Irwin Lazar <ILazar@tbg.com> writes | In our | area, we're also seeing a lot of pushback against the continued tearing up | of streets to lay additional fiber, so QoS may become the only option to | meet required service levels. The correct way of solving this was demonstrated in Stockholm and duplicated in a handful of Canadian cities. In the first case, the City of Stockholm "nationalized" the laying down of dark fibre in the city, and formed an agency (http://www.stokab.se/english/) which provides unlit/unrepeated/unamplified dark fibre between any pair of addresses in Stockholm at cost as a public utility. Thus, instead of a dozen or so CLEC-style companies ripping up the same set of streets, Stokab does it approximately once, and provides fibre pairs as necessary to these companies, and any other buyers who come along (lots of corporate buyers use Stokab instead of the traditional telcos or CLECs). This approach has been an unqualified success for Stockholm, which thanks in large part to Stokab's establishment in 1994, has been *the* intersting place to do Internet stuff through most of the years since then, despite the city's geographical remoteness and small population. The major drawback of existing dark fibre utility agencies is their management's tendency to try to be innovative - Stokab for example sometimes appears (misguidedly!) to want to move up the value chain into services their buyers are offering, and into new experimental things involving media other than fibre (e.g. radio). If a single "nationalized" supplier of dark fibre slows down or becomes more expensive as a result of this, it will cease to be a market-enabling success, and start to look like the sort of constraint on the last-mile market that former PTTs are imposing on their captive market. (And then yeah you're back to digging up more streets or using QoS or whatever, sigh.) So, a good idea is to press your local government into duplicating Stokab (it really IS good for you), but stop your local equivalent from ever hiring someone with a bell-shaped-head or technology fetish. Sean.