The growth of municipal broadband networks

Fri Mar 25 19:10:51 UTC 2011

Highly agree with this experience being shared.  We have had some dealings
with municipal related fiber networks (not naming any names or giving any
hints for obvious reasons) where shortly after providing the proposal to the
customer, the municipal "sales vultures" went in and undercut our pricing
(with Internet access included) to below what the fiber loop itself was
priced at to us.

Paul

-----Original Message-----
From: Martin Millnert [mailto:millnert at gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, March 25, 2011 3:05 PM
To: Paul Graydon
Cc: nanog at nanog.org list
Subject: Re: The growth of municipal broadband networks

Paul,

On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 2:31 PM, Paul Graydon <paul at paulgraydon.co.uk>
wrote:
>
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/03/133-us-cities-now-run-their-
own-broadband-networks.ars
>
> Ars Technica has a short article up about the growth of municipal
networks,
> but principally a nice little 'hey check out this website'
> (http://www.muninetworks.org/communitymap)
(snip)
> I'm curious how the feeling is on NANOG about shifting such provision
> towards municipal instead of corporations?  I guess a rough summary of the
> competing views I've heard so far are:
(snip)

With experience from Sweden, which has seen many varying incantations
of these sort of networks, I have this hopefully useful bit to share:
It's OK for tax-payer money to build layer-1 infrastructure if it
decides so, that non-tax payer money can sell services on, but fail
starts to happen the very moment they decide to go higher than that.

That's... all.

Regards,
Martin