Will wholesale-only muni actually bring the boys to your yard?

Thu Jan 31 01:11:01 UTC 2013

[ One of a batch of replies to today's traffic; I was busy yanking a
750GB drive out of the grave all day. --jra ]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "Owen DeLong" <owen at delong.com>

[ me: ]
> > It rings true to me, in general, and I would go that way... but
> > there is
> > a sting in that tail: Can I reasonably expect that Road Runner will
> > in fact
> > be technically equipped and inclined to meet me to get my residents
> > as
> > subscribers? Especially if they're already built HFC in much to all
> > of
> > my municipality?
> 
> It doesn't actually matter. You don't necessarily need to be the only
> wholesale
> offering, you just need to be open to all service providers. This
> means that
> if Road Runner wants to pay for their own infrastructure instead of
> using yours,
> then that will increase their costs and likely make it harder for them
> to compete
> with ISPs (and other services) that choose to use your infrastructure.

It does actually matter, Owen, for the specific build I'm looking at,
since *Road Runner already has the city built*; they can do GHz CATV 
with all the toys, and at least 25/5 cablemodem, if not 50/15.

That's pretty competitive, and already includes triple play.

What sort of money a build needs to make is of course largely a question 
of how good a sales job you did to your city commission, but I shouldn't
think a small, largely residential, community is gonna make it on *just*
businesses and geeks.

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               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274