Followup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Sun Feb 3 00:31:54 UTC 2013

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Brandon Ross" <bross at pobox.com>

> > No; I wouldn't offer it retail; I'd offer it to all provider-comers
> > wholesale, at cost plus, just like everything else.
> 
> It sure seems like just pushing the competition (or lack thereof) up
> the stack.

Could be.  To compete with Roadrunner, people will have to do triple
play, and the CATV is the hard part.  If someone else is already doing
the aggregation, I'm good with that.

> >> Running a decent layer 3 service is "hard" too. Isn't the whole
> >> point to
> >> let these service providers compete with each other on the quality
> >> and
> >> cost of their services?
> >
> > You could say the same thing about the uplink,
> 
> Which uplink is that? I'm a little confused.

My colo's uplinks to the world, which were one of three things I proposed
offering at wholesale to ISPs.

> > though; I note you didn't throw a flag at that, or at Akamai; is the
> > IPTV issue different to you?
> 
> If you were to open your colo to all comers that have similar models
> to Akamai, that seems fair. After all, it's not the city selling Akamai
> services to either the ISPs or end-users, the city is just providing a
> convenient way for the providers that are there to interconnect with
> content providers that care to show up.

Precisely.  Akamai's business model is that they just show up?  Me and
my ISPs don't have to pay them?

> Now if you were to encourage an IPTV services provider that WASN'T the
> city to co-locate at the facility, that seems reasonable as long as terms
> were even if another one wanted to show up. I could imagine that some
> might sell service direct retail, others might go wholesale with one of
> the other service providers. Maybe both?

Perhaps; yeah.

> This whole thing is the highway analogy to me. The fiber is the road.
> The city MIGHT build a rest stop (layer 2), but shouldn't be allowed
> to either be in the trucking business (layer 3), nor in the
> business of manufacturing the products that get shipped over the road
> (IPTV, VOIP, etc.), and the same should apply to the company that
> maintains the fiber, if it's outsourced.

Ok, fair point.  My goal in IX and Akamai was "unload my uplinks".

The bigger my downlinks are, the more I will care.

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