Idea

Pole attachments turned out to be problematic with the Public Utilities Comission who wanted us to become a CLEC to be able to even ask. Nice folks though. I have now planted over a mile of 48 core Corning SMF28 Ultra in SDR9 conduit in our hillside and connected it via fiber to a local business where I negotiated a dedicated fiber port with the ILEC at $1300/250Mbps symmetrical SLA'd with 62 IPv4 addresses and a /48 IPv6 block. The uplink is funded mostly by a Ubiquiti hotspot with 10 access points, which since October 2018 is averaging about $1100/month. All connections and connectors are fusion spliced using an EasySplicer MKII which I bought from the company owner Lars, directly from Sweden. It's V-Groove but the core is so precisely placed on modern Fiber that loss in negligible- on a 2km run with intermediate splices and connectors less than 3dB loss. It's all SMF, LC/UPC, BiDi SFP in 1310/1550nm, Mikrotik routing & CPE. The ILEC had quoted $35000 to bring in fiber to the business (they refused to service residences directly) but they were late on their construction contract and amazingly all that that ended up being free with a 3 year contract. On our end 8000ft of 48SMF was under $5k and 5000ft SDR9 HDPE conduit was under $4k. We handled the spools with a backhoe. 30" deep trenches about half through rocky hell, all dielectric (no conductive elements & no grounding required) with flat marking tape overlays. We provide free connections to properties we needed to cross; Since the next best option is 6Mbps Terrestrial Wireless at $110/month, it wasn't a hard sell. Arc fusion splicing is really really easy with a modern splicer, most of your time is just fiber prep and then organizing all the hair back into a splice box (we used Coyote brand also very easy). I would recommend this approach to anyone who is not afraid of sweat. It works really really well. In a year or two we'll upgrade to 500Mbps (around $1800/month) and eventually Gbps (around $2200/month). We wouldn't be a very profitable ISP but we are a bunch of happy neighbors.

Why would anyone use copper when fiber is an option? Copper is more expensive and less versatile. For example single fiber gigabit SFP modules are like $25/for a pair. I've used Fujikura splicers and there's nothing difficult about it, just that a good core alignment Fujikura kit may cost $20k. I have lots of deployed Ubiquiti terrestrial wireless gear but this time there's no good lines of sight and not good relay points with property rights or power. Can a cheap arc fusion splicer work as well as a Fujikura?

There's 12-20 homes that could benefit, all within 4km. There's no other wireline internet available (also no cell service) although there is a business fiber termination near the center of all the rural tree filled, hilly properties with the ability to get another 200Mbps for about $250/month. Splicers are expensive but considering that most people are spending $60/month for mobile service and more for home internet it start to sound reasonable to build our own, especially since no cable or phone company is interested. Plus its interesting.

I'm interested in building a small rural fiber network where the local telcoms aren't interested in doing it. I noticed that there's now arc fusion splicers below $1k. Has anyone on here ever used a super cheap core alignment splicer like this? https://www.aliexpress.com/item/signalfire-AI-8-FTTH-Fiber-Optic-Welding-Splicing-Machine-Optical-Fiber-Fusion-Splicer/32847551932.html Would Linus be interested in testing a "cheap" kit like this and maybe comparing it to more traditional splicer like a Fujikura that's 6 to 20 times more expensive?