In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay Ashworth wrote:
Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it deserves to lose.
I agree. If a commercial company goes in to serve folks with fiber they expect a relatively short ROI, 3-5 years typically. This is why rural customers aren't "profitable"; they can't get money from a bank or wall-street for a longer time so they are trying to spread out the build costs over too short of a recoupment period. Fiber has a 20-50 year life. Munis could finance fiber with a 20 year bond at a much lower interest rate than any corporation. By spreading out the costs over 20 years these customers become profitable, often quite so. While in the CBD you might find more than one fiber provider passing a building, for 99.999% of residential users there will only ever be ONE fiber provider to the home. It's hard enough to make the first fiber cost effective, there's no way to go into an already served area incurring all the costs for < 50% of the customers up front. In many small towns muni-fiber in a single star topology to a central switching station where multiple providers can co-locate would bring competitive services at a very attractive cost for both the end user and the services (IP, telephony, video) provider. It's also a topology and technology that easily has 20-50 years of life. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/