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

Sat Mar 24 19:42:48 UTC 2012

How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban?

In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra at baylink.com] 
Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM
To: NANOG
Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc)

<snip>

Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John.

The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for 
municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even 
subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... 

offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale.  Any comer can light up
each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that 
customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer 
layer 2 or 3 service at all.

High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power 
and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it
right.

As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own
the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon
(among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in 
several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint.

See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/

As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 --
or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and
services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data
service.

I believe Google agrees with me.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
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