Re: Muni Fiber and Politics

[Scott Helms <khelms () zcorum com>]

That's not an excuse, its simply the political reality here in the US.
 There is a narrow place band on the size scale for a municipality where
its politically acceptable in most places AND there is a true gap in
coverage.  In nearly all of the larger areas, though there are some
exceptions, there is very little reason for a muni to go through the pain,
and it is most certainly painful, any time a city considers any kinds of
moves in this direction a certain percentage of the voters there will have
the same position that Bill Herrin has written from.  It takes a real need
to exist in the minds of enough voters to get past that and get to a place
where spending money is politically feasible.  I would add that this is
much harder in some parts of the country than in others and this is one of
the reasons that you see muni's building layer 3 networks rather than going
for a more open approach.  The people involved in the bond arrangements
almost invariably see having the city the layer 3 provider as more reliable
path to getting repaid than an open system.





On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 1:31 AM, mcfbbqroast . <bbqroast () gmail com> wrote:

> > The chances that a muni network in North America has both 10-20k
> apartments
> and needs to build its own fiber are pretty much non-existent.  We don't
> have the population density that exists in much of Europe and our cities
> are much less dense.
>
> I'm tired of seeing these excuses in the US. New Zealand is much less
> dense than the US and has a good municipal style open access fiber network
> being built.
>
> >