[AusNOG] curious about lessons learned from your fiber rollouts?

[John Edwards]

My tips:

Rural networks are economically tentative at the best of times, they are
low density and the majority of the demographic that they serve don't have
disposable income for tech entertainment. Government funding likes to be
directed to announceables, and nobody announces a maintenance plan. Budget
accordingly.

Driving time for maintenance personnel is going to become the majority of
your operating budget. Build networks to be bulletproof and have no need
for maintenance, and consider that the added expense of a ring topology or
diverse path might still cost less than a single unscheduled callout by a
contractor. For a rural network, redundant systems buy time to attend to
outages on more relaxed timelines.

Fixed wireless
- is all about waterproofing, be it customer rooftops, cabling joints or
especially equipment shelters.
- rigging teams are at the mercy of safety standards, weather and personal
leave, so you can't expect more than 100 days/year of productive work
- a certain type of person wants to climb towers all day, and they may not
be productive if you try and force them into a soft office environment on
the other days of the year

Fibre Networks
- use a conduit that is a size larger than you need. If you have any kind
of success you're going to need a second cable in that conduit at some
point, even if it's just to do a graceful upgrade
- always use a fibre cleaning kit
- with single-fibre optics (ie: BX), put the transceiver that sends at a
lower frequency at the far end. This gives you a chance to spot the
difference between a fibre fault and a power fault

John



On Thu, 30 Mar 2023 at 02:19, Dave Taht <dave.taht at gmail.com> wrote:

> I am doing an AMA friday, in part about the $70B dollar USA NTIA
> broadband and BEAD programs, which are largely targetted at improving
> rural access to the internet. The target audience is one with which I
> am mostly unfamiliar, the directors of the 50 US states administering
> these programs.
>
> I am very interested about what y'all have learned about how to roll
> out fiber and fixed wireless right, in your country, so far, and what
> could be done better, in mine.
>
> Please let me know what you think here, (links to studies would be
> great, too)
>
> and/or come heckle!
>
> --
> AMA March 31: https://www.broadband.io/c/broadband-grant-events/dave-taht
> Dave Täht CEO, TekLibre, LLC
> _______________________________________________
> AusNOG mailing list
> AusNOG at lists.ausnog.net
> https://lists.ausnog.net/mailman/listinfo/ausnog
>
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