Muni Fiber and Politics

Tue Jul 22 19:23:54 UTC 2014

On 07/22/2014 02:08 PM, Jay Ashworth wrote:

> I believe you've misunderstood Scott's point.
> 
> The goal of layer-restriction is to encourage competition.
> 
> The underlying goal is "reducing the barrier to entry of a new ISP".
> 
> The less equipment such a new ISP has to provision, the lower that
> barrier is.  If all you have to provision is a couple GE/10GE ports
> on your core switch, that's an order of magnitude easier than any 
> type of optical termination equipment, for you as a potential ISP 
> customer.
> 
> To make this work, the fiber operator *has to make it easy for ISPs
> to become their clients* as well...
> 
> Cheers,
> -- jra

I guess my counter to that argument is this. Here we are still trying to
leverage copper and I liken the L1/L2 argument to selling wholesale DSL
from AT&T (which we do) compared to being a CLEC (which we also are). I
much prefer the CLEC model where I provide my own L2 gear. Yeah, there
is more capital outlay, but then I control it. I don't have some 3rd
party messing around with configurations and break something and then I
have to find them and get them to correct it. Also, I don't have to fit
into their L2 restrictions, etc. These things can happen at L1 too I
suppose, but in our experience it is still better.

Steve

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Steven Saner <ssaner at hubris.net>                      Voice:  316-858-3000
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