Followup: Small City Municipal Broadband

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1

From: "Brandon Ross" <bross@pobox.com>

> No; I wouldn't offer it retail; I'd offer it to all provider-comers
> wholesale, at cost plus, just like everything else.

It sure seems like just pushing the competition (or lack thereof) up
the stack.

Could be. To compete with Roadrunner, people will have to do triple
play, and the CATV is the hard part. If someone else is already doing
the aggregation, I'm good with that.

>> Running a decent layer 3 service is "hard" too. Isn't the whole
>> point to
>> let these service providers compete with each other on the quality
>> and
>> cost of their services?
>
> You could say the same thing about the uplink,

Which uplink is that? I'm a little confused.

My colo's uplinks to the world, which were one of three things I proposed
offering at wholesale to ISPs.

> though; I note you didn't throw a flag at that, or at Akamai; is the
> IPTV issue different to you?

If you were to open your colo to all comers that have similar models
to Akamai, that seems fair. After all, it's not the city selling Akamai
services to either the ISPs or end-users, the city is just providing a
convenient way for the providers that are there to interconnect with
content providers that care to show up.

Precisely. Akamai's business model is that they just show up? Me and
my ISPs don't have to pay them?

Now if you were to encourage an IPTV services provider that WASN'T the
city to co-locate at the facility, that seems reasonable as long as terms
were even if another one wanted to show up. I could imagine that some
might sell service direct retail, others might go wholesale with one of
the other service providers. Maybe both?

Perhaps; yeah.

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.

Ok, fair point. My goal in IX and Akamai was "unload my uplinks".

The bigger my downlinks are, the more I will care.

Cheers,
-- jra

2

From: "Brandon Ross" <bross@pobox.com>

Running a decent layer 3 service is "hard" too. Isn't the whole
point to
let these service providers compete with each other on the quality
and
cost of their services?

You could say the same thing about the uplink,

Which uplink is that? I'm a little confused.

My colo's uplinks to the world, which were one of three things I proposed
offering at wholesale to ISPs.

I guess I missed that. You are saying that you would aggregate/resell transit bandwidth in your colo? I would argue against that as well. I'd suggest making sure your colo had adequate entrance facilities to allow whomever wants to provide upstream service there to show up, and allow them access to the fiber, which you already effectively have done.

though; I note you didn't throw a flag at that, or at Akamai; is the
IPTV issue different to you?

If you were to open your colo to all comers that have similar models
to Akamai, that seems fair. After all, it's not the city selling Akamai
services to either the ISPs or end-users, the city is just providing a
convenient way for the providers that are there to interconnect with
content providers that care to show up.

Precisely. Akamai's business model is that they just show up? Me and
my ISPs don't have to pay them?

I guess as far as putting an Akamai server in a colo/on an exchange, I assumed they didn't charge, but now that you mention it, I don't have first hand knowledge of that. I certainly would suggest that the city should not pay for anyone to show up at the colo, but allow them access if
they care to do so on equal footing.

Of course Akamai charges for their services, that's a bit different than just exchanging traffic.