That's not an excuse, its simply the political reality here in the US. There is a narrow place band on the size scale for a municipality where its politically acceptable in most places AND there is a true gap in coverage. In nearly all of the larger areas, though there are some exceptions, there is very little reason for a muni to go through the pain, and it is most certainly painful, any time a city considers any kinds of moves in this direction a certain percentage of the voters there will have the same position that Bill Herrin has written from. It takes a real need to exist in the minds of enough voters to get past that and get to a place where spending money is politically feasible. I would add that this is much harder in some parts of the country than in others and this is one of the reasons that you see muni's building layer 3 networks rather than going for a more open approach. The people involved in the bond arrangements almost invariably see having the city the layer 3 provider as more reliable path to getting repaid than an open system. On Wed, Jul 23, 2014 at 1:31 AM, mcfbbqroast . <bbqroast@gmail.com> wrote:
The chances that a muni network in North America has both 10-20k apartments and needs to build its own fiber are pretty much non-existent. We don't have the population density that exists in much of Europe and our cities are much less dense.
I'm tired of seeing these excuses in the US. New Zealand is much less dense than the US and has a good municipal style open access fiber network being built.