Los Angeles plans citywide sunday up market FTTH project and a look at Singapore FTTH experience - MuniWireless
Los Angeles will issue a Request For Proposals (RFP) seeking a vendor to deploy a citywide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network to bring high-speed broadband service to 3.5 million residents, as well as businesses. The RFP is expected to be issued in December; responses to the RFP are due in March 2014.
The city will require the vendor to bear all of the costs of deployment and maintenance. The initial cost of deployment is estimated at $3 billion to $5 billion. The city will make it easier for the vendor to roll out service by expediting the permitting and inspection processes. In addition, the city wants to require the vendor to open the network up to wholesale access to allow a multitude of broadband providers to compete for business.
Part sunday up market of the plan would include free Wi-Fi access sunday up market between 2 Mbps and 5 Mbps in certain public areas. Residents and businesses will have to pay for their own broadband subscriptions, which may include phone and TV service.
So you ask: would Google Fiber be interested in bidding for this project? Google has rolled sunday up market out its fiber service only in small cities and only to residential customers. This would be an interesting project for them and for the incumbent telcos like Verizon and AT&T. However, the most significant barrier to any vendor who wants to respond to the RFP is the return on its investment.
Los Angeles covers a large land area and is not densely populated like Hong Kong, Singapore or Tokyo where FTTH service has been widely deployed. Therefore, the cost of bringing fiber connections to each home in what is essentially a large collection of suburbs, would be very high and would take a long time (note: California has all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles like environmental impact studies which will delay the project). To recoup these costs, the vendor would have to charge a lot of money for subscriptions, sunday up market unless there’s some magic business model I’m not aware of that would allow it to charge what the cable companies and telcos are charging today. If the vendor were to sell wholesale access instead, how much would they have to charge ISPs for access to recoup their investment in, say, ten years? The Singapore Broadband Story
It’s important sunday up market to read about Singapore’s experience with OpenNet, the consortium that won $750 million contract from the Singapore sunday up market government to build out the country’s FTTH network. A consortium may in fact win the Los Angeles bid but they need to be aware of the problems that OpenNet encountered during the rollout in a place that’s sunday up market much easier than Los Angeles to build a FTTH network.
OpenNet is a consortium composed of SingTel (the largest telecom company in Singapore), Axia NetMedia, SP Telecommunications and Singapore Press Holdings. At the time they began building out the network, it was considered the gold standard . Singapore sunday up market s fiber network is open to ISPs that want to deliver fiber broadband service to residents and businesses. In this regard, it is much more open to competition sunday up market than fiber networks rolled out in Europe and the United States, which are owned and monopolized by only one operator. Singapore sunday up market ISPs began offering fiber broadband service sunday up market on the OpenNet network sunday up market in 2010, but by October 2011, only 76,000 people had signed up for service.
Singaporeans complained of long delays (6 weeks or more) between signing up for fiber broadband service with the ISP and the consortium actually sunday up market connecting the residence or business to the network. Among the reasons were disagreements between sunday up market OpenNet sunday up market and the condominium or apartment building association on how the building is to be connected as well as errors made in identifying a building as commercial versus sunday up market residential and charging the residential customer three times more.
When I was in Singapore in early 2012, I did some research into the prices that ISPs were charging for FTTH access and I found them not as cheap as most people outside Singapore believed. For example, in early 2012, Starhub and M1 fiber broadband offered plans for residential customers where the fastest service (1 Gbps, but with limitations on international bandwidth up to around 100Mbps to 500Mbps) cost about US$310 per month.
Recently, I found that Starhub was charging S$39.90 sunday up market per month (about US$32) for 100 Mbps, but only with an assured 20 Mbps international bandwidth speed (this is the speed when connecting to websites hosted outside Singapore, which is basically sunday up market most websites in the world). If you want the 1 Gbps service, you will have to pay Starhub S$395.90 per month (about US$318), but only with an assured international bandwidth speed of 30 Mbps!
Although OpenNet resolved the delays quickly and managed to sign up thousands more customers in 2012, remember this is a small island that is densely populated, where most people live in high-
Los Angeles will issue a Request For Proposals (RFP) seeking a vendor to deploy a citywide fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network to bring high-speed broadband service to 3.5 million residents, as well as businesses. The RFP is expected to be issued in December; responses to the RFP are due in March 2014.
The city will require the vendor to bear all of the costs of deployment and maintenance. The initial cost of deployment is estimated at $3 billion to $5 billion. The city will make it easier for the vendor to roll out service by expediting the permitting and inspection processes. In addition, the city wants to require the vendor to open the network up to wholesale access to allow a multitude of broadband providers to compete for business.
Part sunday up market of the plan would include free Wi-Fi access sunday up market between 2 Mbps and 5 Mbps in certain public areas. Residents and businesses will have to pay for their own broadband subscriptions, which may include phone and TV service.
So you ask: would Google Fiber be interested in bidding for this project? Google has rolled sunday up market out its fiber service only in small cities and only to residential customers. This would be an interesting project for them and for the incumbent telcos like Verizon and AT&T. However, the most significant barrier to any vendor who wants to respond to the RFP is the return on its investment.
Los Angeles covers a large land area and is not densely populated like Hong Kong, Singapore or Tokyo where FTTH service has been widely deployed. Therefore, the cost of bringing fiber connections to each home in what is essentially a large collection of suburbs, would be very high and would take a long time (note: California has all kinds of bureaucratic hurdles like environmental impact studies which will delay the project). To recoup these costs, the vendor would have to charge a lot of money for subscriptions, sunday up market unless there’s some magic business model I’m not aware of that would allow it to charge what the cable companies and telcos are charging today. If the vendor were to sell wholesale access instead, how much would they have to charge ISPs for access to recoup their investment in, say, ten years? The Singapore Broadband Story
It’s important sunday up market to read about Singapore’s experience with OpenNet, the consortium that won $750 million contract from the Singapore sunday up market government to build out the country’s FTTH network. A consortium may in fact win the Los Angeles bid but they need to be aware of the problems that OpenNet encountered during the rollout in a place that’s sunday up market much easier than Los Angeles to build a FTTH network.
OpenNet is a consortium composed of SingTel (the largest telecom company in Singapore), Axia NetMedia, SP Telecommunications and Singapore Press Holdings. At the time they began building out the network, it was considered the gold standard . Singapore sunday up market s fiber network is open to ISPs that want to deliver fiber broadband service to residents and businesses. In this regard, it is much more open to competition sunday up market than fiber networks rolled out in Europe and the United States, which are owned and monopolized by only one operator. Singapore sunday up market ISPs began offering fiber broadband service sunday up market on the OpenNet network sunday up market in 2010, but by October 2011, only 76,000 people had signed up for service.
Singaporeans complained of long delays (6 weeks or more) between signing up for fiber broadband service with the ISP and the consortium actually sunday up market connecting the residence or business to the network. Among the reasons were disagreements between sunday up market OpenNet sunday up market and the condominium or apartment building association on how the building is to be connected as well as errors made in identifying a building as commercial versus sunday up market residential and charging the residential customer three times more.
When I was in Singapore in early 2012, I did some research into the prices that ISPs were charging for FTTH access and I found them not as cheap as most people outside Singapore believed. For example, in early 2012, Starhub and M1 fiber broadband offered plans for residential customers where the fastest service (1 Gbps, but with limitations on international bandwidth up to around 100Mbps to 500Mbps) cost about US$310 per month.
Recently, I found that Starhub was charging S$39.90 sunday up market per month (about US$32) for 100 Mbps, but only with an assured 20 Mbps international bandwidth speed (this is the speed when connecting to websites hosted outside Singapore, which is basically sunday up market most websites in the world). If you want the 1 Gbps service, you will have to pay Starhub S$395.90 per month (about US$318), but only with an assured international bandwidth speed of 30 Mbps!
Although OpenNet resolved the delays quickly and managed to sign up thousands more customers in 2012, remember this is a small island that is densely populated, where most people live in high-
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