Re: Muni Fiber and Politics

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Aug 4, 2014, at 10:34 PM, mcfbbqroast . <bbqroast () gmail com> wrote:

> I agree with this, a monopoly is ok if the government regulates it properly
> and effectively.
>
> I'm a fan of either:
>
> Dark fibre to every house.
>
> Fiber to every house with a soft handover to the ISP.

The problem with soft handover is that the monopoly provider is in a place to stifle innovation and creativity by 
creating a limitation on what kinds of handoffs/protocols/etc. can be supported.

> All ran by an entity forbidden from retail.
>
> Ideally a mix of both, soft handover for no thrills ISPs (reduced labour to
> connect user, reduced maintenance) and dark fibre for others (reduced
> costs, increased control).

I don’t mind an optional soft handover, but dark fiber MUST be a required service.

Owen

> On 5 Aug 2014 14:11, "Owen DeLong" <owen () delong com> wrote:
>
> > 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