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backhaul
Content tagged with "backhaul"
Lafayette Offers 100Mbps Residential Tier ... And Ruminations on Bandwidth Caps
Lafayette's LUS Fiber network, after recently kicking off its ad campaign, has decided to offer 100Mbps residential connections after a number of requests from subscribers. The network previously offered a 100Mbps business service for $200 -- it seems they are now just allowing anyone to subscribe at that level and price.
As John notes at Lafayette Pro Fiber blog, this is the only tier for which residential plans come with the same price as business plans.
This brings up something I don't think I previously noted in discussions about LUS Fiber - it comes with a monthly transfer cap. I cut the cap chart out of their user agreement [pdf] above. Remember, 8 bits to the byte. Thanks to DSL Reports for the link to the user agreement.
This raises an interesting discussion. Private cable companies typically enforce caps because their network cannot physically support many users using a lot of bandwidth simultaneously. When hundreds of users share a single connection (as with cable), a few major users can seriously impact the experiences of others.
In a FTTH network like Lafayette's, there is no real danger of one user's activities affecting another's. However, there is a danger of racking up a high bandwidth charge for LUS Fiber if many users are constantly using a lot of bandwidth.
The other residential tiers are cheaper than their corresponding business tiers by 45-48%. Nor, according to Huval's remarks in the comments is the monthly usage cap any different—in both the residential and the commercial versions of the 100 meg package is capped at 8 terabits. (Note: that'd be about 1 terabyte of hard disk storage.) The idea behind the higher prices for businesses is that they use much more bandwidth than households—and LUS pays for its connectivity by capacity.
This brings up something I don't think I previously noted in discussions about LUS Fiber - it comes with a monthly transfer cap. I cut the cap chart out of their user agreement [pdf] above. Remember, 8 bits to the byte. Thanks to DSL Reports for the link to the user agreement.
This raises an interesting discussion. Private cable companies typically enforce caps because their network cannot physically support many users using a lot of bandwidth simultaneously. When hundreds of users share a single connection (as with cable), a few major users can seriously impact the experiences of others.
In a FTTH network like Lafayette's, there is no real danger of one user's activities affecting another's. However, there is a danger of racking up a high bandwidth charge for LUS Fiber if many users are constantly using a lot of bandwidth.Solving Middle Mile Availability Does NOT Solve Last Mile Problems
Perhaps the biggest disappointment from the broadband stimulus program was its focus on middle mile investments in a bid to avoid overly upsetting powerful incumbent providers who do not look kindly upon competition (something we discussed here). Some claimed that by increasing middle mile options, the private sector will have greater incentive to invest in the next-generation broadband networks communities desperately need. While this is undoubtedly true, it ignores the biggest hurdle facing network deployers: the high cost of building the network. Reducing the operating expenses of a new network by dropping backhaul prices does very little to allow a deployer (private, public, etc) to better afford the high capital cost of building the network. To illustrate, I could greatly improve my vertical but I still would not play in the NBA (apparently, that requires talent also). Remarkably, we have a fantastic test case of what happens when a government builds massive middle-mile connections and expects the private sector to complete the last mile build: Alberta Province in Canada. Ten years ago, Alberta began building the Supernet, a massive mostly fiber backbone delivering 100Mbps into just about every town in the province (we wrote about this in the back of our Breaking the Broadband Monopoly report). Despite the fact that anyone could get affordable backhaul, a recent Calgary Herald article revealed that half a million people still only have access to dial-up. This illustrates an important lesson: by making ubiquitous backhaul available, the private sector did invest. Unfortunately, it invested only in the profitable areas and has left perhaps a larger problem behind for the public sector to solve.