IMHO the way to go here is to have the physical fiber plant separate. FTTH is a big investment. Easy for a municipality to absorb, but not attractive for a commercial ISP to do. A business will want to realize an ROI much faster than the life of the fiber plant, and will need assurance of having a monopoly and dense deployment to achieve that. None of those conditions apply in the majority of the US, so we're stuck with really old infrastructure delivering really slow service. Municipal FTTH needs to be a regulated public utility (ideally at a state or regional level). It should have an open access policy at published rates and be forbidden from offering lit service on the fiber (conflict of interest). This covers the fiber box in the house to the communications hut to patch in equipment. Think of it like the power company and the separation between generation and transmission. That's Step #1. Step #2 is finding an ISP to make use of the fiber. Having a single municipal ISP is not really what I think is needed. Having the infrastructure in place to eliminate the huge investment needed for an ISP to service a community is. Hopefully, enough people jump at the idea and offer service over the fiber, but if they don't, you need to get creative. The important thing is that the fiber stays open. I'm not a fan of having a town or city be an ISP because I know how the budgets work. I trust a town to make sure my fiber is passing light; I don't trust it to make sure I have the latest and greatest equipment to light the fiber, or bandwidth from the best sources. I certainly don't trust the town to allow competition if it's providing its own service. This is were the line really needs to be drawn IMHO. Municipal FTTH is about layer 1, not layer 2 or layer 3. That said, there are communities where just having the fiber plant won't be enough. In these situations, the municipality can do things like create an incentive program to guarantee a minimum income for an ISP to reach the community which get's trimmed back as the ISP gains subscribers. I don't think a public option is bad on the ISP side of things; as long as the fiber is open and people can choose which ISP they want. The public option might be necessary for very rural communities that can't get service elsewhere or to simply serve as a price-check, but most of us here know that a small community likely won't be able to find the staff to run its own ISP, either. TL;DR Municipal FTTH should be about fixing the infrastructure issues and promoting innovation and competition, not creating a government-run ISP to oust anyone from the market. Think about it: If you're an ISP, and you can lease fiber and equipment space (proper hut, secured, with backup power and cooling etc) for a subsidized rate; for cheaper than anything you could afford to build out; how much arm twisting would it take for you to invest in installing a switch or two to deliver service? If you're a smaller ISP, you were likely already doing this in working with telephone companies in the past (until they started trying to oust you). On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Aaron <aaron@wholesaleinternet.net> wrote:
So let me throw out a purely hypothetical scenario to the collective:
What do you think the consequences to a municipality would be if they laid fiber to every house in the city and gave away internet access for free? Not the WiFi builds we have today but FTTH at gigabit speeds for free?
Do you think the LECs would come unglued?
Aaron
On 7/21/2014 8:33 PM, Miles Fidelman wrote:
I've seen various communities attempt to hand out free wifi - usually in limited areas, but in some cases community-wide (Brookline, MA comes to mind). The limited ones (e.g., in tourist hotspots) have been city funded, or donated. The community-wide ones, that I've seen, have been public-private partnerships - the City provides space on light poles and such - the private firm provides limited access, in hopes of selling expanded service. I haven't seen it work successfully - 4G cell service beats the heck out of WiFi as a metropolitan area service.
When it comes to municipal fiber and triple-play projects, I've generally seen them capitalized with revenue bonds -- hence, a need for revenue to pay of the financing. Lower cost than commercial services because municipal bonds are low-interest, long-term, and they operate on a cost-recovery basis.
Miles Fidelman
Aaron wrote:
Do you have an example of a municipality that gives free internet access to it's residents?
On 7/21/2014 2:26 PM, Matthew Kaufman wrote:
I think the difference is when the municipality starts throwing in free or highly subsidized layer 3 connectivity "free with every layer 1 connection"
Matthew Kaufman
(Sent from my iPhone)
On Jul 21, 2014, at 12:08 PM, Blake Dunlap <ikiris@gmail.com> wrote:
My power is pretty much always on, my water is pretty much always on and safe, my sewer system works, etc etc...
Why is layer 1 internet magically different from every other utility?
-Blake
On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 1:38 PM, William Herrin <bill@herrin.us> wrote: > > On Mon, Jul 21, 2014 at 10:20 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com> > wrote: > Over the last decade, 19 states have made it illegal for > municipalities > to own fiber networks
Hi Jay,
Everything government does, it does badly. Without exception. There are many things government does better than any private organization is likely to sustain, but even those things it does slowly and at an exorbitant price.
Muni fiber is a competition killer. You can't beat city hall; once built it's not practical to compete, even with better service, so residents are stuck with only the overpriced (either directly or via taxes), usually underpowered and always one-size-fits-all network access which results. As an ISP I watched something similar happen in Altoona PA a decade and a half ago. It was a travesty.
The only exception I see to this would be if localities were constrained to providing point to point and point to multipoint communications infrastructure within the locality on a reasonable and non-discriminatory basis. The competition that would foster on the services side might outweigh the damage on the infrastructure side. Like public roads facilitate efficient transportation and freight despite the cost and potholes, though that's an imperfect simile.
Regards, Bill Herrin
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