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

Owen DeLong owen at delong.com
Sun Mar 25 15:33:40 UTC 2012


Who cares?

It's time to stop letting rural deployments stand in the way of municipal deployments.

It's a natural part of living outside of a population center that it costs more to bring utility services to you. I'm not entirely opposed (though somewhat) to subsidizing that to some extent, but, I'm tired of municipal deployments being blocked by this sense of equal entitlement to rural.

The rural builds cost more, take longer, and yield lower revenues. It makes no sense to let that stand in the way of building out municipalities. Nothing prevents rural residents who have the means and really want their buildout prioritized from building a collective to get it done.

Subsidizing rural build-out is one thing. Failing to build out municipalities because of some sense of rural entitlement? That's just stupid.

Owen


Sent from my iPad

On Mar 24, 2012, at 12:42 PM, "Frank Bulk" <frnkblk at iname.com> wrote:

> 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
> Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
> St Petersburg FL USA      http://photo.imageinc.us             +1 727 647 1274
> 
> 
> 




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