Saturday, December 7, 2019

I'm looking for background pricing info for an HOA to build FTTH or fixed wireless for a rural neighborhood (either paying an ISP to do it or operating it at the HOA level)

As a layperson, I'm wondering what the process would look like for an HOA to help the homeowners of a neighborhood get internet access for the first time. Here are the basics:

  • CenturyLink has what I believe to be a fiber tap right outside the neighborhood: there are 4 or 5 newer-looking large boxes on a concrete pad. I believe this node serves DSL/phone to several nearby neighborhoods, but not to our neighborhood.
  • Our neighborhood is 100 homes over 10k+ acres, up two canyons served by two dirt roads which the HOA owns.
  • There is existing water and power buried in the roads.
  • At the top of one of the canyons, the HOA has leased out a small piece of land to a private company that has installed a large comm tower, with grid power and backup diesel generators. The tower surely functions as a simple repeater since it just has two dishes facing opposite directions. The tower has line of sight to some homes, but not many.

As I said, I'm a layperson, not a networking professional. In general, my question is: what on Earth do I do with this information? Is there anything to do with this information, or is this just a pipe dream?

To try to be more specific, here are some questions; feel free to answer few or none:

  • What is a ballpark estimate if I call up CenturyLink's business line and ask for a quote to run fiber directly from their node to our neighborhood's first residence, which is ~0.5 mile up the road (again, keeping in mind that we own the road itself and there is power already installed)? When power companies bury power for the first time, is it likely for there to be empty conduit already in the road that the power company would be willing to sell back to the HOA for use with fiber?
  • Would it be better for the HOA to hire a 3rd party to install the fiber, and then simply ask to plug into CenturyLink's node?
  • Given that the geography of the canyons would make fixed wireless extremely difficult, how outrageous would it be to consider FTTH for our full-time residents? There is a total of about 5 miles of road that serves our lower ~30 household which are mostly full-time residents. I know density is not on our side, but I'm comparing it to our past: When we all agreed that we wanted power for our community, we made it happen; when we all agreed that we wanted central water for our community, we made it happen. This is a community that is quite close-knit and I think understands the idea of decades-long capex projects better than most communities—we installed water ourselves just a few years ago, with homeowners footing the ~$30k per lot pricetag. Is fiber impossibly expensive compared to power and water, or is it not unreasonable compared to our past investments? Right now, people are tired of using LTE hotspots with 2 bars of service. The neighborhood is reasonably hungry for real internet.
  • If the cost of FTTH alone is not disqualifying, then what do we do with that? If we were to front the bill for the network (and hopefully retain ownership of the fiber?), would CenturyLink be willing to provide ordinary residential fiber service to each individual residence? Or would we need a custom business account for the entire HOA? Or would we need to pay some other company to operate a new ISP on our networking, using CenturyLink for backhaul?

If those are dumb questions, I'm sorry. Like I said, feel free to ignore the questions themselves. My real question is just: is this possible? Where do we start?



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