How much would it cost to actually dig a line to the nearest Internet peering exchange? Just to build an underground backbone fiber line itself, in terms of cost/mile?
And how different is that from a neighborhood underground line?
This would be for Washington DC suburbs - Germantown, MD.
I mostly want to know about the backbone-level work. We already have pretty fast Verizon FIOS, so I'm trying to figure out what it would take to go to the next level - 10gbps, etc..
Once you start looking at trenching fiber you're looking at 10ks to 100ks. Not really my specialty, I would be looking at doing it wirelessly but yeah if you need 10gbps there's not a good wireless option right now. You can get up to 2gbps reliably on licensed wireless links, but in that area (lots of rain?) You'll need short links (3-4 miles tops) and big dishes.
Reminder: Check if in your city, the municipality has empty cable tunnels to each building – in many cities, that’s a thing, and you can pull your fiber through there with a simple RC car, and usually use them for free.
I'm not sure how much of this is the trench itself but I asked a local ISP about how much it would cost to connect the apartment building I live in to the municipal owned (and shared) fiber located ~200ft down the street.
I was told $15000, "most" of which was the trenching.
Sounds about right. Great opportunity for wireless, though - If there's line of sight along that 200ft you could put up a wireless link for ~$2-3k and get fiber speeds to the whole complex.
Yes you could do ubiquiti for considerably cheaper, probably even less than $500. I was thinking at least an airfiber to get up to gbps speeds and have a little more reliability, but yeah you can definitely go cheaper.
Really? This is a ~70 unit building. Is it really possible to get gigabit to all occupants with a single wireless link? The fastest I'm seeing seem to be ~6Gbit and for a building this size I'd expect we'd need at absolute least 10ish.
Yes, absolutely. If you put up a 1gbps wireless link everyone in the complex could do 1mbps speedtests at nearly any time.
If you were to bring in unlimited bandwidth to your complex and look at a traffic graph of the usage, those 70 customers would only use more than 100mbps for maybe one hour out of the day, probably more like 20 minutes. If you had a 1gbps link feeding them, you would only be slowing them down at all for at most one hour a day, and even then you wouldn't be slowing them down in any noticeable way. It only takes at most a few dozen mbps to stream a 4k movie, for example. There would almost certainly never be a time when one of your customers could not stream a 4k movie.
If it made you feel better you could sell it as a 900mbps product, or even a 500mbps product. Above 100mbps for residential it's really all marketing anyway - there are no services that a residential customer uses that provide a noticeably different experience at 1gbps vs 100mbps.
EDIT: Consider also that the fiber line you'd be connecting to is probably at most 10gbps, and might only be 1gbps. Residential / muni fiber networks (including Google Fiber) are using at best 10gbps fiber circuits to feed entire neighborhoods with thousands of subscribers.
A big (perceived by management) problem in my particular complex is phone and TV. Would you recommend VoIP for phone? What would you recommend for TV? Sticking with cable? Is there someone who resells cable over IP or something like that?
Netflix is good but a lot of people still want their sports.
There is SlingTV that works pretty well. I use that at home. I don't think they'll do a white-label, though. I also ran in to a guy last year who was starting a company selling some TV services that could be white labelled, specifically for small / regional Internet service providers ... I'm not sure that I still have his information, but I'm going to the same conference where I met him last year in a few weeks, if I run in to him (or someone doing the same thing) I'll post it here.
And yes I would recommend VoIP for phone, there are several companies that will provide white-labelled VoIP service that works pretty well. You can connect it directly in to the wiring in the apartment so they can plug regular phones in to any jack in the house.
EDIT: Email in my profile, feel free to hit me up there if you'd like to continue this conversation.
And how different is that from a neighborhood underground line?
This would be for Washington DC suburbs - Germantown, MD.
I mostly want to know about the backbone-level work. We already have pretty fast Verizon FIOS, so I'm trying to figure out what it would take to go to the next level - 10gbps, etc..