Agree 100%. Layer-1 infrastructure is a high-cost, long term investment with little 'value-add' You don't see too many companies clamoring to put in new water or sewer pipes. Treat fiber the same way.
The money is in content, which is why we're seeing ISP and media consolidation.
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.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.
Howdy,
I hold out hope it could also be done with a local lit multipoint
service. Here's your RFC 6598 address, here's the RFC 6598 addresses
of these 20 service providers, pay whichever one you want for general
purpose Internet connectivity, video over IP or whatever the heck it
is they sell and they'll provide the VPN client you need.
But either way, constrain the locality to providing local point to
point and point to multipoint connectivity. Don't allow it to provide
general services over the link unless you intend to keep all
commercial service providers out.
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.
You're not wrong. And a locality providing dark fiber as at least one
of the buyable services is doing things right.
Regards,
Bill Herrin
Maybe I am narrow minded in my reading of all of this information. But it
seems to me that Verizon customers want to use their service to the
internet(Verizon), and Verizon's connection to the internet(L3, cogent,
etc) is not a thick enough pipe.
This sounds like UPS telling you that the reason your next day package
hasn't arrived is because they refuse to buy an airplane and insist on
sending it by truck...
My municipality (Loma Linda, CA) doesn't offer anything free, but does
provide fiber connectivity (Layer 3) to residents in some portions of
the city. There were plans at one point to make it available more
broadly, but nearly eight years later I still am not in an area which
has access nor do I think there has been great progress in the
build-out efforts for whatever reasons (costs, lack of demand, etc.).
Ray
Cleveland, OH Ward 13.
http://oldbrooklynconnected.com
Nearly every street in the ward has multiple wireless access points serving Internet access to the residents at 2.4 GHz. 5 GHz is used for backhaul. Ubiquity networks wireless gear is used with a smattering of Mikrotik routers throughout.
It’s not terribly reliable but then maybe that’s on purpose to discourage lawsuits. If there is a problem with the system on a Friday at 5:30 PM, it’ll be down until the following Tuesday. The bandwidth also isn’t anything to write home about, but for free (meaning I don’t directly send these folks a check every month) it’s not too bad. I can get 6 Mbps down and 2-4 Mbps up, sometimes more up and down but that’s fairly rare.. I’ve used it for Netflix and it worked reasonably well. HD content would stream but often would jump back to SD. Rarely would it stop entirely.
I ended up having to setup an account with Time Warner for their Internet service because I work from home and the wireless interruptions were enough that it was causing problems. AT&T also serves the area but only with 1.5 Mbps DSL. No other wired carriers serve the area aside from dialup.
Ryan Wilkins
What timing.
I live in 07874. Out here, only 50 miles from New York City, we have a problem.
Verizon's network in this area is older than most people who are subscribed to this list. The copper is literally falling off the telephone poles, and in conversations with linemen, they are instructed to effectuate repairs in the cheapest manner possible (band-aid). In fact, in many cases, they offer to customers to replace their service with wireless rather than fix the wireline.
Further, 07874 happens to be a region that never got FIOS prior to 2010, and there are no plans for it to come in the near future. So, we can always get 1.5 meg DSL which is as reliable, well, as reliable as it can be on a 75 year old copper plant.
So, our alternative is cable? Well, in 07874, we have a company called Service Electric Cable, and for $109/month, you get cable tv, 2/.256 mb/s (yes, 256 kb/s upload) internet and phone. Up it to $173 month (!!!) and you get 35/3 mb/s instead. Upload speed? Yes, really, 3 mb/s. Oh, and wait, it isn't unlimited; there is a bandwidth cap that if you exceed, they charge $1/GB.
So, if this is the case 50 miles from the largest city in the USA, I can't imagine what is happening elsewhere in more remote areas.
So, yes, I am a fan for Muni Fiber; really, I am a fan for any method possible for more competition to occur in the local markets. Perhaps, hopefully, we are on the cusp of another round of ISPs selling broadband to the local, secondary and tertiary market. I am certainly considering doing it in my local community.
Sounds like you chose a particularly bad municipality.
I live in PG&E territory, so I can't directly comment on residential municipal power.
However, I can say that my friends who live in SVP territory all have better service
at a lower price than what I get from PG&E. (SVP is the City of Santa Clara power
agency). Their service has proven both more reliable and more consistent in regards
to voltage, lack of transients, etc. (Yes, we've actually put measurement equipment in
and compared).
My water is municipal and while it doesn't taste great without filtration due to the
antiquity of the mostly iron pipes and the amount of rust that gets picked up from the
system along the way, it's quite safe to drink and has been very reliable. I've not had
any better experience from any of the private water companies I've ever dealt with.
My sewer has been trouble free and the storm drains in my neighborhood by and large
have worked without issue. On the few occasions where we've had minor storm drain
issues, it has been during very heavy rain periods and the city has still managed to resolve
the issues very promptly and without any significant hazard or collateral damage developing.
PG&E has been relatively reliable with my gas connection, but I can point you to
some residents in San Mateo county who could tell a very different story about
their experience with PG&E's gas transmission system. (And some who can no
longer tell any stories as a result of PG&E's gas transmission system).
My garbage/recycling is provided by a third-party private contractor that has a monopoly
granted to them by the city. I am billed by the city. Their service has left much to be
desired, but when I have contacted the city about issues, the city employees have
been very prompt about addressing them and seem to do well taking the contractor
to task as needed. Frankly, I wish the city would just take over the actual operation
as I think they would do a better job than the contractor (Green Waste). At least the
new contractor is somewhat better than the previous one (BFI).
I'm in the city of San Jose.
We don't have municipal fiber to residential or business buildings, but the city does
have its own rather extensive fiber network which includes, among other things,
apparently every street-light in the city. (would be nice if they'd have included
nearby buildings in that build-out or at least the possibility of attaching them later
when they did that, but I'm sure some anti-government-competition weenies
shot that idea down early on).
I'm sorry your city is so bad at its jobs. Many cities are not. I wouldn't hold San Jose
up as a shining example of a great municipality by any measure, but overall, they
do seem to get the job done and are somewhat functional on average. I'd give them
a C overall as a grade.
I think they are about average as major municipalities go.
Owen
If you run, you can vote for yourself and try to push whatever you think is a more
effective solution. If the problems are really as bad as you describe, surely you
could get tremendous support from the other residents for your endeavor to resolve them.
Owen
Thank you.
Search gives me examples of small to medium municipal wireless deployments but what I'm particularly interested in is an example(s) of a municipal fiber build that was used to deliver free internet access to said municipality's residents. The post I originally responded to would lead me to believe that such an entity exists and if so, information on it would be super timely to a project I'm working on.
Aaron
You didn't misunderstand me. But that's not the only point I was
making. Yes, Netflix pays Cogent for access to the networks it
doesn't have interconnections with. Cogent and Verizon have a 1.8:1
peering agreement. Cogent sends more than that and as such is in
breach of contract. It's not unfair for the breaching party to accept
penalties. So it's not exactly Netflix's responsibility, it's
Cogent's. They're responsible for providing their customer, Netflix,
with the service they purchased.
Netflix's problem is that their application generates a third of the
internet's traffic. That leads to special considerations for Netflix
as it makes its transit and interconnection contracts. Anyone
promising anything to Netflix should consider its bitweight.
So you're actually saying that it's *Cogent's* fault for not taking
into account that Netflix was going to be horribly asymmetric, in taking
them on as a client? I'm fine with that, but what's their solution?
As I noted in a long thread last year, I think that providing noncompetitive
L2 aggregation as well -- on the same type of terms -- is productive in
reducing barriers to entry.
But no sense in relitigating that here.
Cheers,
-- jra
No, but I wasn't asserting "All government sucks. Ugh"; you were.
Did *you* have data to back up "All", or not?
Cheers,
-- jra
.....
Whoever installs fiber first and gets any significant fraction of subscribers in any
but the densest of population centers is a competition killer, _IF_ you let them
parlay that physical infrastructure into an anti-competitive environment for higher
layer services.
I take it that on principal you would have petitioned against the
proposed Google Fiber roll-out in the San Jose area and would
have spoken out against it at the public hearing on June 17th
in favor of an alternative municipal funded project if you were not
otherwise engaged (the synopsis indicates no public comments
from the floor from that meeting)? You may have missed an
opportunity to be the one to stop Google Fiber in San Jose in
preference to muni fiber, although there is never just one meeting
for such large scale projects. I am sure you will have other
chances to offer your opinion, and encourage the council to
just say no.
I'd rather ask Adobe, since their peer-to-peer transport (and layers above) has been dual-stacked since it was first designed.
Matthew Kaufman
Is that what I said?
Matthew Kaufman
....
No, but I wasn't asserting "All government sucks. Ugh"; you were.
All governments suck some of the time, and some
governments suck all of the time. Your evaluation
as to the level of vacuum will depend on how often
your oxen pass the government goring centers
(part of the "you can not please all of the people
all of the time" theme).
I've lived in midtown San Jose, CA 95126 circa 2010/2012, in a
2010-completed condo-style 5-story 243-unit apartment complex, which
had AT&T FTTU, with Alcatel HONT-C (4 POTS, 1 Ethernet; "155.52 Mbps
upstream and 622.08 Mbps downstream", according to Alcatel; shared
with at most 32 users).
http://mailman.nanog.org/pipermail/nanog/2013-January/055282.html
I've had the fibre terminated in my bedroom closet with ONT. At that
time, AT&T would advertise 24/3 U-verse, since the day I've signed up
in mid-2010. Yet they repeatedly (and on distinct occasions, well
into 2012) have failed and/or refused to provision my line to anything
above 18/1.5. So, I did have under 3ms pings to some local CDNs, but
only 1.5Mbps of upstream, on a line that could easily handle 100Mbps.
Apparently, they've reserved 24/3 for single-pair copper customers,
with bonded pair and FTTU being artificially limited to 18/1.5.
Keep in mind -- that's a greenfield development in San Jose, CA -- the
biggest city in NorCal, and 10th biggest city in the US.
Strangely enough, it seems like if you actually want faster internet,
you have to move away from the big metro areas. Kansas City, MO/KS,
Chattanooga, TN, Burlington, VT, Wilson, NC, Lafayette, LA, all have
much faster internet than most of the SF Bay Area. I've actually even
started making a list at http://bmap.su/, together with the pricing;
it has all the links, and I haven't updated the prices in a while; if
you visit the providers, you can see how the prices for 100/100 are
now the same as they were for 40/40 a year ago, and 1000/1000 is the
same price as 80/80 was; and you can basically get 1000/1000 for
between 70 and 150 USD from the vast majority of the providers on the
list now. Whereas at&t U-verse is still doing the same single-digit
Mbps on the upload side, even if they already have the technology in
place for doing 100Mbps.
C.
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
Nope... I would strongly support it.
Why?
Because until we have regulation that does what I am proposing, we have ridiculous monopolies with all kinds of negative consumer impact. While Google as a new monopoly wouldn't be the ideal competitive environment, it would, at least, be better than what we have today.
While I believe, on principle that we need to move forward towards what I described above, I also recognize the reality on the ground and the need not to cut off one's nose to spite one's face.
Owen