On Jul 21, 2014, at 1:38 PM, William Herrin wrote:
> 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.
I was planning on staying out of this debate, but.....
I was involved in an effort a few years back to legalize municiple fiber
buildouts in Texas for a few reasons:
Lack of fiber penetration in smaller cities where pent up demand was
not being met.
Lack of competition in high speed data services in all but a few
markets in the state.
This being the heady days of WiFi, allow cities who chose to build out
public access to do so without interference from any incumbent.
And locally, allow the cities that already had fiber built out to use
that fiber to earn additional revenue by leasing capacity to any carrier who
wanted it.
To put it mildly, the incumbents went off. Massive lobbying efforts.
Astroturfing. End of the telecom world rhetoric. During the regular session,
using a pro market argument that allowing open access to a city built fiber
network would improve the comepetive landscape, we fought the anti-muni bill to
a draw in the regular session. It was, of course, passed in a dead-of-night
action in a follow-on special session. Cities were pretty well blocked from
leasing fiber to others.
Now almost 10 years later, I'm finally seeing stirring of real competition on
the utility poles in my neighborhood. ATT is hanging new fiber and
advertisting new high speed service on uVerse, TWC has increased their service
levels without increasing prices. The change? Google Fiber.
--Chris
