Work has taken me away (quite far away) from blogging for some time now. There are a few subjects I want to blog about, particularly regarding the architecture of the UFB network. If time permits I’ll try to get to these in the next few weeks. Also, I might consolidate this blog with my other blog, since my posting has become so sparse.
Meanwhile, a quick post on the proposal for Chorus to be the UFB partner. In this article it is claimed that Telecom has 25,000 kms of fibre already in the ground: Telecom hopes for a break on regulation if it separates.
Really? They’re not including Southern Cross are they? 
That’s great, if it’s accurate. The problem is that probably more than half of this is running down state and local highways and linking towns and communities. It’s not the fibre in the street running past those homes in New Zealand’s urban areas that the UFB project is targeting.
To give you an idea of what is needed I’ll pick on Wellington, only because the council makes available the convenient fact that they maintain 654 kilometres of roads. This is good enough for us to make a first order assumption that the UFB project needs to deploy between 654 and 1,308 kilometres of cable and duct in Wellington to serve it’s 67,000 households. Why do I say 1,308 kilometres? Well sometimes we might need to run ducts down both sides of the street, in other cases there’ll be one duct down a street but lots of ducts drilled across the street to provide drops into homes. So simply doubling the route kms gives us a very nice fudge factor to cater to both situations.
Now if we use the National Broadband Map to check out Telecom’s fibre assets in Wellington’s southern and eastern suburbs we see that the fibre is actually quite sparse.
What’s more, this fibre may not be appropriately designed for FTTH, requiring some reworking. The reality is that the value this brings is not as great as Telecom might like us to think. It may seem like I am beating up on Telecom here, I’m not. As I’ve said before, having Chorus as a partner does makes sense, if done right. I don’t have the confidence that the bureaucracy springing up around UFB could get it right though.