Re: Muni fiber: L1 or L2?

[Dan Armstrong <dan () beanfield com>]

Sorry for jumping into this discussion so late…. and I apologize if this has already been talked about (this has been a 
long thread)

But the most successful municipal undertaking to support telecom I have ever seen is a municipally owned conduit 
system….  Any infrastructure L1, L2, or anything is too complex to be commercially viable if owned by one entity.  

Putting everybody on a level playing field removes the value from everybody, and therefore removes the commercial 
interest to DO anything, so nothing happens.

Unless somebody is able to build a product that everybody can't just have without any obstacles, nobody is going to do 
anything, and we end up with nothing.

A city owned conduit system is the best balance between fairness for the consumer, and supporting a competitive 
environment for service providers to offer something John Q public can't get on his own.




On 2013-01-31, at 9:10 PM, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:

> On Jan 31, 2013, at 5:08 PM, Ray Soucy <rps () maine edu> wrote:
>
> > > 1.      Must sell dark fiber to any purchaser.
> > > 2.      Must sell dark fiber to all purchasers on equal terms.
> > >       (There must be a published price list and there cannot be deviations
> > >       from that price list. If the price list is modified, existing customers
> > >       receive the new pricing at the beginning of their next billing cycle.)
> > > 3.      May provide value-added L2 services
> > > 4.      If L2 services are provided, they are also subject to rule 2.
> > > 5.      May not sell L3 or higher level services.
> > > 6.      May not hold ownership or build any form of alliance or affiliation with
> > >       a provider of L3 or higher level services.
> >
> > I think rule #3 is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea, but
> > ends up being abused in practice.
>
> Certainly without rule 4, yes. However, with rules 4,5,6, I think that
> overcomes most of the issues that result from rule 3.
>
> If you don't have rule 3, there are a lot of areas where it simply won't
> be cost effective for ANYONE to come to the MMR and thus you don't get
> any benefit.
>
> > My personal view is that you really want that separation in place.
> > You don't want a situation where the dark fiber provider gives
> > priority to their L2 outages and get's around to their competitors
> > later.
>
> Ideally, I agree with you, but to cover all cases, you also have to make
> sure that you have some set of L2 providers before you can do that.
>
> Further, I'm suggesting that the natural place for this in most cases
> is to be operated by the muni not a business.
>
> > Businesses are in the business of profit.  Nothing wrong with that,
> > but if you want it to be a fair playing field you need to avoid this
> > kind of conflict of interest.
>
> Agreed.
>
> > We've seen the same behavior with ILECs and small ISPs.  They were
> > required to open up their network to competing ISPs, but did
> > everything they could to make it as difficult as possible.  You really
> > want to create a situation where that temptation isn't even there.
>
> Except this kind of chicanery has always involved L3+ services in the past.
>
> > We've also seen that when left up to the private sector even last-mile
> > solutions suffer from the same cherry-picking of "profitable"
> > locations to service: example would be an apartment complex having
> > fiber delivered vs. a house next door not having fiber delivered.  You
> > can't really blame the private sector for it, but if you want the idea
> > of FTTH to be a universal service, you really need to apply the public
> > utility model to it.
>
> Yep.
>
> Owen