Re: Muni Fiber and Politics

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Aug 4, 2014, at 3:01 PM, Eugeniu Patrascu <eugen () imacandi net> wrote:

> On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 11:05 PM, Owen DeLong <owen () delong com> wrote:
>
> OTOH, if the municipality provides only L1 concentration (dragging L1 facilities
> back to centralized locations where access providers can connect to large
> numbers of customers), then access providers have to compete to deliver
> what consumers actually want. They can't ignore the need for newer L2
> technologies because their competitor(s) will leap frog them and take away
> their customers. This is what we, as consumers, want, isn't it?
>
> In my neck of the woods, the city hall decided that no more fiber cables running all over the poles in the city and 
> somehow combined with some EU regulations that communication links need to be buried, they created a project whereby 
> a 3rd party company would dig the whole city, put in some tubes in which microfibres would be installed by ISPs that 
> reach every street number and ISP would pay per the kilometer from point A to point B (where point A was either a PoP 
> or ISP HQ or whatever; point B is the customer).
>
> To be clear, this is single-mode dark fiber so the ISPs can run it at whatever speeds they like between two points.
>
> The only drawback is that the 3rd party company has a monopoly on the prices for the leasing of the tubes, but from 
> my understanding this is kept under control by regulation.

As long as the price is regulated at a reasonable level and is available on equal footing to all comers, that’s about 
as good as it will get whether run by private enterprise or by the city itself.

Owen