last mile, regulatory incentives, etc (was: att fiber, et al)

Thu Mar 22 23:16:37 UTC 2012

2012/3/22 William Herrin <bill at herrin.us>

> On Thu, Mar 22, 2012 at 1:22 PM, Keegan Holley
> <keegan.holley at sungard.com> wrote:
> > 2012/3/22 Jared Mauch <jared at puck.nether.net>
> >> On Mar 22, 2012, at 11:05 AM, chris wrote:
> >> > I'm all for VZ being able to reclaim it as long as they open their
> fiber
> >> > which I don't see happening unless its by force via government. At the
> >> end
> >> > of the day there needs to be the ability to allow competitors in so of
> >> > course they shouldnt be allowed to rip out the regulated part and
> replace
> >> > it with a unregulated one.
> >
> > Maybe I'm missing something, but how exactly does one share fiber?  Isn't
> > it usually a closed loop between DWDM or Sonet nodes?  It doesn't seem
> fair
> > to force the incumbents to start handing out lambdas and timeslots to
> their
> > competitors on the business side.  I guess passive optical can be shared
> > depending on the details of the network, but that would still be much
> > different than sharing copper pairs.
>
>
> So, you share fiber by having one guy control one wavelength (color,
> e.g. red) and another guy control another wavelength (e.g. blue). And
> when you install it to a home or business, the "prism" sits up on the
> phone pole and just splits out the one wavelength that is intended for
> that location. You can't even stray out of your color: if you do, the
> prism will bend the light in a way that misses the target beam.
>
> So who get's the keys the the cabinet it resides in?  The LEC?  All of the
CLECs?  The FCC?  Who's responsible for maintaining the box given it's now
shared.  Who takes legal responsibility for outages caused by things done
to this magical prism you speak of?  In the LD to LEC carrier model you can
use whatever you want, but this is different from what the FCC intended
when they forced the incumbents to share copper plant. Also PON and WDM are
very different actually, but that's beside the point.  Once the incumbent
has to permit access to their nodes the CLECs become customers.  Copper
pairs followed a different model because they could be used by anyone at
the whim of hte customer.  Not all fiber based networks are implemented
that way.