Muni fiber: L1 or L2?

Fri Feb 1 02:10:20 UTC 2013

On Jan 31, 2013, at 5:08 PM, Ray Soucy <rps at maine.edu> wrote:

>> 1.      Must sell dark fiber to any purchaser.
>> 2.      Must sell dark fiber to all purchasers on equal terms.
>>        (There must be a published price list and there cannot be deviations
>>        from that price list. If the price list is modified, existing customers
>>        receive the new pricing at the beginning of their next billing cycle.)
>> 3.      May provide value-added L2 services
>> 4.      If L2 services are provided, they are also subject to rule 2.
>> 5.      May not sell L3 or higher level services.
>> 6.      May not hold ownership or build any form of alliance or affiliation with
>>        a provider of L3 or higher level services.
> 
> I think rule #3 is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea, but
> ends up being abused in practice.
> 

Certainly without rule 4, yes. However, with rules 4,5,6, I think that
overcomes most of the issues that result from rule 3.

If you don't have rule 3, there are a lot of areas where it simply won't
be cost effective for ANYONE to come to the MMR and thus you don't get
any benefit.

> My personal view is that you really want that separation in place.
> You don't want a situation where the dark fiber provider gives
> priority to their L2 outages and get's around to their competitors
> later.
> 

Ideally, I agree with you, but to cover all cases, you also have to make
sure that you have some set of L2 providers before you can do that.

Further, I'm suggesting that the natural place for this in most cases
is to be operated by the muni not a business.

> Businesses are in the business of profit.  Nothing wrong with that,
> but if you want it to be a fair playing field you need to avoid this
> kind of conflict of interest.

Agreed.

> We've seen the same behavior with ILECs and small ISPs.  They were
> required to open up their network to competing ISPs, but did
> everything they could to make it as difficult as possible.  You really
> want to create a situation where that temptation isn't even there.

Except this kind of chicanery has always involved L3+ services in the past.

> We've also seen that when left up to the private sector even last-mile
> solutions suffer from the same cherry-picking of "profitable"
> locations to service: example would be an apartment complex having
> fiber delivered vs. a house next door not having fiber delivered.  You
> can't really blame the private sector for it, but if you want the idea
> of FTTH to be a universal service, you really need to apply the public
> utility model to it.

Yep.

Owen