Trenching a conduit is multiple times more expensive than laying fiber direct. More than likely using conduit would not be cost effective.
With a conduit you have to: (i) purchase the conduit, which is more expensive than the fibre cable itself, (ii) install the conduit, (iii) blow the fiber cable into the conduit and (iv) install all the support infrastructure required for a conduit system, such as manholes and cable wells.
Furthermore access points have to be installed at close enough intervalls to make air blowing or water jetting possible. In rural settings this might well be far more often than otherwise needed for a direct burial network. In all the steps along the way, a conduit based network drives up the cost, resulting in a multiple on the buildout cost.
Protection, diagnostics, additional capacity and other media. None of the aforementioned are necessary any better or easier in a ducted network. A duct does not protect against backhoe fade any better than a proper direct burial cable. Diagnostics are done the same way in a ducted and a direct buried network. However direct burial cables with metallic streng members are easier to find than a non-metallic ducted cable. Adding more cables to a small diameter duct is not always easy, feasible or straightforward, especially if the duct was not properly or professionally installed. As to other media, such as metallic cables, the whole point of installing a fiber network is to only need to maintain one outdoor plant, not multiple legacy networks.
In addition to the extra cost, there is a lot of fun and games to be had if you install ducts in regions with subzero temperatures. Water is going to get into the ducts and then you are going to have giant icicles with cable in the middle and duct on the outside.
Walking on a proper direct burial fiber optic cable is not even going to register. Anything less than a backhoe is unlikely to even leave a mark. On the other hand if you even look funny at a ducted cable, you might have problems.
Repairing a ducted network or a direct burial network is basically the same. You excavate the problem area and you replace the faulty parts. The main difference is that in a ducted network, you are going to spend most of your time fiddling and fixing the ducts, less time with fixing the fiber optic part.
Now, what a ducted network gives you, is flexibility, but at a greater cost. If properly built that is. A ducted network means you might not have to retrench later, but this might not be an issue in a rural setting.
Imagination will take you very far, and in this case, very far from the matter at hand. Texas and Finland are real places, not figments of imagination.
> Imagine a layout where cables do not have to follow roads. Imagine a layout where one cable can serve buildings on two roads. Certainly much, much easier when the buildings are dense.
Not very likely in the real world. Easements and rights of way are not available or not readily available among arbitrary paths. In any case, even if you were to cut through peoples back yards, you would still most of the time just be following a parallellish path to the roads.
> Imagine a thousand people living in one building in the center of a thousand square miles, served by one cable. Imagine a thousand people living one per square mile in a thousand square miles. The population densities are the same. The cabling costs are not.
These are real places we are talking about. Have a look at a map.
> This really isn't a good measure since roads will be denser
in urban areas and less dense in rural areas, thus leading to exactly the same issues as directly using population density.
Please be so good as explaining you point better, I do not understand it. If you are going to wire up every lot in the state, you will have to traverse all roads in the state to do a cable drop to every lot in order to do so. What does road density have to do with it?
When building wireline communication networks, the deciding factor costwise, is the number of linear cable sheet miles. As such miles of road is a good proxy for comparing deployment costs between locations.
Please note that I am discussing wireline broadband. If you have you heart set on wireless coverage, then we have to talk different measures, and even there population density is not the tell all metric.
My bad. However that does not still make it cheaper to build in Finland, it merely brings up Texas and Finland to par on miles of road per population. Several things still favour Texas in the cost per capita, such as: economics of scale, ability to perform construction year around and no need to put utilities under the frostline.
There are no technical or cost reasons for Texas to be unable to offer the same level of broadband service as Finland. It all comes down to other reasons, perhaps such as lack of political will in Texas.
The above is an invalid comparison. A better, more objective measure is linear population density.
Miles of roads in Texas: 152,054 miles
Miles of roads in Finland: 65,617 miles ()
Population of Texas: 25,674,681
Population of Finland: 5,375,276
Linear population density of Texas: ~169 persons per miles of road
Linear population density of Finland: ~82 persons per miles of road
Ergo, it is cheaper per head to provide wireline telecommunications services in Texas than in Finland, when building out to the whole population, as the linear population density is higher in Texas and most, if not all, permanent residences and business are accessible by road.
() This road mileage does not include private roads in Finland. Including these roads would further lower the linear population density of Finland, but these roads were excluded from the calculation as the majority of the private roads are access roads to non-permanent recidency second homes and timer or agriculture roads.
$0.10/GB is way more than market rates for bandwidth. Dedicated server hosters such as 100TB.com charge about $200 for 100TB, ie. $2/TB or 0.2 cents /GB, resulting in a grand total of 1.6 cents for a 8GB movie stream.
I am also very surprised to see OCZ drives recommended. I have 10 OCZ Vertex 3 SSDs in a single server. In the past two months, 6 of these 10 Vertex 3 drives have failed so far. OCZ is utter and bitter crap.
Google Reader on the desktop and Byline on iOS. Google Reader compatibility is a must in order to keep all devices in sync.
On iOS the following are must have features:
* swipe to next article
* preload RSS articles and linked content for offline access and faster browsing of content
Byline is currently the best RSS reader on iOS, but it has a lot of shotcomings:
* No Next Unread button or gesture (NetNewsWire does, but is otherwise a horrible, horrible app. Avoid like the plague.)
* Slow compared to Reeder
* Only shows last 1000 RSS items
* No gestures for navigation like Reeder
* Uses an effing dropdown menu in portrait mode AND does not hold state for the menu
* Some feeds with special characters are not correctly in folder, but dumped in the All Items folder
I would actually prefer to use Reeder, but Reeder is terrible for actually reading RSS. Skimming RSS feeds yes, reading actual articles no. Whoever thought that a pull or push gesture to navigate to the previous/next RSS item was a good idea should have their head examined.
Somebody really needs to write the perfect RSS reader for iOS by combining the best features of Byline and Reeder + that missing Next Unread button.
I moved from Bloglines to Google Reader due to Bloglines inability to keep state, unavailability and lack of development. Generally Google Reader has been ok, but I originally preferred Bloglines and moved over only when it was obvious I had to due to the demise of Bloglines.
Google Reader's web interface is OKish on the desktop, but absolutely horrible on any mobile device, hence the need for a native iOS app.
With a conduit you have to: (i) purchase the conduit, which is more expensive than the fibre cable itself, (ii) install the conduit, (iii) blow the fiber cable into the conduit and (iv) install all the support infrastructure required for a conduit system, such as manholes and cable wells.
Furthermore access points have to be installed at close enough intervalls to make air blowing or water jetting possible. In rural settings this might well be far more often than otherwise needed for a direct burial network. In all the steps along the way, a conduit based network drives up the cost, resulting in a multiple on the buildout cost.
Protection, diagnostics, additional capacity and other media. None of the aforementioned are necessary any better or easier in a ducted network. A duct does not protect against backhoe fade any better than a proper direct burial cable. Diagnostics are done the same way in a ducted and a direct buried network. However direct burial cables with metallic streng members are easier to find than a non-metallic ducted cable. Adding more cables to a small diameter duct is not always easy, feasible or straightforward, especially if the duct was not properly or professionally installed. As to other media, such as metallic cables, the whole point of installing a fiber network is to only need to maintain one outdoor plant, not multiple legacy networks.
In addition to the extra cost, there is a lot of fun and games to be had if you install ducts in regions with subzero temperatures. Water is going to get into the ducts and then you are going to have giant icicles with cable in the middle and duct on the outside.
Walking on a proper direct burial fiber optic cable is not even going to register. Anything less than a backhoe is unlikely to even leave a mark. On the other hand if you even look funny at a ducted cable, you might have problems.
Repairing a ducted network or a direct burial network is basically the same. You excavate the problem area and you replace the faulty parts. The main difference is that in a ducted network, you are going to spend most of your time fiddling and fixing the ducts, less time with fixing the fiber optic part.
Now, what a ducted network gives you, is flexibility, but at a greater cost. If properly built that is. A ducted network means you might not have to retrench later, but this might not be an issue in a rural setting.