----- Original Message -----
From: "William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>
All ran by an entity forbidden from retail.
Nonononono, bad plan. I want a fiber from my home to my storefront on main street, but I'm a consumer not a retailer so I can't buy just one? Or hey, so sorry but the cable MuniFiber ran to your home is under contract to XYZ corp. They have to release it before we at ABC corp can provide you service.
Well, yeah; I actually agree with most of that. My plan, to recap it from '12, was this: You can rent, for an MRC (probably plus a deposit): 1) L2 connectivity to a property, talking to an ONT supplied by the utility, that is a virtual circuit to the prem, and delivered to you as (I think) QinQ. That is: you get a completely clean Ethernet connection, over which you can run IPv4 or IPv6, with whatever addressing you want, to a GigE port on the ONT, as long as the customer has one free. If the customer wants their 4 ports to go to 4 different ISPs? Fine. 2) L1 connectivity to a property, over any available pair provisioned to that address -- I was planning on 3 pair drops for 1-3 unit properties, and a declining overbuild from 2 down to about 1.2 pairs per unit for stripcenters and apartment buildings and the like. Obviously, this will cost more, as it's a more limited resource. This would allow you to plug the fiber directly into your switch at both ends, and we'll just xconn the two drops in the fiber room. 3) If you're really motivated for some reason, with an even larger deposit, we will have our contractor pull your fiber into our conduits, running from wherever you need to go to wherever else you need to go. This would be a contractual setup, I suspect, as it needs to handle title in case of abandonment, and like that. Presumably, it would not carry an MRC, unless it appears in our fiber room (which it probably should), in which case a nominal charge for the jumper and any NRCs for special work. I can't see why anyone would actually need this, but I mention it for completeness sake -- I plan to preprovision additional trunking in strategic places, so we can get more than 3 pairs someplace should we really need it; fiber's (mostly) cheap; crews are expensive. As I noted originally, I think providing L2 service is useful as it (sharply) reduces the barrier-to-entry to smaller "boutique" ISP services, at the cost of their perhaps being at our mercy for upgrades and such. If we do our job properly, I don't think too many such speed bumps would affect such people. We're pretty far along the development curve now; anyone who thinks symmetrical gigabit isn't enough either has never used it (with a good backhaul), or needs to be on Internet2. :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://www.bcp38.info 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA BCP38: Ask For It By Name! +1 727 647 1274