Muni fiber: L1 or L2?

Fri Feb 1 02:28:13 UTC 2013

Sorry for jumping into this discussion so late…. and I apologize if this has already been talked about (this has been a long thread)

But the most successful municipal undertaking to support telecom I have ever seen is a municipally owned conduit system….  Any infrastructure L1, L2, or anything is too complex to be commercially viable if owned by one entity.  

Putting everybody on a level playing field removes the value from everybody, and therefore removes the commercial interest to DO anything, so nothing happens.

Unless somebody is able to build a product that everybody can't just have without any obstacles, nobody is going to do anything, and we end up with nothing.

A city owned conduit system is the best balance between fairness for the consumer, and supporting a competitive environment for service providers to offer something John Q public can't get on his own.

On 2013-01-31, at 9:10 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:

> 
> 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
> 
> 