Cook County Fiber To The Home

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.