Remooted: a deployment design for Muni Fiber (was Re: Muni Fiber and Politics)

Tue Aug 5 21:34:20 UTC 2014

----- Original Message -----
> From: "William Herrin" <bill at herrin.us>

> > All ran by an entity forbidden from retail.
> 
> Nonononono, bad plan. I want a fiber from my home to my storefront on
> main street, but I'm a consumer not a retailer so I can't buy just
> one? Or hey, so sorry but the cable MuniFiber ran to your home is
> under contract to XYZ corp. They have to release it before we at ABC
> corp can provide you service.

Well, yeah; I actually agree with most of that.

My plan, to recap it from '12, was this:

You can rent, for an MRC (probably plus a deposit):

1) L2 connectivity to a property, talking to an ONT supplied by the utility,
that is a virtual circuit to the prem, and delivered to you as (I think)
QinQ.  That is: you get a completely clean Ethernet connection, over which
you can run IPv4 or IPv6, with whatever addressing you want, to a GigE port
on the ONT, as long as the customer has one free.  If the customer wants
their 4 ports to go to 4 different ISPs?  Fine.

2) L1 connectivity to a property, over any available pair provisioned
to that address -- I was planning on 3 pair drops for 1-3 unit properties,
and a declining overbuild from 2 down to about 1.2 pairs per unit for
stripcenters and apartment buildings and the like.  Obviously, this will
cost more, as it's a more limited resource.  This would allow you to plug
the fiber directly into your switch at both ends, and we'll just xconn
the two drops in the fiber room.

3) If you're really motivated for some reason, with an even larger 
deposit, we will have our contractor pull your fiber into our conduits,
running from wherever you need to go to wherever else you need to go.
This would be a contractual setup, I suspect, as it needs to handle
title in case of abandonment, and like that.  Presumably, it would
not carry an MRC, unless it appears in our fiber room (which it 
probably should), in which case a nominal charge for the jumper and
any NRCs for special work.  I can't see why anyone would actually
need this, but I mention it for completeness sake -- I plan to
preprovision additional trunking in strategic places, so we can
get more than 3 pairs someplace should we really need it; fiber's
(mostly) cheap; crews are expensive.

As I noted originally, I think providing L2 service is useful as it
(sharply) reduces the barrier-to-entry to smaller "boutique" ISP 
services, at the cost of their perhaps being at our mercy for upgrades
and such.  If we do our job properly, I don't think too many such
speed bumps would affect such people.  We're pretty far along the
development curve now; anyone who thinks symmetrical gigabit isn't 
enough either has never used it (with a good backhaul), or needs
to be on Internet2.  :-)

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra at baylink.com
Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates       http://www.bcp38.info          2000 Land Rover DII
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