Followup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Sun Feb 3 00:52:58 UTC 2013

On Sat, 2 Feb 2013, Jay Ashworth wrote:

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

I guess I missed that.  You are saying that you would aggregate/resell 
transit bandwidth in your colo?  I would argue against that as well.  I'd 
suggest making sure your colo had adequate entrance facilities to allow 
whomever wants to provide upstream service there to show up, and allow 
them access to the fiber, which you already effectively have done.

>>> 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?

I guess as far as putting an Akamai server in a colo/on an exchange, I 
assumed they didn't charge, but now that you mention it, I don't have 
first hand knowledge of that.  I certainly would suggest that the city 
should not pay for anyone to show up at the colo, but allow them access if
they care to do so on equal footing.

Of course Akamai charges for their services, that's a bit different than 
just exchanging traffic.

-- 
Brandon Ross                                      Yahoo & AIM:  BrandonNRoss
+1-404-635-6667                                                ICQ:  2269442
Schedule a meeting:  https://doodle.com/bross            Skype:  brandonross