Muni Fiber and Politics

Tue Aug 5 15:00:10 UTC 2014

On Aug 4, 2014, at 10:34 PM, mcfbbqroast . <bbqroast at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.

The problem with soft handover is that the monopoly provider is in a place to stifle innovation and creativity by creating a limitation on what kinds of handoffs/protocols/etc. can be supported.

> 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).

I don’t mind an optional soft handover, but dark fiber MUST be a required service.

Owen

> 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
>> 
>> 