How many munis serve the rural like they do the urban? In the vast majority of cases the munis end up doing what ILECs only wish they could do -- serve the most profitable customers. Frank -----Original Message----- From: Jay Ashworth [mailto:jra@baylink.com] Sent: Thursday, March 22, 2012 12:52 PM To: NANOG Subject: Muni Fiber (was: Re: last mile, regulatory incentives, etc) <snip> Oh, it's *much* worse than that, John. The *right*, long term solution to all of these problems is for municipalities to do the fiber build, properly engineered, and even subbed out to a contractor to build and possibly operate... offering *only* layer 1 service at wholesale. Any comer can light up each city's pop, and offer retail service over the FTTH fiber to that customer at whatever rate they like, and the city itself doesn't offer layer 2 or 3 service at all. High-speed optical data *is* the next natural monopoly, after power and water/sewer delivery, and it's time to just get over it and do it right. As you might imagine, this environment -- one where the LEC doesn't own the physical plant -- scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of Verizon (among others), so much so that they *have gotten it made illegal* in several states, and they're lobbying to expand that footprint. See, among other sites: http://www.muninetworks.org/ As you might imagine, I am a fairly strong proponent of muni layer 1 -- or even layer 2, where the municipality supplies (matching) ONTs, and services have to fit over GigE -- fiber delivery of high-speed data service. I believe Google agrees with me. :-) Cheers, -- jra Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274