Sunday, May 31, 2009
Quote of Note: Brett Glass
"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.)"
Brett Glass, in a CircleID comment on my Crawford likes Aussie utility network blog posting. Good idea Brett, but probably not quite all that is necessary.
Brett Glass, in a CircleID comment on my Crawford likes Aussie utility network blog posting. Good idea Brett, but probably not quite all that is necessary.
Technorati Tags: Competition, fiberoptics, PublicGoods, CommonCarriage, QuoteOfNote, Unbundling, USLosingLead, Utility
Comments:
I would argue that there is in fact so much fiber already in the ground, and that it is so easy to fill the remaining gaps using technologies such as wireless, that opening the existing fiber would be sufficient to allow universal broadband deployment.
Let's consider, for example, the city of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. It has a population of under 100 people, and no terrestrial high speed Internet. Setting up a wireless system to serve the community would be easy; an ISP like myself could do it in a day. But there's no high speed backbone connectivity available.
Ironically, three fiber backbones -- two owned by Level3 and one by Sprint -- pass right through town, running right along US Highway 287. For a capital investment of about $100,000 -- less than it costs to build a house nowadays -- Level3 could provide bandwidth to the city from its existing regeneration station along the railroad tracks. Even if it grossed only $2,000 per month for the bandwidth it sold at that location, this would be a 24% per year return on its capital investment -- not too shabby. But even though this is a great return, the company won't do it. It is insisting upon a 100% or greater return per annum.
The story is similar in other cities where either the incumbent telephone company has a monopoly on the fiber or the long haul fiber goes by but does not stop. Yes, there are a few remote spots where the backbones are more distant, but again this can be solved with wireless or other similar solutions. (Heavily treed, hilly areas might be best handled by BPL, for example.)
As I said in my comments to the NTIA and RUS, solve the middle mile problem and last mile service will become feasible without subsidy of any kind.
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Let's consider, for example, the city of Medicine Bow, Wyoming. It has a population of under 100 people, and no terrestrial high speed Internet. Setting up a wireless system to serve the community would be easy; an ISP like myself could do it in a day. But there's no high speed backbone connectivity available.
Ironically, three fiber backbones -- two owned by Level3 and one by Sprint -- pass right through town, running right along US Highway 287. For a capital investment of about $100,000 -- less than it costs to build a house nowadays -- Level3 could provide bandwidth to the city from its existing regeneration station along the railroad tracks. Even if it grossed only $2,000 per month for the bandwidth it sold at that location, this would be a 24% per year return on its capital investment -- not too shabby. But even though this is a great return, the company won't do it. It is insisting upon a 100% or greater return per annum.
The story is similar in other cities where either the incumbent telephone company has a monopoly on the fiber or the long haul fiber goes by but does not stop. Yes, there are a few remote spots where the backbones are more distant, but again this can be solved with wireless or other similar solutions. (Heavily treed, hilly areas might be best handled by BPL, for example.)
As I said in my comments to the NTIA and RUS, solve the middle mile problem and last mile service will become feasible without subsidy of any kind.
# posted by 
: 5/31/2009 12:08 PM
: 5/31/2009 12:08 PM
