Rollup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Leo Bicknell bicknell at ufp.org
Sun Feb 3 20:49:46 UTC 2013


In a message written on Sun, Feb 03, 2013 at 02:39:39PM -0500, Scott Helms wrote:
> > Basically when the customer (typically the service provider, but
> > not always) orders a loop to a customer the muni provider would
> > OTDR shoot it from the handoff point to the service provider to the
> > prem.  They would be responsible for insuring a reasonable performance
> > of the fiber between those two end points.
> 
> Been tried multiple times and I've never seen it work in  the US, Canada,
> Europe, or Latin America. That's not to say it can't work, but there lots
> of reasons why it doesn't and I don't think anyone has suggested anything
> here that I haven't already seen fail.

Zayo (nee AboveNet/MFN), Sunesys, Allied Fiber, FiberTech Networks,
and a dozen smaller dark fiber providers work this way today, with
nice healthy profitable business.  Granted, none of them are in the
residential space today, but I don't see any reason why the prem
being residential would make the model fail.

Plenty of small cities sell dark as well, at least until the incumbant
carriers scare/bribe the legislatures into outlawing it.  I think that's
evidence it works well, they know they can't compete with a muni
network, so they are trying to block it with legal and lobbying efforts.

They all cost a lot more than would make sense for residential, but
most of that is that they lack the economies of scale that going
to every residence would bring.  Their current density of customers
is simply too low.

-- 
       Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org - CCIE 3440
        PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 826 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20130203/bad1a0a4/attachment.sig>


More information about the NANOG mailing list