Kia ora koutou katoa!

About 5 years ago, I made enquiries -- unoffically -- of the cost of putting in a piece of fibre along Onekaka Iron Works Road, in Golden Bay. The unofficial, "this never happened, you didn't hear it from me" ball park estimate, which I think would have included:

• digging a new pit
• tapping into some recently laid RBI fibre that goes between Takaka and Collingwood
• installing new equipment (GPON?? I don't really know... into a new cabinet...??
• trenching along the road for maybe 500 metres
• traffic management... etc., etc.

would be in the order of $30,000. 

That was quite a lot, so it never went anywhere. But I understood where the costs came from.

Fast-forward five years. The land-owner that is directly adjacent to the TAK/V cabinet asked about whether they would be able to get a fibre connection. So, I pootled off and made an Next Generation Access (NGA) enquiry to see whether the (presumably newly fibre-fed) TAK/V cabinet would enable a fibre connection to be made. The RSP has come back and said that yes, an NGA connection could be achieved, and that the estimated cost of providing a connection -- to the land-owner's boundary -- would be in the ball-park of $9,000. Additionally, if the land-owner wanted "inside boundary trenching" to be carried out to their buildings, this could be done but would bring the costings up to about $27-34,000. Again, that's quite a lot.

I understand that if essential equipment is not present in the locations needed, there will be costs involved in establishing them, but had naively thought that the costs of breaking a fibre out of a cabinet and ducking it under a fenceline might be a little cheaper. Presumably there'd be additional equipment to be installed at the cabinet? Or would there need to be additional equipment to be installed in the exchange?

There are a couple of other threads here on Geekzone, where other people, more knowledgeable in these things have explained that:

 

1. not all fibre cables are equal: think mainline train tracks vs. a local off-ramp for a car
2. a fibre cable passing by might not be easily-tappable-into ("dark fibre"?? vs fibre for service consumption??)
3. NGA costs are still high

Is there someone who knows better about these things able to help me understand where the costs might be in the case of the TAK/V cabinet, and the directly-adjacent land-owner?

Finally, I do have a further thought. Both Takaka and Collingwood should be getting residential fibre connections by the end of 2021. Once that work had been completed, is it likely that the cost of an NGA connection somewhere between those two townships might be cheaper...? Or is that wishful thinking ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Cheers all. Hope you're having a great Wednesday afternoon!

   Jon