Sorry for jumping into this discussion so late…. and I apologize if this has already been talked about (this has been a long thread)
But the most successful municipal undertaking to support telecom I have ever seen is a municipally owned conduit system…. Any infrastructure L1, L2, or anything is too complex to be commercially viable if owned by one entity. Putting everybody on a level playing field removes the value from everybody, and therefore removes the commercial interest to DO anything, so nothing happens. Unless somebody is able to build a product that everybody can't just have without any obstacles, nobody is going to do anything, and we end up with nothing. A city owned conduit system is the best balance between fairness for the consumer, and supporting a competitive environment for service providers to offer something John Q public can't get on his own. On 2013-01-31, at 9:10 PM, Owen DeLong <o...@delong.com> wrote: > > On Jan 31, 2013, at 5:08 PM, Ray Soucy <r...@maine.edu> wrote: > >>> 1. Must sell dark fiber to any purchaser. >>> 2. Must sell dark fiber to all purchasers on equal terms. >>> (There must be a published price list and there cannot be deviations >>> from that price list. If the price list is modified, existing >>> customers >>> receive the new pricing at the beginning of their next billing cycle.) >>> 3. May provide value-added L2 services >>> 4. If L2 services are provided, they are also subject to rule 2. >>> 5. May not sell L3 or higher level services. >>> 6. May not hold ownership or build any form of alliance or affiliation >>> with >>> a provider of L3 or higher level services. >> >> I think rule #3 is the kind of thing that sounds like a good idea, but >> ends up being abused in practice. >> > > Certainly without rule 4, yes. However, with rules 4,5,6, I think that > overcomes most of the issues that result from rule 3. > > If you don't have rule 3, there are a lot of areas where it simply won't > be cost effective for ANYONE to come to the MMR and thus you don't get > any benefit. > >> My personal view is that you really want that separation in place. >> You don't want a situation where the dark fiber provider gives >> priority to their L2 outages and get's around to their competitors >> later. >> > > Ideally, I agree with you, but to cover all cases, you also have to make > sure that you have some set of L2 providers before you can do that. > > Further, I'm suggesting that the natural place for this in most cases > is to be operated by the muni not a business. > >> Businesses are in the business of profit. Nothing wrong with that, >> but if you want it to be a fair playing field you need to avoid this >> kind of conflict of interest. > > Agreed. > >> We've seen the same behavior with ILECs and small ISPs. They were >> required to open up their network to competing ISPs, but did >> everything they could to make it as difficult as possible. You really >> want to create a situation where that temptation isn't even there. > > Except this kind of chicanery has always involved L3+ services in the past. > >> We've also seen that when left up to the private sector even last-mile >> solutions suffer from the same cherry-picking of "profitable" >> locations to service: example would be an apartment complex having >> fiber delivered vs. a house next door not having fiber delivered. You >> can't really blame the private sector for it, but if you want the idea >> of FTTH to be a universal service, you really need to apply the public >> utility model to it. > > Yep. > > Owen > >
