Why Broadband?  Why Fiber Optics?  Why not use existing phone lines?  How about cable and satellite?  Where is Cook County compared to the rest of the world when it comes to broadband? 

Here is a paper written by Doug Dawson of CCG Consulting, the firm hired by Cook County Broadband Initiative to guide us through the process of providing Broadband to Cook County, that answers these and other good questions.

View Cook County Needs Better Broadband as a PDF

Cook County Needs Better Broadband

The County is underserved today with broadband. Following is some of the evidence showing why the County needs better broadband:

• Most of the area within the County does not have access to broadband today. Only Grand Marais and Grand Portage have access to any broadband.
• There is an ever increasing demand for bandwidth that has already and will continue to outstrip the ability of the current technologies;
• There are inherent limitations in the ability of the incumbent technologies to deliver the bandwidth needed by customers;
• The area is far behind the broadband available in the metropolitan areas in the State;
• FTTP as proposed by the County is a superior technology;

Most of the County is Served only by Dial-up Internet Access

The map prepared for the federal grant request shows all of the areas in the County that do not have broadband today. The homes and businesses in these areas must still rely on dial-up access or satellite to get to the Internet.

Further, the copper network in the County is old and even dial-up operates slower than in many other places.

The residential survey done by the County shows that homes without real broadband want something better. An astounding 91% of residences said they would support a County network. The County also met with many businesses who reported that lack of broadband is severely affecting their ability to operate and be profitable.

An Ever-increasing Need for Broadband

How much bandwidth does America realistically need to satisfy current and predictable future needs? In the area covered by this grant the incumbent cable and telephone providers have some brought broadband to the larger pockets of residents but have brought no broadband to the surrounding areas.

Industry experts almost universally agree that household Internet usage within the foreseeable future will outstrip the capabilities of DSL and cable modems even should those technologies be brought to these areas.

While many households are satisfied with today’s download speeds, we are already beginning to see sophisticated users demand more bandwidth. In the near future experts all agree that households are going to demand far faster speeds than are currently being delivered. We have already seen the rapid evolution from early dial-up access increasing to 56 Kbps dial-up increasing to cable modems and DSL. There is no reason to believe that we have reached the end game in terms of the need for faster broadband. Consumers are finding more and more uses for broadband. Households are routinely swapping pictures, video files, and other large files. Gamers are using the Internet for live play across the street and around the world. We are starting to see the Internet becoming the prime mechanism for delivering videos to households. Of even more interest is where technology is going. Several manufacturers are working on 3-D video technology that will enhance the gaming and movie experience (and require gigantic data files compared to today).

Estimates by the experts have the overall size of the data on Internet growing from 50% to almost exponential growth during the next decade. We don’t know which of these experts are right, but there is almost nobody predicting a growth rate much slower than 50% in overall internet traffic per year.

Predictions by some of the experts include:

• In May 2008 the Chief Technology Officer of Charter Communications said, “ISP traffic is increasing at more than 50% every year. So it is not far-fetched to see 100 Meg products becoming the norm in 5 or 10 years, and we expect our customers will find exciting ways to use that capacity.” In the same interview, the Chief Technology Officer of Comcast agreed, “For the short term, 100 Mbps is a marketing advantage – in the longer term, who knows? People didn’t need 1 Mbps when we started delivering it.” [1]
• At 46% per year, Cisco makes a similar estimate. “Cisco VNI projections indicate that IP traffic will increase at a combined annual growth rate (CAGR) of 46 percent from 2007 to 2012, nearly doubling every two years. This will result in an annual bandwidth demand on the world's IP networks of approximately 522 exabytes, or more than half a zettabyte. In the consumer market, the advent of rich online video communications and entertainment, as well as social networking, has greatly increased the impact of online video on the network. In 2012, Internet video traffic alone will be 400 times the traffic carried by the U.S. Internet backbone in 2000. Representative of this trend, Internet video has jumped from 12 percent of the global consumer Internet traffic in 2006 to 22 percent in 2007. Video on demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer (P2P) video, and Internet video are forecast to account for nearly 90 percent of all consumer IP traffic in 2012.”[2]
• Professor Andrew Odlyzco of the University of Minnesota currently sees a 50-60% increase per year in Internet traffic, but believes the growth rate is slowing over time.[3]
• IDC believes that by 2011, “the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006. . . Fast-growing corners of the digital universe include those related to digital TV, surveillance cameras, Internet access in emerging countries, sensor-based applications, datacenters supporting “cloud computing,” and social networks.”[4]
• Bret Swanson and George Gilder predict fast growth through 2015: “From YouTube, IPTV, and high-definition images, to “cloud computing” and ubiquitous mobile cameras—to 3D games, virtual worlds, and photorealistic telepresence—the new wave is swelling into an exaflood of Internet and IP traffic. An exabyte is 10 to the 18th. We estimate that by 2015, U.S. IP traffic could reach an annual total of one zettabyte (1021 bytes), or one million million billion bytes.”[5]
• In its most recent report to Congress on the status of deployment of advanced telecommunications networks, the FCC stated: “Providers assert that within the next several years, consumers can expect connections providing symmetrical service at 10 to 20 Mbps. Within five to ten years, these connection speeds should increase to 100 Mbps, and some providers predict that premium services may provide consumers with 1 gigabit per second (Gbps) access within a decade. Even higher-speed connections may be deployed to businesses, with some providers predicting the availability of 10 Gbps business services”. [6]

If the growth rates area as fast as predicted by this diverse group of experts, then all would agree that DSL and cable modems, as they exist today, will be unable to supply households with the bandwidth needed to fully utilize the services and benefits of the Internet. Only fiber can give households access to full web functionality within a few years from now.

Inherent Limitations of Copper Technologies

While some of the proposed area is covered today by DSL or cable modems, these technologies have inherent limitations on the amount of bandwidth that can be delivered. Following is a discussion on the limitations of telephone and cable company technologies.

Limitations of Cable Networks

Mediacom in Grand Marais does not currently offer broadband. We have to suppose this is due to bandwidth limitations within the system, meaning that most of the system bandwidth is needed to deliver cable channels. However, Mediacom could upgrade the network to provide broadband service using cable modem technology. Even should they do this, there are some inherent limitations on cable broadband.

Cable systems were originally designed to deliver through sealed coaxial cable lines the same radio-frequency signals that residents with good reception could obtain from television broadcast towers over the air. Over the years, cable operators have upgraded their networks to Hybrid Fiber Coaxial (HFC) systems by replacing some of their coaxial cables and associated facilities with fiber optic lines and electronics. They have also increased the bandwidth capacities of their systems and today suburban systems range between 750 MHz to 1 GHz in system bandwidth.

Cable systems that provide cable modem service use multiple cable television channel (6MHz) for downstream signals and one channel for upstream signals. At the cable company headend, a cable modem termination system (CMTS) uses these channels to create a virtual local area network with cable modems attached to computers at subscriber residences. Depending on the transmission technology used, cable operators can theoretically send up to 36 Mbps per channel downstream from the cable headend, and users can send up to 10 Mbps per channel upstream. This upstream and downstream bandwidth must, however, be shared by all active users connected to a network segment called a “node.” The number of customers sharing bandwidth in a node has a significant effect on the performance and if nodes are too large then bandwidth in cable systems drops during peak usage times. The typical cable node is around 500 homes today, so at best the 500 homes can share about 36 Mbps downstream. If congestion occurs because of high usage, the cable operator’s solution is to reduce the size of the node. This involves building additional fiber and rerouting coaxial cable to feed smaller groups of homes.

Cable systems are capable of delivering significant amounts of bandwidth to customers. However, there is a tradeoff in every cable system between programming channels and data bandwidth. Cable systems today are under tremendous pressure to offer more high definition (HD) programming. HD channels require about three times as much bandwidth as normal cable channels and cable providers have to work very hard to make room for additional HD channels. Cable systems could offer faster data speeds, but only at the sacrifice of channels.

Another issue for cable providers to provide faster data services is the availability of affordable cable modems. The cable TV providers have all banded together nationwide and created a firm that they all use to do research and product development – called Cable Labs. Cable Labs develops the specifications for cable modems and all of the cable providers have agreed to only use products that are Cable Labs compliant. Through this process the cable providers have been able to really get low prices for such things as cable modems and settop boxes. Today most of the cable companies in the country offer cable modem speeds slower than 10 Mbps. Thus, the cable modems for those kinds of speeds are inexpensive due to mass production. Only a few markets offer faster speeds and with faster speeds come more expensive cable modem boxes.

Another issue to consider with cable modem service is that it is often not available for businesses. This is in large part a historical phenomenon – cable operators typically did not build their systems out to commercial areas because few, if any, businesses subscribed to cable television service. Most cable companies are now willing to extend their systems to commercial establishments if they could solve an even more significant problem – most cable systems do not currently have the bandwidth to support widespread business usage of their systems. The shared nature of providing data to large nodes means that a cable company can’t handle a few customers with large data needs without sacrificing data speeds for other customers on the same node. Because of this, even when businesses can get cable modem service they cannot perform routine functions such as web hosting or other services needing dedicated constant bandwidth. This may change over time, but it is not likely to change in the near future.

Cable companies are currently making big hay out of a shift to Docsis 3.0. What Docsis 3.0 does in a nutshell is to allow them to more easily bond channels together to make one big data pipe to neighborhoods rather than a series of small ones. This gives them some efficiency of scale, but it does not increase overall system bandwidth an iota. DOCSIS 3.0 does not solve the inherent trade-off between programming channels and data channels. It makes the data channels a little more efficient but does not increase the amount of data available to a customer node

Furthermore, DOCSIS 3.0 does not fix the upstream problem inherent in cable systems. At best a cable system can allocate only 10 Mbps for all upstream from an entire node. This is a limitation imposed by the HFC standards. In real life this equates customer upload speeds of 500 to 700 Kbps at peak performance and slower during peak times. With the channel bonding from DOCSIS 3.0 cable companies will get improved upstream efficiency at the system level, but they cannot overcome the overall problem that HFC allocates a tiny sliver of bandwidth to the upstream.

The large cable companies are currently engaged in a public relations campaign touting the advantages of DOCSIS 3.0 and they would have you think this makes them competitive with fiber. This is more marketing by rhetoric than marketing reality because DOCSIS 3.0 will have marginal impact on the average cable modem customer. In fact, it could decrease the performance for the average customer. Expect cable companies to market 100 Mbps modems to a handful of customers. As they give faster bandwidth to the customers willing to pay for it, the speeds achieved by the other customers on the same node will decrease. And all customers on the node will continue to see slow upload speeds.

Limitations of DSL

DSL (Digital Subscriber Lines) is the technology used by Qwest in Grand Marais and by Century in the Grand Portage area to deliver broadband.

DSL is a technology that allows the delivery of data at high-speed over existing copper telephone wires. It is a proven technology that has been in use for approximately ten years. Where available, DSL is typically offered in a number of different bandwidths, which allows users to select the bandwidth that it needs and can afford. DSL service generally uses only a portion of a copper line’s capacity and thus permits users to make telephone calls at the same time that they are working on the Internet.

DSL is not readily available everywhere for a number of reasons. First, DSL is subject to distance limitations. DSL can reasonably be served up to 18,000 feet from a central office switch in the most favorable conditions, but poor copper wiring in most exchanges realistically makes this limit closer to 10,000 to 12,000 feet, depending on the brand of equipment. This distance limitation is further shortened in reality, since it is measured in cable feet rather than “as the crow flies” in a straight line. The copper wiring coming out of a central office often wanders up and down streets and rarely runs in a straight line to reach areas away from the switch. Realistically, in many exchanges, this 10,000 to 12,000 foot distance limitation creates a potential delivery circle of only about a mile-and-one-half around the DSL hub.

There are two solutions to DSL’s distance limitations. First, as newer generations of DSLAMs are developed to deliver higher bandwidths, the DSL delivery range will increase. DSL bandwidth delivery over copper is not linear, meaning that the amount of bandwidth that can be delivered drops off quickly with distance from the transmission point. A 1-Meg modem today might fall off to a 128k signal at 10,000 feet; a 5-Meg modem might be able to deliver 1 Meg at that same distance. Over time, the distance issue might be overcome to some degree through improved technology.

The second solution to DSL distance limitations results from what are referred to as “remote” or “mini” DSLAMs. This technology allows DSLAMs, or DSL hubs, to be moved into more remote locations in the network – e.g., to the cable junction in front of a housing development or a business park. From this remote DSL origination point, the DSL signal could still be delivered for the same distance, but this distance is now measured from the new field-installed hardware and not from the central office.

The second problem with DSL delivery is the existing copper network. Copper plant was not originally built with DSL in mind, and there are many places in current networks where DSL will not work, regardless of the distance from the central office. In some cases, the copper is too small in gauge or thickness, since the thicker the copper the better that DSL will work. In other cases, there are signal leaks into the system or there are other reasons why some copper pairs will not readily accept DSL signals. There is very little that can be done to fix stray “noise” problems, other than to replace the portions of the network that has such problems. Replacement is an expensive solution that often means re-wiring an entire neighborhood.

Third, DSL is a copper-only technology. This means that if any path to a customer includes even one foot of non-copper cable, such as fiber, then DSL will not function. For many years, Verizon and other telephone companies have been building new feeder cables using fiber. Feeder cables are large capacity cables that carry signals from the central office to large neighborhood clusters of homes and businesses. Fiber is cheaper and more reliable for this use, and almost all new subdivisions and business parks built in the last ten years are fed with fiber feeder cables. Additionally, phone companies have been replacing older copper feeder cables with fiber cables as they do routine upgrades. This has led to the strange phenomenon that the newer the neighborhood, the less likely that DSL will be available. Older neighborhoods that are built throughout with copper may be good candidates for DSL, whereas in newer areas with fiber feeds, DSL will not work without field deployment of the DSLAMs, a more costly way to provide service. This phenomenon is not favorable to rapidly growing communities in which a large percentage of homes and businesses have been built in the last ten years.

Broadband in these Areas Lags the Surrounding Communities

The County has been already left behind and is a broadband ‘have-not’. There is a huge broadband gap between the data speeds available in the County today and the broadband available in much of the rest of Minnesota. For example, the twin cities, which are a five hour drive from the County are served mostly by Qwest and Comcast. Consider the following residential broadband products that are available in the twin cities today:

Residential

Qwest 1.5 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 34.99[7]

Qwest 7 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 41.99

Qwest 12 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 51.99

Qwest 20 Mbps Download / 896 Kbps Upload $ 64.99

Comcast 1 Mbps Download / 384 Kbps Upload $ 24.95

Comcast 15 Mbps Download / 3 Mbps Upload $ 42.95

Comcast 20 Mbps Download / 4 Mbps Upload $ 52.95

Comcast 30 Mbps Download / 7 Mbps Upload $ 62.95

Comcast 50 Mbps Download / 10 Mbps Upload $ 99.95

In Grand Marais only the first two Qwest products on the list above are offered. These are first generation DSL products and Grant Marais has not been upgraded by Qwest to offer the faster speeds. Mediacom offers no cable modem service in Grand Marais.

For people outside of the DSL area, the only broadband product available is satellite service. There are several satellite providers, but the most common one in the County is Wild Blue. One can see from the following prices that satellite service costs more and delivers far less bandwidth.

Wild Blue Satellite Service

512 Kbps Download, 128 Kbps Upload $54.95

1 Mbps Download, 200 Kbps Upload $69.95

1.5 Mbps Download, 256 Kbps Upload $89.95

These products require a two year contract, and also come with very low caps on the total amount of download or upload that can be used during a month.

Fiber is a Superior Technology

It is interesting to see executives at cable and telephone companies talking about 100 Mbps and 1 Gbps connectivity during the next decade, since their current technologies have no hope of ever delivering those kinds of speeds. The following table has been prepared by CCG Consulting, the County’s broadband consultant, and shows CCG’s best estimate at the commercial bandwidth products that are available today and into the future with the various technologies. It is clear that fiber is today, and will remain for the foreseeable future as the most robust technology.

Data Download Delivery Speeds

As the above chart shows, fiber already is vastly superior to the other technologies and also has room for gigantic growth in the size of the data pipe being delivered to customers. The same is not true for the other technologies. Fiber delivers far more bandwidth than the other technologies today and promises to be far better moving into the future.

[1] Brian Santo, “It’s the End of Cable as We Know It (And We Feel Fine),” CED (May 1, 2008), http://www.cedmagazine.com/Article-End-of-Cable-As-We-Know-It.aspx.

[2] Cisco, “Global IP Traffic Forecast and Methodology, 2007-2012,” http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2008/prod_061608b.html.

[3] Andrew Odlyzco, Minnesota Internet Traffic Studies Home Page. http://www.dtc.umn.edu/mints/home.php.

[4] IDC, “White Paper: The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe” (March 2008) http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe.pdf.

[5] Bret Swanson and George Gilder, “Estimating the Exaflood: The Impact of Video and Rich Media on the Internet: A zettabyte by 2015?” Discovery Institute at 2 (January 2008). http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/filesDB-download.php?command=download&id=1475.

[6] FCC, Fourth Report to Congress on the Availability of Advanced Telecommunications Capabilities in the United States, p. 45.

[7] Qwest rate are $5 per month higher than shown if a customer doesn’t take telephone service.

[8] DSL requires bonded pairs, that is, using more than one copper pair to achieve the speeds listed in the table. The problem in the real network is that very few neighborhoods have been built with the extra copper pairs needed to provide this service to more than a few customers.

[9] Wi-Max can deliver very large bandwidth to a small number of locations. The speeds cited in this table represent the kind of speeds that can be delivered universally to all customers in a large area.

So just how big is this project and what does it consist of? Here's a brief outline of the parts from the preliminary engineering report.

View Engineering and Technology Plan as a PDF

Engineering and Technology Plan

The proposed broadband project consists of building fiber on every street and road in the County and passing virtually every home and business.

Fiber-to-the-Premise (FTTP) Technology Used

This project envisions building a fiber optic system throughout Cook County. The fiber would extend past every home and business in the County and would build a fiber drop to any customer taking service. For a tutorial on fiber cable see the web site for the Fiber Optic Association. This web site explains everything about fiber from a glossary of terms to how it’s manufactured and used.

The technology to be used for this network is a Passive Optical Network (PON) technology. The fiber technology is called passive because there is a physical split of the fiber used to reach each house that does not require any electronics (thus, passive).

In designing a PON network there are several different network architectures in use in various systems around the world. The first design issue to consider is whether to centralize or distribute the electronics in the network. The second design issue looks at using a star versus a ring topology. A third issue of the design is to determine whether to use distributed splitter locations or local convergence points for splitter locations.

Large communities or rural deployments typically require huts distributed throughout the network to house electronics. In a larger network, a design will place huts in several locations that will contain electronics that will light the fibers that will be split and assigned to each home. However, in a smaller town, it’s possible to have a design where the electronics can all be placed in the headend building.

In terms of a network topology, a PON network can built using a star design, where the fibers all go from the head-end directly to each electronics hut, or using a ring design, where there is some sort of a circular fiber path throughout the community from which the fiber goes to each electronics hut.

A ring design is used when the town is large enough because a ring adds one added layer of security to the network in that a fiber cut anywhere on the ring would not disrupt service on the ring. Rings are self-healing, meaning that transport on the ring can travel both clockwise or counterclockwise, this bypassing a fiber cut.

When considering splitter location design, there are two options – a) Distributed Splitter locations where a PON fiber is split at several locations and thus splitters are distributed along the PON fiber and b) Local Convergence Point splitter locations where all PON fibers feeding a certain geographic area are located at the same cabinet. A distributed splitter design works best when a FTTH provider is not in a competitive environment and will supply service to all homes and businesses in the service area. In this situation, the provider knows that he will utilize every fiber to every home and thus utilize the PON fibers to their maximum capacity. A Local Convergence Point design is used in a competitive environment where the FTTH operator does not know who will take his service or where that customer be located. In this case the Local Convergence Point allows the operator to utilize his PON fibers (and subsequently his PON electronics) very efficiently by allowing the operator to fill up each PON fiber (and PON splitter) as customers are added to the network. Thus, the Local Convergence Point design allows a competitive FTTH operator the same benefits as that of a non-competitive FTTH operator, by adding splitter cabinets in each neighborhood and dedicating individual fibers from each home to this cabinet. Splitters are added to the inside of the cabinet only as subscribers grow.

In the Cook County network the following basic design parameters were used:

• It was necessary because of the large size of the County to deploy PONs huts. The network design consists of a headend plus six huts scattered around the County. These huts are needed for several reasons. First, the use of huts decreases the size of the fibers needed to go from the headend to the various neighborhoods. Second, a PONs network has distance limitations, and the use of huts makes certain that every customer can get a full non-degraded signal.
• In Cook County it was necessary to use a star topography, meaning that there is a fiber route from the headend to each neighborhood. A star topography is needed in Cook County due to the nature of the road system. This is a County where a large percentage of roads end at water. In most of the US roads are interconnected in some sort of loose grid, but in Cook County the joke is that most roads lead to nowhere! It was not possible to design a ring that could follow the existing roads in the County.
• The splitter design chosen is a local convergence point design and consists of major fiber cables, called feeder fibers that would extend from a head-end to the local convergence point in each neighborhood where the local fibers are split to get to homes and businesses.

Fiber Network Design

CCG Consulting designed a fiber network that is capable of bringing fiber to every home and business in the County. Following is a description of the major assumptions used in designing the network:

The network design was accomplished in the following manner:

• Arrowhead Electric and the County supplied GIS files showing the location of all roads and of all buildings in the County.
• CCG Consulting visited the County to look at local issues that would affect design.
• CCG looked at all of the specific factors in the County and determined the most appropriate network design, as described above. Some of the issues that affected design include:
  • In the area served by Arrowhead Electric there are 4,068 residential electric meters today homes and 174 business electric meters. In Grand Marais, where Arrowhead does not serve today there are 1,332 homes and 149 businesses. Some homes have two electric meters, so an actual count of buildings is 5,208 residences and 323 businesses.
  • The average drop length is the distance between the splice point at the fiber cable and each home or business (which is different than the direct distance between the fiber in front of a home and the house. In the rural Arrowhead areas the residential drop lengths were estimated to be an average of 845 feet. The average business drop in the rural areas is estimated at 664 feet. In Grand Marais the average drop length for both homes and businesses is estimated at 450 feet. Arrowhead Electric was able to supply GIS maps, and loop lengths were determined by looking at a sample of actual homes and businesses.
  • For the primary route miles of the fiber network, 63%, or 325 miles can be placed upon existing aerial poles. The other 37%, or 187 miles must be buried underground. These are the same places where the electric wires are currently underground. The total primary network is 512 miles of fiber.
  • There is an additional 87 miles of fiber needed to reach pockets of homes. This is referred to in the engineering study as secondary miles. This consists of 62 miles of aerial fiber on existing pole routes and 25 miles of underground buried fiber.
  • For the routes that will be placed on existing poles, Arrowhead currently owns 8,652 poles in the rural parts of the County. In Grand Marais the poles are owned by the municipal electric utility which owns 450 poles. In both cases there will be a pole attachment agreement for the new business to rent space on the existing poles. A very small number of poles are owned by Great River Electric.
  • Most of the existing poles have enough space to add fiber. In Grand Marais some of the poles will require make-ready work or even replacement due to the crowded nature of the existing wires. For much of the rural area the poles are shared between Arrowhead Electric and either Qwest or Century Telephone, but many poles carry only Arrowhead electric cables. We have estimated that about 10% of the poles will have to be replaced, since some of the current poles are short or too full of existing wires, and adding fiber would not allow for adequate road clearance.
  • The fiber used in the design is ADSS (All-Dieletric Self-Supporting) and will conform with NESC 1% sag specifications.
  • All splicing will be fusion spliced in the field.
  • The network has been designed by dividing the County into specific service areas to be served from huts placed in the neighborhoods. The design anticipates that there will be one headend location and six huts. A few of these huts, but not all, will be placed near to existing electric substations.
  • These huts will contain powered electronics that would include an OLT cabinet and the fiber electronics needed to create the link back to the headend. To the extent possible, the huts will also contain fiber splitters where a customer fiber is ‘split’ to serve up to 32 homes or businesses. These huts must be heated and cooled to maintain an appropriate operating temperature for the electronics.
  • In addition to the huts, a few neighborhoods will need standalone LCP cabinets that contain fiber splitters. These splitters are the devices that physically splice a single fiber pair to be able to pass to as many as 32 homes or businesses. These splitters do not require power and these cabinets are not powered. We estimate the need for seven LCP cabinets which include 5 in Grand Marais, 1 in Cascade and 1 at Tait Lake.
  • Today, in rural areas the electric meters are placed at the road and are not at homes. The fiber ONTs must be placed on homes and fiber must be run to each home or business.
  • There is an existing submarine electric cable under Clearwater Lake. For this design we have chosen to build on existing poles and go around the lake rather than build a more costly submarine fiber cable.
  • In many rural areas there is heavy bedrock close to the surface that make it impossible to bury cable in the standard industry way. In this study we assumed that the cable would be buried as deeply as possible, often only to 12 inches, and then covered with concrete. This is the method used by Arrowhead to bury electric cables. Nearly 40% of the cables in park land and in the northern part of the County will require this construction method.
• CCG used an engineering program that helped to design a network that would meet the design criteria. CCG had to first manually determine the best location of neighborhood huts. From there, the engineering program determined the size of fiber needed to be built on each road and street in the County.
• A map of the proposed network was produced.
• A parts list of needed network components was established. For example, the parts list includes such things as the number of feet of each size of fiber required.

Customer Electronics

Following are the basic elements of the electronics used in a Passive Optical fiber network. These terms are the industry lingo that is used by the manufacturers of the equipment.

1. Optical Line Terminal (OLT). This is the device that lights the fiber on the network and distribution side of the PON system. The OLTs are placed in the various neighborhood huts. The OLT creates the bandwidth on the single fiber that is then passively split to serve 32 customers. The OLT provides bandwidth into the backbone network so that the customer bandwidth can access the service provider elements such and the data, telephone and video feeds. In the GPON design for Cook County the OLTs will supply 2.4 Gbps download from the headend to the customer for each PON (up to 32 homes) and 1.2 Gbps upload from the customers to the head-end.

2. Optical Network Terminals (ONT). The ONT is the electronics that goes onto the side of the home or business and that converts the optical signals to an electrical format. From the ONT are connections to the existing home wiring for telephone, cable TV and data. The ONT is powered at the customer site and typically has battery backup to keep phone service in place in the event of a power failure at the customer site.

3. Splitters. These passive devices are the hardware that take the single fiber from the OLT and "split" them into 32 fibers that in turn terminate at the ONTs. The splitter divides the bandwidth/light on the single fiber to multiple fibers. These devices require no power (which is why they are called passive) and they are housed in the neighborhood huts or in a small enclosure in the field.

4. Element Management System. The element management system is the underlying software that manages the network. It allows monitoring of the OLTs and ONTs and is used to establish service to a customer. The software can be used to address field hardware remotely so that hardware can be changed or service can be established without a service person being dispatched. Arrowhead already owns an element management system.

5. MPLS Router. The MPLS router is a device in the head-end supplies Quality of Service (QOS) routing for the FTTH network and manages the network bandwidth associated with the services delivered to subscribers. QOS is the process whereby different services are given priorities. For example, it’s typical to give voice traffic a higher QOS than data traffic. Thus, when somebody is talking on the phone, the call would not be interrupted when somebody in the home started to download a large data file.

Following are the assumptions made for electronics:

• CCG Consulting priced the FTTH electronics based upon recent quotes we got from Calix. CCG is vendor neutral and we are not suggesting that the County use Calix. The County will be using public bid rules to choose the electronics. It is CCG’s recent experience that the cost of the FTTH electronics is similar between vendors and thus using a recent quote from any of the vendors is sufficient for predicting the cost of the network electronics. Calix just happened to be the most recent bid on hand.
• The ONT at the customer home and business has been designed to be powered from inside the home. This means that there will need to be a small holed drilled though the wall so that power can be run to the ONT from inside of the home. For many businesses the ONT will be installed inside with other telecommunications equipment.
• The ONT at the home will include a battery back-up so that telephones can continue to get power in the event of a power outage. The batteries last around four hours in continuous use up to eight hours with occasional use.
• The model assumes a total installation labor cost of a little less than $500. This includes contract labor for the fiber drop, installing the ONT, installing the power connection, connecting to existing wiring, installing the settop box and instructing the customer about how to use the new system. The financial model also includes two full-time outside technicians. To the extent those technicians install any customers in place of contractors the $500 would all be saved. Thus, the model assumes the worst case situation where contractors do all installations.
• The ONTs have been designed with an RF return. This means that the ONT is capable of taking a signal from a settop box and delivering it back to the headend. The alternative to this would be to use all IP and deliver all signals using the broadband part of the network. Having an RF return increases the options for customers and will allow the network to deliver a digital video tier via RF with traditional settop boxes.

Cable TV Headend

• We have assumed a cable TV delivery system consisting of an RF overlay and a digital tier. This means that the system could support the delivery of analog TV to customers without the use of a settop box, as is done by a cable company. We have also assumed a digital tier whereby any customer buying digital services would require a settop box.
• The cost of the headend has been engineered to include all current advanced services. The headend will support about 60 channels of HD programming. The headend supports Video on Demand and has been sized to include 2,800 hours of programming in the system. The system can be grown by adding about 700 additional hours of programming capacity for $30,000. Video on Demand allows customers to watch movies and many TV shows at their times of their choosing and includes the features of a DVD player such as pause, rewind, etc. Video on Demand systems can also carry local programming like little league games, high school sports, government meetings, etc. The headend also supports settop boxes with DVR service, the TiVo-like service that lets customers record shows to watch later. The digital tier includes a digital program guide making it easy for customers to search for shows. The headend also support Pay-per-View for such events like major league baseball, wresting, etc.
• The headend is not originally designed to support IPTV. IPTV is a video delivery system that uses the data path to deliver cable service to customers. The digital system designed for this study uses the separate CATV data path that is part of PONs. IPTV has been developed for telephone companies and others who use DSL to deliver cable signal and thus have limited bandwidth. An IPTV system delivers only the channel that a customer wants to watch. One of the biggest benefits of an IPTV system is that theoretically the system could offer unlimited channels. Since programming is delivered one channel at a time to customers there is no limit on how many channels the system operator can have at the head end. However, from a practical standpoint, the programmers have not yet caught up to this concept. Programmers today charge more for IPTV delivery of their networks. Further, they want to bill all customers for getting a network even though many of them will never watch it. In today’s environment it can cost $3 - $5 more per customer per month to use IPTV instead of broadcast TV, a cost which still makes IPTV unattractive for a small system. Further, a cable operator must use software called middleware with IPTV to control the settop boxes. Middleware can cost $2 - $3 per customer per month. Finally, while IPTV settop boxes are less expensive than standard settop boxes, every TV must have a settop box with IPTV, so settop box costs increase. In a traditional RF overlay system, customers with analog service do not need a settop box. Only digital customers need settop boxes, and even a digital customer can run additional TVs without using a settop box.
• One of the issues faced by all system operators is the signal format available from the satellites. Today almost all programming is available in MPEG2. This is a scheme whereby the satellite provider will condense the signal to save on bandwidth from the satellite. If the system operator has equipment that uses MPEG2 signal they can put it straight onto the system. Otherwise, they must convert the signal from MPEG2 to whatever their system uses. Today, many satellite signals are being converted to MPEG4. This is an improved technology which compresses the signal to a smaller size without losing clarity. An MPEG4 signal for an HD program will normally be easier to handle and be of higher quality than an MPEG2 signal for the same show. The problem the system operator has is that getting a new format from the satellites requires a change of equipment in the headend to convert channels to whatever format the system carries. In our business plan estimate we have estimated a number of MPEG2 to MPEG4 converters. However, this is a moving target in the industry and any operator will probably have to buy a few such converters every year.
• We have assumed that digital customers will average two settop boxes per household. Some could have more or less than this. Note that a digital customer can have just one settop box to watch all of the digital programming on the system and can still connect other televisions without a settop box that could get the analog channels.
• The headend cost also includes satellite dishes and an antenna tower for receiving off-air local channels. A satellite farm can consist of one huge satellite dish or an array of multiple smaller six-meter dishes.

Voice Switch

• The business plan assumes that the system will include a voice switch. We assumed this will be a softswitch, which is a small modern switch that includes advanced voice features. A softswitch today will support traditional telephone and will also support IP telephones with advanced features. Advanced features include such things as the ability to tie voice mails to emails so a customer can get voice mails as an email file; the ability to tie calling lists from the computer to the phone so that a call can be initiated using Outlook; a follow-me service where a customer can direct a call to any number of phones in any sequence, so that a call could first try his cell phone, second try his landline and third try the babysitter’s before being routed to voice mail.
• The switch will also support all basic business features such as supporting trunks for customers with their own phone system, or Centrex for customers who want advanced features such as the ability to put calls on hold or transfer calls.
• The switch will support full long distance service including international calling.

Building

• The business plan assumes that the business will purchase an existing building. This building will require upgrades to be ready to house a central office. CCG calculated a cost of $1,015,000 to buy and upgrade the building.
• The building cost includes fire suppression and a backup generator.
• Somewhere near to the building will be the satellite dishes and the off-air antenna.
• The building cost includes some modest amount of excavation and site preparation and includes such things as fencing and other security features.
• The business plan also contemplates building six huts to house fiber electronics in various neighborhoods.

Data Routers

• The business plan budgets for the data routers needed to provide customer ISP services. This would include providing email, security, IP addresses, web storage and other functions normally provided by an ISP.
• The business plan assumes that the business would use shareware software to operate the ISP. This is done by all the small ISPs in the country and there is very robust software available that performs the day-to-day tasks of being an ISP.

Other Assets

• The business plan also includes the other assets needed to operate the business.
• The business plan buys a few vehicles for outside technicians. Since so much of the network is aerial the company needs bucket trucks.
• The business plan includes a computer for every employee.
• The business plan includes furniture and office equipment.
• The business plan includes $500,000 of inventory which would consist of spare fiber, settop boxes, ONTs, and spare cards for all the electronics.