Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)

Fri Mar 23 13:21:30 UTC 2012

Jared Mauch wrote:

> It is already a monopoly. Most places are served by one of
> the utilities: power, telephony or cable. He that controls
> the outside plant controls your fate.

The difference is in how the services can be unbundled.

Power is additive (if in phase) that network topology is
irrelevant.

For telephony, unbundling for DSL at L1 is just fine.

So is optical fiber if single star topology is used.

WDM PON can still be unbundled at L1.

However, with time slotted PON, unbundling must be
at L2, which is as expensive as L3, which means
there effectively is no unbundling.

Or, CLEC may rent a raw fiber at L1 and operate its
own PON. However, as CLEC has less customer density
to share the fiber than ILEC, CLEC's fiber cost per
customer is higher than that of ILEC, which is why
PON promotes local monopoly.

					Masataka Ohta