Free access to measurement network

Mon Dec 18 17:19:54 UTC 2017

  That must be recent change then because last time I looked RLECs are pretty well protected from CLEC competition.  That was the original telecom act difference between CLECs and RLECs.  Their argument was that it was so hard to be economically viable in low density areas that they deserved to have exclusive access to their infrastructure.  However the biggest thing stopping a CLEC from building in a ROW is economics.  The RLEC wouldn't even be there without all of the government subsidies they got to build in the first place.  

I think the market has already spoken pretty resoundingly about building out infrastructure as a CLEC.  You would have to step over all of the corpses on your way to doing so.  In fact,  I can’t off the top of my head think of a single CLEC that has widespread coverage over their own infrastructure.  They almost universally use the ILEC infrastructure for last mile.  Even the giants like Level 3 are pretty much unavailable unless you are in the heart of the NFL sized city.  As far as rural wireless, we have found very few options in any of the markets we have looked into.  The same density issues that prevent high quality cellular build outs also applies to WISPs.  In the rural area the WISP still needs backhaul and antenna infrastructure.  The lack of national scale WISPs tells me that model is not going to be viable at scale.  Too much infrastructure for too few customers is the common killer of CLECs and WISPs.  The biggest WISPs I know of are mostly urban as alternatives to the ILEC infrastructure not in rural areas and are used mostly as backup providers.

Most facilities based DSL providers (i.e. equipment collocated with the ILECs) died quite some time ago.  There were lots of them in the 1999 - 2005 timeframe and they are all dead now.  You just can't compete with the ILEC cost model.

I think the only model that would possibly bring out any viable competition in the last mile would be municipality owned infrastructure.  The problem with that model is the municipalities love to offer exclusive contracts instead of an open infrastructure because they get the big payday.

Steven Naslund
Chicago IL

>-----Original Message-----
>From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Mike Hammett
>Sent: Monday, December 18, 2017 10:43 AM
>Cc: nanog at nanog.org
>Subject: Re: Free access to measurement network
>
>There's nothing stopping you from using CLEC status to build in the ROW of an RLEC area. 
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>Fixed wireless is the most cost effective way to deploy in rural environments, other than at some point ultra rural, satellite takes over. That's kinda what WISPs have been doing for 20 years. 
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>So don't own cable. Build fiber. There's nothing stopping you from doing that. 
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>If you're going CLEC and using the ILEC's copper, go bigger. Most of the big ILECs are still rolling with sub 10 megabit speeds. I know some CLECs doing ADSL2+, VDSL, etc. Not as wide-reaching, no, but it's something and generates ?>revenue while you build your own plant. 
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>----- 
>Mike Hammett 
>Intelligent Computing Solutions 
>
>Midwest Internet Exchange 
>
>The Brothers WISP 