In a message written on Sat, Feb 02, 2013 at 06:14:56PM -0500, Brandon Ross wrote:
This whole thing is the highway analogy to me. The fiber is the road. The city MIGHT build a rest stop (layer 2), but shouldn't be allowed to either be in the trucking business (layer 3), nor in the business of manufacturing the products that get shipped over the road (IPTV, VOIP, etc.), and the same should apply to the company that maintains the fiber, if it's outsourced.
I think your analogy is largely correct (I'm not sure Rest Stop == Layer 2 is perfect, but close enough), but it is a very important way of describing things to a non-technical audience. FTTH should operate like roads in many respects. From ownership and access, to how the network is expanded. For instance a new neighborhood would see the developer build both the roads and fiber to specifications, and then turn them over to the municipality. Same model. Having multiple people build the infrastructure would be just as inefficeint as if every house had two roads built to it by two private companies. -- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org - CCIE 3440 PGP keys at http://www.ufp.org/~bicknell/