[139053] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: The growth of municipal broadband networks
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay Ashworth)
Fri Mar 25 21:44:48 2011
Date: Fri, 25 Mar 2011 21:43:44 -0400 (EDT)
From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <4D8CDF79.9060404@paulgraydon.co.uk>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
----- Original Message -----
> From: "Paul Graydon" <paul@paulgraydon.co.uk>
> I'm curious how the feeling is on NANOG about shifting such provision
> towards municipal instead of corporations? I guess a rough summary of
> the competing views I've heard so far are:
Oh, look. A hobby horse. My opinion is a third: that last-mile fiber is,
for several reasons, a Natural Monopoly, and having municipalities operate it,
and farm their residents out as customers to any comer to the meet-me room,
is the natural end-game ... and the sooner we get to it, the better.
The problem is that many states have made it *illegal* for muni's to do this,
encouraged, unsurprisingly, in many cases, by Verizon (who desperately needs
FiOS to fly, because they've cut-to-clear in their copper plant for so
many *decades* now that it's unsalvageable).
Check the archives; I think I brought this up myself about 6 months ago.
Cheers,
-- jra
