Followup: Small City Municipal Broadband

Sat Feb 2 22:41:23 UTC 2013

On Feb 2, 2013, at 2:26 PM, Jay Ashworth <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Jay Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com>
> 
>> It's about 3 square miles, and has about 8000 passings, the majority
>> of which are single or double family residential; a sprinkling of
>> multi-tenant, about a dozen city facilities, and a bunch of retail 
>> multi-unit business.
> 
> I was musing, off-list, as to why there isn't a Mad-Lib you can just plug 
> some numbers into and get within, say, 40% or so of your target costs for
> a given design.
> 
> Well, 
> 
>  http://www.ftthcommunitytoolkit.wikispaces.net
> 
> isn't it, but it does have a bunch of useful information for this project,
> looks like.
> 
> A couple of clarifying points:
> 
> 1) I had posited GPON as I assumed that was where most of the CATV over
> FTTH hardware work was, vice FiOS.  Turns out there's lots of hardware for
> IPTV as well, and quite a number of smaller deployments, so apparently
> that path is easier than I thought.  The only difference is cross-connect
> fiber counts, and possibly some link budget.
> 
> 2) I was planning to provide an IX switch in my colo, so all my L3 providers
> could short-circuit traffic to my *other* providers through it, unloading 
> my uplinks.
> 
> 3) Given that, I suppose I could put Limelight and Akamai racks in there,
> and couple them to the IX switch as well, policies permitting.
> 
> 4) Given what a pisser it's going to be to get tags to me on the local 
> backbone loops (about 3 are with 5 miles of my city border), I'm also
> considering having a 10G or 2 hauled in from each of 2 backbones, and
> reselling those to my L3 providers (again at cost recovery pricing), 
> while not precluding any provider wanting to haul in their own uplink
> from doing so.
> 

A better model, IMHO, is to encourage the backbones to come meet your
providers at your IX/Colo.

> 5) There's a possiblity my college campus may be on I2 (or want to); 
> perhaps I can facilitate that as well -- and possible (again, policies
> permitting) extend such connections to relevant staff members or students
> who live in the city) (I'm not as familiar with I2 as I should be).

Do some research before you pursue this too vocally or commit to it.

> 6) And pursuant to 3, perhaps I could even set up the IPTV service and
> resell that to the L3 provider to bundle with their IP service, so
> they don't have to do it themselves; while it's not a difficult as I 
> had gathered, it's still harder than them doing VoIP as part of their 
> own triple-play.

Pandora's can of worms.

Owen