Over the last decade, 19 states have made it illegal for municipalities
to own fiber networks -- encouraged largely, I am told, by Verizon and
other cable companies/MSOs[1].
Verizon, of course, isn't doing any new FiOS deployments, per a 2010
press release[2].
FCC Chair Tom Wheeler has been making noises lately that he wants the FCC
to preempt the field on this topic, making such deployments legal.
Congressional Republicans think that's a bad idea:
http://www.vox.com/2014/7/20/5913363/house-republicans-and-obamas-fcc-are-at-war-over-city-owned-internet
[ and here's the backgrounder on the amendment:
http://www.broadcastingcable.com/news/washington/blackburn-bill-would-block-fcc-preemption/132468 ]
While I generally try to avoid bringing up topics on NANOG that are political;
this one seems to be directly in our wheelhouse, and unavoidably political.
My apologies in advance; let's all try to be grownups, shall we?
Cheers,
-- jra
[1] http://motherboard.vice.com/read/hundreds-of-cities-are-wired-with-fiberbut-telecom-lobbying-keeps-it-unused
[2] https://secure.dslreports.com/shownews/Verizon-Again-Confirms-FiOS-Expansion-is-Over-118949
There was a muni case in my neck of the woods a couple of years ago.
Comcast spent an order of magnitude more than the municipality but
still lost.
Anyway, follow the money. "Blackburn’s largest career donors are ..
PACs affiliated with AT&T ... ($66,750) and Comcast ... ($36,600). ...
Blackburn has also taken $56,000 from the National Cable &
Telecommunications Association."
http://www.muninetworks.org/content/media-roundup-blackburn-amendment-lights-newswires
In other news, FIOS has gone symmetrical.
http://newscenter.verizon.com/corporate/news-articles/2014/07-21-fios-upload-speed-upgrade/
Is anyone else cynical enough to say FiOS going symmetrical is an attempt to blunt the pro-NetFlix argument on that point?
- jra
I certainly don’t think it hurts.. but in general I’ll say the FiOS going symmetrical is very pro-consumer and pro-internet and in that part I suspect we will both agree.
- Jared
Well, if they are provisioned for it, and if they don't (continue to)
impose the silly "you can't run a server on a consumer circuit"
crap they traditionally have.
I just have no faith that all the dominos are lined up in the proper
direction...
Cheers,
-- jra
In an organization as large as Verizon there are many reasons why a policy
gets changed. I'm certain that there are product guys who were saying our
customers want this. I'm sure there were marketing folks saying we can
build a marketing campaign around it. I am equally certain that some there
were some folks, perhaps lawyers, who said this gives us a better position
to argue from if we need to against Netflix.
I'll be watching to see how well this roll out goes. If they didn't
re-engineer their splits (or plan for symmetrical from the beginning) they
could run into some problems because the total speed on a GPON port is
asymmetrical, about 2.5 gbps down to 1.25 gbps up.
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
Seems like as good at time as any for Netflix to go distributed peer to peer.
In an organization as large as Verizon there are many reasons why a policy
gets changed. I'm certain that there are product guys who were saying our
customers want this. I'm sure there were marketing folks saying we can
build a marketing campaign around it. I am equally certain that some there
were some folks, perhaps lawyers, who said this gives us a better position
to argue from if we need to against Netflix.
Interestingly enough, this seems to be coupled
with a statement that Verizon will be deploying
Netflix CDN boxes into their network:
http://publicpolicy.verizon.com/blog/entry/level-3s-selective-amnesia-on-peering
"Fortunately, Verizon and Netflix have found a way to avoid the congestion
problems that Level 3 is creating by its refusal to find “alternative
commercial terms.” We are working diligently on directly connecting Netflix
content servers into Verizon’s network so that we both can keep the
interests of our mutual customers paramount."
Kudos to Netflix for getting Verizon to agree
to host openconnect boxes internally! This
beats the business plan I was formulating
to sell $1/month VPN connections to
Netflix users on Verizon to bypass the
congested links. ^_^;
Matt
"So what has changed for Level 3 [in the 2005 Cogent peering dispute]?"
They lost the argument with Cogent. They figured out their customers
were too valuable to risk their wrath over a desire to play chicken
with someone willing to go the distance.
That's what changed.
Playing chicken with a large peer is a bad idea. Playing chicken with
the FCC now that it's taken an interest is a worse one.
I'm sorta surprised the class action lawyers aren't all over this. It
seems to me a few million Verizon end-users are owed partial refunds
of tens to hundreds of dollars each due to the admitted discriminatory
constraints Verizon has placed on their data traffic to netflix and
everybody else using the same networks netflix uses.
I'm one of them. My Verizon connection became unusable for netflix a
couple months ago and has been unusable for gaming every evening for
the last few weeks. I'm only using a few dozen kilobits (paid for 25
mbps) for gaming, but the packet loss at the congested peering links
kills it dead.
If I didn't also have Cox I'd be ready to blow a gasket. There's a
quality operation.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
Sure, because what paying customer would object to his vendor
consuming his bandwidth to service other customers and what content
provider would object to storing their content for redistribution on
random client machines?
Regards,
Bill Herrin
Well, Radio Paradise, which uses Octoshape for precisely this.
But they're admittedly a special case. Still, Octoshape does seem to be
staying in business...
Cheers,
-- jra
Hi Jay,
Everything government does, it does badly. Without exception. There
are many things government does better than any private organization
is likely to sustain, but even those things it does slowly and at an
exorbitant price.
Muni fiber is a competition killer. You can't beat city hall; once
built it's not practical to compete, even with better service, so
residents are stuck with only the overpriced (either directly or via
taxes), usually underpowered and always one-size-fits-all network
access which results. As an ISP I watched something similar happen in
Altoona PA a decade and a half ago. It was a travesty.
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.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
wasn't this part of the verizon network specifically NOT the red part
in the verizon blog?
(so I'm unclear how this change is in any way related to verizon/netflix issues)
While I might not agree with the parts of your email you cut out, I would definitely like to chime in on this part. Muni fiber should be exactly that, muni *fiber*. Point to point fiber optic single mode fiber cabling, aggregating thousands of households per location, preferrably tens of thousands.
It's hard to go wrong in this area, it either works or it doesn't, and in these aggregation nodes people can compete with several different technologies, they can use PON, they can use active ethernet, they can provide corporate 10GE connections if they need to, they can run hybrid/fiber coax, they can run point-to-point 1GE for residential. Anything is possible and the infrastructure is likely to be as viable in 30 years as it is day 1 after installation.
Bill,
I've certainly seen poor execution from public operators, but I have also
seen several that were well run and over the course of years (in one case
decades). They're not right in all cases, but to simply say it can't be
done well is false. Now, we do have to be sensitive to public <--> private
competition but in cases where there is already a monopoly or even worse no
broadband service I can't see how keeping muni's out helps consumers.
Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
William Herrin wrote:
Over the last decade, 19 states have made it illegal for municipalities
to own fiber networks
Hi Jay,
Everything government does, it does badly. Without exception. There
are many things government does better than any private organization
is likely to sustain, but even those things it does slowly and at an
exorbitant price.
Muni fiber is a competition killer. You can't beat city hall; once
built it's not practical to compete, even with better service, so
residents are stuck with only the overpriced (either directly or via
taxes), usually underpowered and always one-size-fits-all network
access which results. As an ISP I watched something similar happen in
Altoona PA a decade and a half ago. It was a travesty.
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.
Let's see:
- municipal water supplies work just fine
- about 20% of US power is supplied by municipally owned electric utilities, for about 18% less cost (statistics might be a little stale, I haven't checked recently)
- about the only gigabit FTTH in the country comes from muni networks
- the anti-muni laws hurt small localities the most, where none of the big players have any intent of deploying anything
Miles Fidelman
My power is pretty much always on, my water is pretty much always on
and safe, my sewer system works, etc etc...
Why is layer 1 internet magically different from every other utility?
-Blake
I think the difference is when the municipality starts throwing in free or highly subsidized layer 3 connectivity "free with every layer 1 connection"
Matthew Kaufman
From: "William Herrin" <bill@herrin.us>
> Over the last decade, 19 states have made it illegal for
> municipalities to own fiber networks
Hi Jay,
Everything government does, it does badly. Without exception. There
are many things government does better than any private organization
is likely to sustain, but even those things it does slowly and at an
exorbitant price.
Sure it does, Bill.
Retake civics, will you? Read about The Public Good, and tell me how
profit-driven corporations -- especially public ones -- are the orgs
best suited to protect and support it.
Muni fiber is a competition killer. You can't beat city hall; once
built it's not practical to compete, even with better service, so
residents are stuck with only the overpriced (either directly or via
taxes), usually underpowered and always one-size-fits-all network
access which results. As an ISP I watched something similar happen in
Altoona PA a decade and a half ago. It was a travesty.
Did you miss, perhaps, the 2 month long thread I started end of 2012,
concerning building out a L1/L2 fiber muni?
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 guess you didn't.
May 6 fiber installers dig up the street in front of your house over
the next 2 years.
Can I solve your unusual networking challenges?
Possibly not.
Cheers,
-- jra
Agree.
I'd go a step further and say that Dark Fiber as a Public Utility
(which is regulated to provide open access at published rates and
forbidden from providing its own lit service directly) is the only way
forward.
That said, I don't think it's a good idea to see the municipality
provide the fiber and Internet access. There needs to be some
separation to promote an equal playing field. That isn't to say the
town couldn't provide their own service within the framework of being
a customer of the utility, which would be helpful as a price-check and
anchor provider.
Just need to make sure it's setup to promote competition not kill it.
For rural areas where the population density is too low to deliver an
acceptable ROI for companies like Verizon or Comcast, I think
municipal dark fiber to the home is the only hope.
Let the ISPs focus on the cost and investment of the optics and
routers to drive up bandwidth instead of trying to absorb the cost of
a 20 year fiber plant in 3 years.
On a side note, this model actually makes it possible for a smaller
ISP to actually be viable again, which might not be a bad thing.