SureWest: Initial Post-Install Fiber Details And Thoughts

As I previously mentioned, I spent a day with Chris Kirk, SureWest's install technician, earlier this week. I'm set up with the company's 50 Mbps symmetrical broadband Internet service, along with IPTV (an AmiNET110 standard-definition set-top box, tethered to a TiVo Series 2, and two AmiNET120 high-definition STBs which interestingly enough seem to support both MPEG-2 and Windows Media Video) and VoIP. After spending a day-and-a-half test-driving the various services, I've got lots of initial impressions to share with you, which I'll try to organize in some sort of coherent order in the following paragraphs

The '52B' cabinet feeding my and neighbors' fiber appetites is about two blocks away. It's roughly the size of a large refrigerator, and it makes quite an impressive airflow show when the integrated cooling unit periodically kicks on (it's on my daily dog-walk route). A fiber feed coming from a utility pole on the street connects to an Allied Telesyn gateway mounted on the side of my house. Power to the gateway comes, over dedicated CAT5 cable, from an APC UPS unit that sits in my office (out of the weather, and with convenient access to AC power). The UPS's primary purpose is to ensure that VoIP keeps working if the premises' power fails; it also keeps data (meaningful only if, of course, the router and other LAN gear is also UPS-fed, as mine is) and video services running .

Two other CAT5 cables run between my office and the SureWest-supplied gateway, with two more running under the house to my living room and yet another running to the garage and tapping into an existing (but unused) POTS wiring harness. All this seemingly redundant wiring wasn't in my original vision for the installation, and figuring out that we needed it all is what took up much of Chris's time on Wednesday. To explain, let me begin by relating to you what Chris shared with me; that every SureWest fiber-supplied customer, regardless of his or her degree of purchased services, gets fed with approximately 98 Mbps of raw bandwidth.

As additional broadband Internet data bandwidth gets provisioned (note the pre- and post-provisioning testing results in my earlier coverage), for example, the amount of remaining bandwidth available for video and voice services decreases. However, even ~48 Mbps in my particular setup is sufficient for a lot of simultaneous video-and-voice. Each high-definition (currently MPEG-2, eventually moving to H.264) stream averages 8 Mbps, with standard-def (again, currently MPEG-2) payloads at 4 Mbps each.

At this point, I need to remind you that while SureWest's IPTV physical implementation is similar to Verizon's FiOS (i.e. fiber run all the way to the premises), its logistical implementation is akin to AT&T's U-verse, with channel 'switching' occurring at the SureWest server. In other words, unlike both FiOS and today's cable TV (where all 'pipes' to all customers simultaneously carry all available channels, and channel selection occurs at the set-top box), with SureWest each STB receives only the channel the viewer has requested. This nuance is important for two primary reasons; bandwidth (which I'm discussing now) and channel-switching latency. I'll cover the latter point in a bit.

For those of you who remember my ~3 year old writeup on my home LAN topology and its evolution (if you don't, I suggest you peruse it before continuing your reading of this piece; minimally check out the layout diagram), you'll recall that there's a CAT5e backbone running from the router-plus-GbE switch in my office to another GbE switch in the living room. My initial thought was that by running a single CAT5e data feed from the SureWest gateway to one of the WAN inputs of my router, and from there to the living room via the existing CAT5e backbone, I'd be able to supply both data services to my various LAN clients there (Wi-Fi access point, game consoles, Audiotron, etc) and video services to the two set-top boxes. However, although the STBs requested and received DHCP assignments from the router, they weren't able to handshake with SureWest's server and establish service. Here's the reason why, in the words of SureWest's equipment engineer, Ed Zeledon:

The main reason the video won't work thru your router is because we utilize a QIP DHCP server. Video set tops require specific boot configurations. This server assigns IPs according to MAC ID; we also utilize V-LANs in our network, separating the video [editor note: and, I suspect, the voice service] from standard data traffic. This is done for security of the video and to meet our commitments with content providers [editor note: as well as, I suspect, for QoS reasons]. I will review your RV042 [editor note: my router]; there may be a way to port forward by MAC ID, but wouldn’t doubt this will be a complicated configuration [editor note: ahead of the install, I'd suspected I might need to open up firewall holes and/or do NAT forwarding, but I didn't get an answer when I requested the necessary information to accomplish this preparatory move].

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