Muni Fiber and Politics

Mon Aug 4 22:01:41 UTC 2014

On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Owen DeLong <owen at delong.com> wrote:
>
>
> OTOH, if the municipality provides only L1 concentration (dragging L1
> facilities
> back to centralized locations where access providers can connect to large
> numbers of customers), then access providers have to compete to deliver
> what consumers actually want. They can't ignore the need for newer L2
> technologies because their competitor(s) will leap frog them and take away
> their customers. This is what we, as consumers, want, isn't it?

In my neck of the woods, the city hall decided that no more fiber cables
running all over the poles in the city and somehow combined with some EU
regulations that communication links need to be buried, they created a
project whereby a 3rd party company would dig the whole city, put in some
tubes in which microfibres would be installed by ISPs that reach every
street number and ISP would pay per the kilometer from point A to point B
(where point A was either a PoP or ISP HQ or whatever; point B is the
customer).

To be clear, this is single-mode dark fiber so the ISPs can run it at
whatever speeds they like between two points.

The only drawback is that the 3rd party company has a monopoly on the
prices for the leasing of the tubes, but from my understanding this is kept
under control by regulation.

Eugeniu