not even be able to find 10 miles of fiber.

 

[Eug]

You've never priced fiber, optics and install have you? I think its something like 10-15 grand per mile.

Interesting. The guy I mentioned above did this a decade ago. I wonder what it cost back then.

Mind you he probably only needed a mile or two.

 

[SonicIce]

suddenly "ludicrously expensive" satellite is looking pretty cheap

 

[Mark R]

Interesting. The guy I mentioned above did this a decade ago. I wonder what it cost back then.

Mind you he probably only needed a mile or two.

Interesting, did some experimental pricing - didn't actually check for stock:

However, I could find direct burial fiber priced at about $.50 per meter for 4 cores (nylon armored, rather than steel - so not ideal quality) - but even steel armored could be had for about $.90. These prices are for 'cut-to-length' fiber from local retailers. A better price could probably be had by directly importing 6 km drums from China.

Installation:
Burial - DIY. The guy is a farmer, so all he would need to do is rent a cable plow, and hook it to his tractor. Estimated 2 days work for him + 2 assistants.

Gigabit ZX Transceivers - $100 each end

On-site splicing and termination - $1000 - 1 days work.

Still, I take people's comments about the maintenance. If the cable broke, it would be a real big problem. Even finding the cable in a 3 ft trench would be difficult, let alone finding the fault.

 

[gevorg]

Why not WiMAX?

 

[Eug]

How much is satellite?

The latencies are horrible, if that matters to him.

 

[BrianTho2010]

Why not WiMAX?

That would require a WiMax tower to be close enough, and WiMax towers have terrible range.

 

[Specop 007]

Interesting, did some experimental pricing - didn't actually check for stock:

However, I could find direct burial fiber priced at about $.50 per meter for 4 cores (nylon armored, rather than steel - so not ideal quality) - but even steel armored could be had for about $.90. These prices are for 'cut-to-length' fiber from local retailers. A better price could probably be had by directly importing 6 km drums from China.

Installation:
Burial - DIY. The guy is a farmer, so all he would need to do is rent a cable plow, and hook it to his tractor. Estimated 2 days work for him + 2 assistants.

Gigabit ZX Transceivers - $100 each end

On-site splicing and termination - $1000 - 1 days work.

Still, I take people's comments about the maintenance. If the cable broke, it would be a real big problem. Even finding the cable in a 3 ft trench would be difficult, let alone finding the fault.

So you are looking at .50 /3.2 feet over 10 miles.

5280 / 3.2 = 1650, x.50 = $825x10 = $8,500 just for the fiber. Plus everything else.

Does he have any right of way concerns? Any utility lines to worry about? Anything to bore under such as roads? What about easements?

Sounds like a hell of a lot of work for internet. I use a wireless solution and its great. I'm 6 miles south of the central office. Its satellite or wireless for me, I chose wireless. Its been nearly flawless.

 

[spidey07]

On finding the cable, you can get cable with a tracer in it. But agree wireless is the way to go, you'll just have to get the towers high enough.

 

[imagoon]

I hope he didn't expect to use a tractor to just bury the cable. All it takes is one tug above the rated limit of the cable to shatter the strand. Also you really need to test the fiber before you bury it. Badly shipped fiber can be bad on the spool. One way to make someone's day a bad day in the DC is to wack the fiber spool with a hammer a few times....

 

[Specop 007]

Oh and in regards to wireless being a substandard solution my speed is currently 2 meg. I can play games or watch Netflix without problems. Plans go up to 5 meg. If I work a custom solution I can get up to around 50 meg of bandwidth on my wireless link.

 

[imagoon]

Oh and in regards to wireless being a substandard solution my speed is currently 2 meg. I can play games or watch Netflix without problems. Plans go up to 5 meg. If I work a custom solution I can get up to around 50 meg of bandwidth on my wireless link.

I have several wireless point to points. The current 5meg sync to one of the off site buildings is fine assuming no 'tornado level' weather going on outside.

 

[Specop 007]

If it were up to me to work out OP I'd start by talking to the members of this "community out of town" to get everyone together on it. Then I'd give Dragonwave a call and get some ideas on deployments, equipment and pricing and go from there.

 

[drebo]

Dragonwave would be overkill in this instance.

Ubiquiti would be more than sufficient.