Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)

Mon Mar 26 19:51:35 UTC 2012

----- Original Message -----
> From: "JC Dill" <jcdill.lists at gmail.com>

> On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
> > In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay
> > Ashworth wrote:
> >> Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good;
> >> if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it
> >> deserves to lose.
> 
> It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately
> funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the
> street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of
> the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or
> underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part
> of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should
> be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no
> matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines.

Yup; that's what I said.  But it cannot be privately financed; *it must
be the property of the municipality*, legally.  I don't care if they
sub out the actual trench and splice, or even the operation of layer 1...

but they have to own it; that's the whole point.

> > Fiber has a 20-50 year life.
> 
> The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is.
> Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by
> mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less
> than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can
> deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the
> position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they
> rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and
> their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a
> *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer
> data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal
> wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless.

His assertion wasn't economic life, it was *functional* life; I think we're 
pretty close to 50 years from the first deployment of optical fiber, and I
think it's still serviceable.

The question here is: did you design layer 1 properly, so as to make it
cost-competitive for a long time (see the other thread on this).

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
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