Friday, May 29, 2009
Clarifying "Crawford Likes Aussie Network"
Dennis Fazio has posted a comment over at CircleID, which reprinted my blog post entitled Crawford likes Aussie utility network, taking me to task for saying that an Aussie-style network would cost way less than the $500 billion we get when we naively multiply the cost of that network by the difference factor of the two national populations. He is right for flagging this prone-to-misinterpretation number.
Fazio bases his alternate estimate on Verizon's cost per house passed of $800 per house times 111 million households in the U.S. That's $88.8 billion. Since that doesn't include the cost of hooking up a house or the new gear in the central office, I say it is low. It probably doesn't include passing homes in Vermont or Maine or other hard-to-recable states, which Verizon has been dumping left and right.
In another blog post not too long ago, I tried to pencil out the cost of fiber a bit more carefully and came up with $290 billion. Is that right? Who knows. But $500 B is clearly way high and $88.8 B is clearly way low.
Fazio bases his alternate estimate on Verizon's cost per house passed of $800 per house times 111 million households in the U.S. That's $88.8 billion. Since that doesn't include the cost of hooking up a house or the new gear in the central office, I say it is low. It probably doesn't include passing homes in Vermont or Maine or other hard-to-recable states, which Verizon has been dumping left and right.
In another blog post not too long ago, I tried to pencil out the cost of fiber a bit more carefully and came up with $290 billion. Is that right? Who knows. But $500 B is clearly way high and $88.8 B is clearly way low.
Technorati Tags: fiberoptics, FTTH, OpenAccess
Comments:
There's no need for a network like Australia's nere in America, because the fiber is already in the ground. The problem is gaining access to it. I live in a small city which has 5 -- count them -- backbones running through or near town, two of them a block from my building. But the owners of these networks won't provide service to us at any reasonable price. And there's unacceptable market concentration occurring.
All of the fiber networks which pass in or near our city used to be owned by different companies, but now three of them are owned by Level3. And while Level3 has a building at the north end of town that was actually engineered to provide space for co-location of equipment (I've been inside it, and it has more than a dozen empty equipment cages which were intended to be rented by tenants), it refuses to open a point of presence that would allow our community to avoid being gouged for Internet bandwidth by the cable and telephone monopolies.
Crawford's radical notion that ISPs should be saddled with such heavy regulation that they cannot innovate -- or even be nationalized -- is simply off base. All that is necessary is to ban anticompetitive practices and incent or require the existing fiber owners to open their networks to the areas through which their fiber passes. (This should have been a condition of granting them use of the public right of way, but at the time no one imagined that they wouldn't do the obvious thing and seize the opportunity to serve those areas.)
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All of the fiber networks which pass in or near our city used to be owned by different companies, but now three of them are owned by Level3. And while Level3 has a building at the north end of town that was actually engineered to provide space for co-location of equipment (I've been inside it, and it has more than a dozen empty equipment cages which were intended to be rented by tenants), it refuses to open a point of presence that would allow our community to avoid being gouged for Internet bandwidth by the cable and telephone monopolies.
Crawford's radical notion that ISPs should be saddled with such heavy regulation that they cannot innovate -- or even be nationalized -- is simply off base. All that is necessary is to ban anticompetitive practices and incent or require the existing fiber owners to open their networks to the areas through which their fiber passes. (This should have been a condition of granting them use of the public right of way, but at the time no one imagined that they wouldn't do the obvious thing and seize the opportunity to serve those areas.)
# posted by 
: 5/30/2009 9:57 PM
: 5/30/2009 9:57 PM
