----- Original Message -----
From: "JC Dill" <jcdill.lists@gmail.com>
On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote:
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.
It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines.
Yup; that's what I said. But it cannot be privately financed; *it must be the property of the municipality*, legally. I don't care if they sub out the actual trench and splice, or even the operation of layer 1... but they have to own it; that's the whole point.
Fiber has a 20-50 year life.
The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is. Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless.
His assertion wasn't economic life, it was *functional* life; I think we're pretty close to 50 years from the first deployment of optical fiber, and I think it's still serviceable. The question here is: did you design layer 1 properly, so as to make it cost-competitive for a long time (see the other thread on this). 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