Learning by doing network labs.

Using this as a project example for currency design. The labs will become an incubator for projects to take advantage of Moore's law to provide virtually free networking at the metropolitan scale. If proven in one or more place, we can build a whole ecosystem for the operational needs of metropolitan optical networks.

Let's take a 10,000 foot look at the economics:

With Moore's law, the cost per Mbit (or Gbit) for backhaul connectivity is continually going down. At the same time the price/performance of the components of an optical network also keeps going down. The incumbent carriers are intent on holding monopoly advantages as long as they can. In major markets they can only do that by a monopoly on the last mile and in smaller markets sometimes also the middle miles.

We'll need some estimates and formulas:

Cost per symetric Gbit in backhaul ($10/Mbit/Month? a while back): $100-500 ?

Cost of equipment:

• Buildout to first 100 nodes (plus mesh) (x100 end users ?)
• Next 900 (x100) = 100,000
• Next 9000 (x30) = 300,000 homes

Cost categories:

• Backhaul (expense) ? $100-500 per Gbit per Month
• New cable runs (capital) ? $500K
• Lease dark/lit fiber (see

  Zayo

  ) and others ? (10K, 40K, 100K)/mo
• Metro backbone switches (4, 10, 40) $5-10K
• Metro edge switches (10-40, 100-400, 1000-9000) $600-1200
• Mesh Nodes (60-90, 600-900, 6000-9000) $100-500

Taking the middle level of 10 backbone, 100 edge, 900 mesh (leaf) nodes

Switch capex: 10*10K + 100*1K + 900*300 = $470K

Monthly: 100K homes -> 1G maybe 1-3K/mo?

Cap ex/1000 (per node host): $500-1000

Monthly (per home): $1K = 10 cents/home/mo, $100K = $1/home/mo

The 1000 node hosts are each responsible for $1-100/node/mo of the monthly, so 30x$10 = $300 would give a bit of overhead while building out the network for revenue sharing among the network builders.