On Jan 30, 2013, at 1:47 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 30, 2013 at 4:30 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
On Jan 30, 2013, at 6:24 AM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote:
As long as they support open peering they can probably operate at layer 3 without harm. Tough to pitch a muni on spending tax revenue for something that's not a complete product usable directly by the taxpayers.
Perhaps, but well worth the effort. There are a wide variety of reasons to want more than one L3 provider to be readily available and avoid limiting consumers to a single choice of ISP policies, capabilities, etc.
If the municipal provider offers open, settlement-free peering at the head end then the customer *does* have a choice of L3 provider. Tunnel service over IP has only minor differences from an L2 service in such a scenario. Only one difference truthfully: MTU.
No, they have the municipal provider as a single monopoly L3 provider. While it's true that you can create an L2 service on top of existing L3 service using a tunnel, that doesn't exempt you from the limitations and policies of the underlying L3 provider.
Also, an L1/L2 fiber plant may be usable for other services beyond just packets.
True enough but rapidly dropping in importance. The 20th century held POTS service with a rare need for a dry copper pair. The 21st holds IP packets with a rare need for dark fiber.
We all know these trends run in cycles. Today, the importance of other services is dropping. However, if we should have learned anything from the past development in this industry, it's that planning a 30 year plant around today's realities is virtually guaranteed to be wrong in about 10 years or less.
Besides, I don't propose that a municipality implement fiber but refuse to unbundle it at any reasonable price. That would be Really Bad.
However, if they're competing for L3 business, it creates a conflict of interest. If they're a monopoly L3 provider, it creates different problems. Owen