[vtthrowaway2519]

>A couple of years ago, I got to watch the whole fiber installation process in action when I had Comcast Gigabit Pro installed in my house. Leaving aside the months it took to get county permitting, it took a team of guys a whole day to run it from the nearest splice point 1,700 feet to my neighborhood. Another half day to run it 200 feet to the pole by my house. Another half day to trench it under my driveway and into my basement. And another half day to install and configure the CPE.

That's an absurd amount of time. There must have been other considerations which made it unusual. When WCVT brought fiber to our area in Vermont it took maybe 5-6 hours to run the 1600 feet or so of our side road, and an extra hour for one house on the way with its own few hundred feet, using their larger scale trencher system + an air blaster if they needed to do a horizontal direct bore which could do 25-50' very quickly. Dig Safe had been by a day or two before just like for any normal ground work anyone would do, so all underground cables/pipes were already painted. The fiber ended up right at our place where we put it through a hole I drilled in the foundation. It wasn't any special ISP team either they had one of the local construction companies take care of the bulk part. Then one tech of theirs drove in, maybe 30 minutes tops to get that spliced and run to my rack. Then like, 5 minutes for the GPON CPE, max? They'd obviously done a proper job of calculating optical power attenuation ahead of time so no issues there. Seriously a -half a day- to install and configure CPE? That makes no sense at all, so it must be some Comcast thing, or something went wrong. GPON is binary, it's either within acceptable optical power range or not.

If you're counting anything LAN side beyond the fiber end point you shouldn't because that is completely independent from the WAN drop and represents an arbitrary amount of time that will be different for every customer.

[rayiner]

In Maryland, all work in rights of way must be done by a company specially authorized by the state to perform utility-related construction. Then each county has licensing and permitting processes for work "related" to telecom utilities. Additionally, our utilities are above ground, and our neighborhood is too tight to allow use of a trencher, so all that work was done by hand. This is just how much of the northeast/mid-atlantic is. It's a double-edged sword: these are relatively high-density places where a single fiber cable can serve a lot of houses. But at the same time, they tend to be already built up (my subdivision was laid out in 1920), dense with narrow access ways, and in counties/states with lots of bureaucracy. (I am currently working on a "vegetation management plan" so I can clear the weeds from my backyard.)

For one-off fiber installs, Comcast uses active Ethernet instead of GPON, so maybe that's why the CPE installation took so long. Although, to be fair, I'm counting the time it took to drill a hole in the foundation as part of the half day of CPE install and the time to configure the router/access point--neither of which your average customer is qualified to do themselves.