Multifamily Technology 360° Exclusive Guest Post
By Richard Holtz
By Richard Holtz
An interesting thing happened at this spring's Broadband Communities Summit – I found myself having conversations with broadband
proponents about how much fiber you really need to get gigabit service to an
apartment unit.
Turns out, it’s not as much as apartment owners may have
been led to believe.
While the marketing message from both service providers and
amenity-crazed apartment consultants seems to say you absolutely need deep
fiber all the way to the unit, that’s not really the case.
Here’s the secret that many of that those marketers don’t want
you to hear: copper to the unit still actually works just fine. As long as
certain key elements are in place, you can still deliver a gigabit experience
without fiber all the way to the pillow.
A few of those elements include getting fiber to comm room;
making sure the coax cable running between the comm room and the apartment doesn’t
span more than 150 feet; having existing Cat 5e cabling in the walls; and putting
quality gigabit capable switches and electronics in the comm room.
That’s important for a couple of reasons. One, it means that
retrofitting an existing building today can be done more cheaply than you may
have thought, since you may not have to start tearing into the walls, depending
on what’s already there. That’s critical if you’re currently considering buying
a building.
But two, and perhaps more importantly, if you don’t run
fiber all the way to the unit, you can save on the costlier electronics that
fiber demands.
For many of my colleagues, this message may seem heretical.
After all, as a vocal proponent of widespread broadband adoption for most of my
career, an argument against the commonly-accepted industry view that you can
never have too much fiber could be viewed, at best, as a kind of backpedaling,
and at worst, a betrayal to our common goal of broadband for all.
But that’s okay. I’ve never been someone who’s afraid to
speak my mind, even if my views sometimes fly in the face of conventional
wisdom.
The reason I’m doing so now is because I want apartment
owners faced with making these decisions – who have heard nothing but fiber,
fiber, fiber over the last decade -- to know the full range of their options,
and the costs they’ll incur with each.
Basically, there’s no question about the value of deep fiber
going forward. Taking fiber all the way to the unit is going to be your most
future-proof option, for at least the next 20 years, if not more.
But to get gigabit speeds to the unit today, placing fiber
optic electronics in a communications room, and running Cat 5e copper to the
apartments themselves works just fine. In fact, you can get gigabit speeds over
copper in this kind of set up without even breathing hard. You just need to
make sure you have quality switches and electronics within your design. As I
like to say, there are gigabit switches, and then there are gigabit switches.
Do you know which is which?
An added bonus is that with copper, your service providers
are less apt to squabble amongst each other over the different strands they run
their services on, and won’t be able to point fingers at one another when
things don’t work.
Going the copper route also helps owners of existing
buildings do a retrofit at a lower cost point, because they don’t need as many
of the more expensive electronics – the optical devices designed to transmit
signals of light – that they would if they ran fiber all the way to the unit.
That’s another important point to consider, especially given
how fast technology changes. If owners pay – or partner with service providers
to pay – for the latest electronics to be placed inside each of their units
today, they can potentially face costly amortization and depreciation issues
down the road. Basically, the question becomes how do you amortize and
depreciate the electronics fast enough to stay ahead of the curve?
The answer, in some cases, is that you can’t.
Now, as the cost of fiber optic electronics comes down, this
issue will eventually solve itself. And when it does, going with deep fiber all
the way to the unit will be a no-brainer.
But until that happens, owners should know that they have
other, more cost-effective options that will work effectively to get residents
gigabit speeds, without putting undue pressure on their pocketbooks.
No matter what die-hard fiber proponents and their marketers
say.
Richard Holtz is CEO of InfiniSys.