In a message written on Tue, Jan 29, 2013 at 02:14:46PM -0800, Owen DeLong wrote:
The MMR should, IMHO be a colo facility where service providers can lease racks if they choose. The colo should also be operated on a cost recovery basis and should only be open to installation of equipment directly related to providing service to customers reached via the MMR.
I'm not sure I agree with your point. The _muni_ should not run any equipment colo of any kind. The muni MMR should be fiber only, and not even require so much as a generator to work. It should not need to be staffed 24x7, have anything that requires PM, etc. I fully support the muni MMR being inside of a colocation facility run by some other company (Equinix/DLR/CoreSite, whatever) so folks can colo "on site". I think it is also important someone be able to set up a colo down the street and just drop in a 1000 strand fiber cable to the actual MMR. Why is this important? Well, look at one of the failure modes of the CO system. When DSL was in its hayday, CO's would become full, and no new DSL providers would be able to get colo space. Plus the CO's could use space/power/hands time/etc as profit centers. Muni-fiber should stay as far away from these problems as possible. I think it's also important to consider the spectrum of deployments here. A small town of 1000 homes may have MuniMMRREIT come in and build a 5,000 sq foot building with 1,000 of that leased to the muni for fiber patch panels, and the other 4,000 sold to ISP's by the rack to provide service. On the other side consider a space like New York City, where MuniFiberCo builds out 50,000 square feet for fiber racks somewhere, and ISP #1 drops in 10,000 strands from 111 8th Ave, and ISP #2 drops in 10,000 strands from 25 Broadway, and so on. In the middle may be a mid-sized town, where the build the MMR in a business park, and 3 ISP's erect their own colos, and a colo provider builds the fourth a houses a dozen smaller players. In the small town case, MuniMMRREIT may agree to a regulated price structure for colo space. In the New York City case, it would make no sense for one colo to try and house all the equipment now and forever, and there would actually (on a per strand basis) be very minimal cost to pull 10,000 strands down the street. I'll argue that running 10,000 strands (which is as few as 12 860 strand fiber cables) a block or two down the street is far less cost than trying to shoehorn more colo into an existing building where it is hard to add generators/chillers/etc. Basically, running fiber a block or two down the street opens up a host of cheaper realestate/colo opportunities, and it doesn't cost significanly more than running the fiber from one end of a colo to another relative to all the other costs. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/