Muni broadband sucks (was: New minimum speed for US broadband connections)

Thu Jun 3 07:07:17 UTC 2021

On Thu, Jun 3, 2021 at 1:37 AM Masataka Ohta <
mohta at necom830.hpcl.titech.ac.jp> wrote:

> > The city should provide base infrastructure, lease it to operators at
> > the same price, and get out of the way. End of.
>
> With single star topology, that's fine.
>
> However, with PON, only the provider with the largest share can win
> the initial competition, after which there is monopoly.
>

No.  Most of the municipal proposals I see are open access, even with a PON
design.

If the network is not a "one fiber per customer" design, then the muni
network will own the entire GPON/XGS-PON infrastructure (fiber, splitters
and lit electronics).  The ISP is just providing bits, customer service,
billing, and maybe the inside install and CPE.  Sometimes, the transport to
the customer is a fee paid by the ISP to the network owner.  In other cases
the end-customer pays the fiber transport cost directly to the network
owner, and then pays a separate bill just for their desired ISP service.
This is all designed for open access with each ISP having their own NNIs
and service VLANs on the lit network to connect back to their ISP service
network.

Often the muni owners are looking for a "network operator" that is usually
one of the ISPs on the network, who will handle all the physical
administration and connection work for the lit network, and is paid some
sort of fee for doing this.  They have to stay neutral as the operator,
when dealing with other ISPs, with contract requirements and SLAs for
maintaining the network for all involved.

There are several successful municipal or utility district owned open
access fiber infrastructure projects in the US.  Some of the
implementations even allow the customer to "self service" switch to a new
ISP as desired, via a web portal and have several choices for providers.

Occasionally a muni network will want a single ISP for the entire network.
They will offer an ISP an exclusive contract for a fixed period of time,
and negotiate for the lowest possible price for their residents for the
bandwidth provided.  I know of muni owned networks where the residents are
paying $30/month for full 1GigE ISP service, and all the other costs are
paid by their property taxes servicing a long term bond for the
construction costs.

-- 
Jim Troutman,
jamesltroutman at gmail.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
207-514-5676 (cell)
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/attachments/20210603/3c0d3706/attachment.html>