Muni Fiber and Politics

mcfbbqroast . bbqroast at gmail.com
Tue Aug 5 05:34:40 UTC 2014


I agree with this, a monopoly is ok if the government regulates it properly
and effectively.

I'm a fan of either:

Dark fibre to every house.

Fiber to every house with a soft handover to the ISP.

All ran by an entity forbidden from retail.

Ideally a mix of both, soft handover for no thrills ISPs (reduced labour to
connect user, reduced maintenance) and dark fibre for others (reduced
costs, increased control).
On 5 Aug 2014 14:11, "Owen DeLong" <owen at delong.com> wrote:

>
> On Aug 4, 2014, at 3:01 PM, Eugeniu Patrascu <eugen at imacandi.net> wrote:
>
> > 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.
>
> As long as the price is regulated at a reasonable level and is available
> on equal footing to all comers, that’s about as good as it will get whether
> run by private enterprise or by the city itself.
>
> Owen
>
>



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