/ Cory Doctorow / 6:21 pm Mon May 11, 2009

Selling fiber broadband by inviting users to dig their own trenches

Lyse, a wildly successful Norwegian ISP, is getting fiber into peoples' houses by getting them to dig their own trenches:
Lyse's business model is different from companies like Verizon, which is currently rolling out fiber across its service area and then trying to sign up customers. Lyse instead sends people into unserved areas, knocks on all the doors, and passes out information on the new fiber service. Only when 60 percent of the people in an area sign up in advance for the service does Lyse start the actual fiber install...

In addition to entering an area with tremendous support already lined up, Lyse also does something innovative: it allows prospective customers to dig their own fiber trenches from the street to their homes. In return, customers can save about $400. "They can arrange things just the way they want," says Herbjørn Tjeltveit of Lyse, which makes for happier customers; apparently, nothing angers a Norwegian more than having some faceless corporation tunnel through his flower garden.

Norwegian ISP: dig your own fiber trench, save $400

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  1. My parents have lived in Silicon Valley for about 40 years. You can practically see the headquarters for Google, Apple, etc. from their house. Yet, the entire neighborhood is without high-speed internet. Most of the neighbors use dial-up. Many neighbors experimented with satellite internet, but it was barely better than dial-up and much more expensive. My father and one other neighbor get their internet via a local small businessman who beams microwaves from a nearby hill directly to a dish on their roof. It beats any other system they’ve tried but it still leaves something to be desired.

    This is because the local broadband options (cable, DSL, etc.) end about 90 feet short of their street. There are only 9 houses on the cul-de-sac and no company finds it worth it to do so much digging and installation for 9 potential customers.

    If a plan like this came to their neighborhood, you’d for certain find 9 households out with shovels in under 5 minutes.

    Do you know how absurd it is to live about 10 minutes from Google & Apple HQ and still have to rely on dial up? One of their neighbors is something like employ number 7 from Adobe and he can barely check his email at home.

  2. Depending on how much you value your plantings and/or your time, dig-it-yourself is a nice option to have available. (Around here, everything from power to phone to phiber is still on poles.)

  3. So there really are people practicing common sense in the world today, North America lost that a long time ago.

  4. If it meant saving $400, I’d probably go get my shovel, too… and go door-to-door offering to dig the trenches for $100 apiece.

  5. Did we as US tax payers hand over billions of dollars to telcom companies throughout the 90’s for them to lay the foundation and hook up America to fiber optic internet?

    Isn’t the ‘unused’ fiber optic lines that google is buying up the mess that was left of that transfer of wealth?

  6. MyLund #1:

    I am assuming that the others don’t enjoy a line of sight to that hill, or they would be on this system already.

    Has it occurred to your parents that they could share their microwave internet connection with the other seven neighbours? They would probably be more than happy to share the initial hardware costs involved for distribution and fattening of the microwave pipe.

    Heck with a little luck they would have free internet and all the BBQ food they could eat for life!

  7. Farmers in New Zealand are doing this as well; forming groups, using their own tractors to mole-plow plastic conduits across fields into their homes, then blowing a “mouse” down the pipe with a tracer to pull through the fibre-optic cable.

    They put their community black box terminals in any convenient barn.

    They were forced into this through the main national provider, Telecom, procrastinating over several years about upgrading rural telephone exchanges to provide broadband.

    Smaller IT providers have helped the farmers get established at very attractive rates, giving the finger to Telecom.

    All hail the underdog!

    OJ

  8. I’m not sure that would fly in most places… I bet you need a permit and inspection to lay cable…. I mean the city/state has to get their chunk of change. You know proper depth, angle for water drainage, ect…

    Or a bunch of BS if you ask me.

  9. Added Vice-President Tjomas Saawjer, “We’d like to let you dig this fiber-optic trench, honest injun, but Aunt Polly likes it done just so, and she’d be powerful vexed if it ain’t done real careful. I bet not one boy in a hunnerd could dig this fiber-optic trench right. Now if you was to give me, say, some tadpoles or a spoon-cannon or a tin soldier or a one-eyed kitten, I might hear of it.”

  10. Nylund, I wonder why they don’t get wireless broadband like EVDO? Surely price isn’t a big barrier to someone living in silicon valley.

  11. Compare!! Right Coast North America, USA:

    I had comcast Internet, and every time they increased my bandwidth (always immediately followed by much fanfare and glossy mailings) my real throughput went down. This is because comcast is a huge worm farm (they implement filtering to stop legitimate bittorrent, nntp, smtp, web servers etc. but close to 80% of their traffic is malware that they are not competent to control) and the rate that the zombies in my segment send their attacks is bottlenecked at the cable modem. Bandwidth goes up 10%, I get 10% more malware traffic from 100 or more sources, my total throughput goes down… until I tarpitted all the malware, and then my neighbors all started crying bitter tears of how slow their systems suddenly are.

    Anyway, verizon came through with FIOS (doing some interesting stuff with pole-mounted relay/amps that tap the high-volt lines above) and they tore off all the copper junctions and threw them in the ditch. I mean, literally, this is not an sort of exaggeration, they unscrewed the live copper telephone junction boxes from the poles and let them lie where they fell. In my case, this meant that my telephone connection did not work in the rain, because the box always filled up with water. I have photos.

    In order to get reliable phone service (there’s very poor cell reception down in the holler where I live) I had to get FIOS Internet; as part of that installation verizon takes you off the copper POTS system and plugs your existing phone line into the fiber NID.

    Verizon said they’d come by between 8AM and 7PM on a specific day after a couple of weeks, but if nobody was home tough luck you lose. Then they called at 5PM and rescheduled for another day, after I’d already sacrificed a day’s wages to their inability to schedule work reasonably.

    Then, when they showed up, the guy was very nice: but I was MERCILESS… I insisted they run the cable exactly where I said, I made them trim and terminate the glass when they wanted to stick a 30 foot coil inside the wall and forget it, made them mount the NID on a fieldstone basement wall, etc. etc. etc. in short, I got them to DO IT RIGHT – which they would never have done otherwise.

    I would have happily done it all myself if they’d just delivered the NID. In fact, I would have paid them for the privilege of running the lines on my own schedule instead of having to sacrifice two days’ wages.

  12. A TV station today did a feature on rural farmers doing the same thing here in New Zealand.
    Interesting bit at 1’20 where the tech supplier describes how they had lengths of cable offcuts left over from their 10km rolls so just supplied the wires for free. Local hero.

  13. As if the Norwegians, with their socialized medicine and electric cars, could ever teach the USA (USA! USA! USA!) anything.

  14. Even if I didn’t save money in the deal, I would gladly lay my own fiber. Unfortunately I live in an apartment in the middle of downtown, so it would be a lot more complicated than digging a trench. Even so, I’d jump through all of the legal hoops and put in the hard work if there was an ISP here ready to hook it up if it meant getting rid of Comcast.

  15. If you read carefully, you’ll see this is not as good as it sounds. The key word is “competitors”. The article doesn’t explicitly say so, but it’s clear Norway telecom is *not a free market*! In a free market, you get a few large providers. They have a dependable and large client base, supporting long-term investments in infrastructure. And they can prevent competition. Nothing has a higher ROI than preventing competition. And that profitability gets passed on to you, the investor. Through your pension funds, government investments, subsidized elections, etc. Sure, this kind of competitive “market” looks good for a few internet users. But the societal costs are horrendous. In a well-managed free market, this kind of thing would simply be illegal.

  16. @15 – I think you need to use a few more proper nouns in your posts, the repeated use of ‘they’ makes it unclear if you’re talking about the Norwegian ISP or the ‘few large providers’. Care to clarify?

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