On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 2:15 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: "Eugeniu Patrascu" <eugen@imacandi.net>
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.
This one is a bad idea cause you have lots of people pushing fiber through pipes with active fiber in them... and their incentives not to screw up other people's glass are... unclear? :-)
Not really, if one company starts making mistakes, the other will also mistake their cables. It's like a working mexican standoff :)
Oh, wait: the conduit installer isn't a contractor, they're a monopoly?
The people pushing fiber through the conduits are contractors. There are a handful of companies licensed to operate this.
No, that's even worse.
It's not perfect, but it works.