Last Mile Design
Miles Fidelman
mfidelman at meetinghouse.net
Sat Feb 9 21:17:18 UTC 2019
On 2/9/19 4:04 PM, Thomas Bellman wrote:
> On 2019-02-09 18:59 CET, Mikael Abrahamsson wrote:
>
>> For anyone saying it's "impossible" to do AE they're welcome here to
>> the nordic region and especially Sweden where PON is basically unheard
>> of. We have millions of AE connected households. I live in one of them.
> However, large parts (probably even most) of our FTTH deployments have
> been built, and are owned, by our municipalities, not private companies.
> And have had government subsidies. (Sometimes outsourced to normal
> commercial companies, but those companies then have the municipality as
> their customer, not us end-users.)
>
> Even without the subsidies, I expect that changes what kind of long-
> term view is taken on the investment. A purely commercial company might
> want a return on their investments in just a few years, and if the fiber
> plant needs to be replaced in its entirety ten years from now, that will
> be the problem of a different CEO. :-) A municipality (or a company
> wholly owned by the municipality) is used to build roads and water pipes
> with expected lifetimes of 50 years, and might build their fiber plants
> expecting them to live 20 years or longer.
>
Yes indeed, longer time horizon, but generally not so much subsidized as:
- having a big initial customer (municipal electric utility, water
utility, the city or county) - a lot of municipal builds are essentially
done for internal purposes, with service to the public as a bonus
- still, usually funded by bonds - long-term money, low rates - and
maybe some money from the NTIA (also available to rural coops)
- a view of networks as infrastructure, with cost-recovery pricing,
rather than as a revenue stream to milk (same as internal networks at a
university or corporation)
By and large, there's a pretty good argument that we SHOULD be viewing
broadband networks as infrastructure, with ownership & management to
match. (Fair disclosure, I used to promote that view as director of a
non-profit policy shop, and as a consultant to municipal governments.
I've also helped design & build big networks, for big customers - in my
days at BBN - so it's an informed opinion :-).
Miles Fidelman
--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is. .... Yogi Berra
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