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Municipal Fiber Network Will Let Customers Switch ISPs In Seconds (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: Most cities and towns that build their own broadband networks do so to solve a single problem: that residents and businesses aren't being adequately served by private cable companies and telcos. But there's more than one way to create a network and offer service, and the city of Ammon, Idaho, is deploying a model that's worth examining. Ammon has built an open access network that lets multiple private ISPs offer service to customers over city-owned fiber. The wholesale model in itself isn't unprecedented, but Ammon has also built a system in which residents will be able to sign up for an ISP -- or switch ISPs if they are dissatisfied -- almost instantly, just by visiting a city-operated website and without changing any equipment. Ammon has completed a pilot project involving 12 homes and is getting ready for construction to another 200 homes. Eventually, the city wants to wire up all of its 4,500 homes and apartment buildings, city Technology Director Bruce Patterson told Ars. Ammon has already deployed fiber to businesses in the city, and it did so without raising everybody's taxes.
This is desperately needed in Canada. We pay the highest internet rates in the world and changing ISP's can be a nightmare.
Que up the lawsuits from the major ISP stating this isn't fair!
Their reason? "We should be able to screw the customer when ever and as often as we want. This will kill innovation!!! Liberals/Conservatives are taking your choice and the government will own the internet."
blah blah blah
I don't really see the purpose of this. If you have the physical network, then all you need is a connection to the rest of the public Internet. Otherwise you get email service from whoever you want; aren't there companies that provide POP3/SMTP service to whoever needs it? Also many people are perfectly happy with web-based email. What else does the average Internet user actually need? Streaming services for audio and video are available all over the place. Of course isn't this what ISPs are afraid of: Municipal Internet providing last-mile connectivity to the general public, making them irrelevant?
I must be missing something here, why is this even important?
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Good luck with the Multi-Dwelling Units. You can run fiber to the building (an Optical Network Terminator (ONT)), but running it to the unit is pretty damn difficult. Most MDUs don't have conduit suitable for fiber, most just have old telephone cable (no CAT5/e/6/etc), and the cable companies just run their cable up the outside of the building and drill a hole through the walls (which is unsightly and may not be allowed by the building owner). Wireless seems to be crap in terms of delivering services to them as well.
MDUs are hard unless they are properly wired when they are built. If someone has figured out the right approach, I'd love to know what it is. The payback on running fiber to an MDU is "Never".
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
You can't just pit ISP against each other like this! How do expect companies to overcharge for services if they have to compete for customers?! Clearly these cities don't understand the nuances of capitalism! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I'd like to see details on how they set up their municipal network. Can nodes within the network connect to each other like a MAN? Would this effectively enable fellow citizens to connect to each other at whatever speeds the municpal network theoretically offers in the last mile?
It obviously opens up security concerns but also new potentials... things like TOWN-WIDE LANPARTIES!
This is skirting the real story here -- which is that such public infrastructure could be managed by a public entity (or a private entity charged with providing the highest quality bandwidth) with no incentive for excess profit or attempts to limit the bandwidth / quality because they want to increase profits. And by the way, fiber is a public infrastructure generally, because most towns grant the franchise to dig up streets / string cable to one company only.
So, if an ISP is only a retailer of services on the dumb pipe that everyone has access to, what is the ISP's purpose, other than billing and helping users get access to the pipe? Why not take the fiber into the city's hands to begin with?
The story here isn't that a town has made it easy for customers to switch providers with the click of a button -- it's that a city has taken the role of ISPs completely out of providing the infrastructure and removed the excuses that ISPs that their quality of delivered bandwidth per $ differs for unjustifiable reasons.
They are saying that customers don't actually want to be differentiating their choice on artificial limitations on their bandwidth quality (which should be the same for everyone). If ISPs are really competing based on other value that they add (customer service?) and not their monopoly over a public infrastructure, let them do so and see what customers actually start to choose based on.
This also adds a single point of failure to all ISP offerings.
Good luck with the Multi-Dwelling Units. You can run fiber to the building (an Optical Network Terminator (ONT)), but running it to the unit is pretty damn difficult. Most MDUs don't have conduit suitable for fiber, most just have old telephone cable (no CAT5/e/6/etc), and the cable companies just run their cable up the outside of the building and drill a hole through the walls (which is unsightly and may not be allowed by the building owner). Wireless seems to be crap in terms of delivering services to them as well.
MDUs are hard unless they are properly wired when they are built. If someone has figured out the right approach, I'd love to know what it is. The payback on running fiber to an MDU is "Never".
Throw in a DSLAM in the building. The newer DSL gives you perfectly adequate speeds within the building unless you're moving massive datasets or non-incremental hard drive backups every day, for example. I have about 60/75 MBps and the limiting factor is probably the wireless, not the DSL connection over the POTS line. Sure, it's not giving you high-speed fiber, but it's fine for most stuff.
Real lawyers write in C++
This also adds a single point of failure to all ISP offerings.
True, but most areas with fiber effectively become single-supply since there's very, very little incentive to lay down a second fiber grid. At least here in Norway they'll usually get 70-90% to sign up and the other fixed offers go away since mobile broadband usually works as a temporary solution. And they certainly could do redundant connections and data centers for everything but the last leg, so one guy with a backhoe can't take out more than a small neighborhood. In practice though peering points tend to concentrate anyway, there's a few hubs where almost every major ISPs is represented, they're there because everyone else is there - literally network effects at work.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
highly innovative! Like how most cities deal with Water and Sewer...
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"because most towns grant the franchise to dig up streets / string cable to one company only"
This hasn't been true since the early 1990s. There may not be an _economic_ incentive for a new provider to enter a market, but exclusive franchises have been banned for well over 20 years.
... it's changing an email address that you've had for nearly 2 decades.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I'm a resident of Ammon, and I can't wait for this rollout. The two options we have are both terrible (one cable and one DSL provider). Spotty service, ever increasing prices, and horribly restrictive data caps. I can't wait for the ability to shop for exactly what I need (which is fairly low speeds, but high data caps. If they offered something 1/3 my current speed but with 3 times the data, I could do anything I want and still never notice network lag). Here's hoping this model keeps this municipal fiber from being sued out of existence like has happened so many times before...
This is a thick last mile with the muni building a L2 backbone. That effectively means you're stuck going through their switchgear regardless of ISP. CWDM is a far better option let the ISP's run their own switch and CPE gear and the muni deals with the cross connects and frequency assignments. Bonus points for requiring MACsec by the ISP's.
Mind you a muni might still run a L2 network it makes a lot of sense to allow ipv6 connections to schools 911 etc as well as offering lifeline internet and the like.
No sir I dont like it.
Later that day, Technology Director Bruce Patterson was found garroted by a piece of coaxial cable.
Judging by the poor quality of the cable, Comcast, Time-Warner, and AT&T have fallen under suspicion.
When questioned of their whereabouts, they could not provide any solid proof of their activities during the hours of 9 AM to 5 PM.
breaking any of the rules will no longer be a mere TOS-violation, but breaking the law — enforced not by clueless customer support, but by the (equally clueless, but armed) police. Even if you escape a fine, you will be banned from the city's network and there goes your ability to "switch ISPs".
Yes, in much the same way that you are carted off to jail and permanently blacklisted when you are late paying for tap water or garbage collection.
What are you going on about?
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
Presumably the city has phone lines, so the phone company can offer DSL. Satellite is an option. And there are wireless ISPs.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
As oppose to the single point of failure for all one cable offering most places have?
Mainly because it reflects the same model that cities have been in forever for the physical road network. They build the roads and everyone has equal access to them. The services provided over the road network depend on who you want to buy them from.
An open-access fiber network would be great because there's all kinds of creative uses for it, most of which stall as independent business ideas because they start or end with "Step N. Build municipal fiber network."
Such a network could get used for lots of things besides just generic internet access, including video delivery, private WANs, and so on. Most of these things are things that could be done over an IP network, but many of them are simpler to do over a network that at least looks to the ends like a dumb network.
And there's a dozen different ways to define what an ISP is or does, too, so even in that specific realm there's lots of ways to implement that same business -- and the cost would be small at small scale since there wouldn't be a huge infrastructure to maintain.
And by the way, fiber is a public infrastructure generally, because most towns grant the franchise to dig up streets / string cable to one company only.
Also, (and I know I'm about to oversimplify a little, but...) there's not much point in having multiple fiber runs all throughout town, even if the town allows it. It's sort of like if you had a few different "road providers" who each had to run their roads into your neighborhood, creating separate driveways for each road. It's inefficient.
Or if you are going to run redundant lines, make it part of the same system, and design it all to provide real redundancy. Right now, businesses frequently get multiple lines from different vendors in order to ensure uptime, but if we cut all the investment in competing infrastructure and instead invested that money in creating robust and redundant infrastructure, then we should all end up with faster and more reliable connections.
The market is really great at finding an optimal solution (or solutions) to a broad, unexplored solution space. That was the state Cable TV was in when it was first implemented. Nobody knew what was the best way to connect houses, what was the best way to branch nodes, how best to allocate frequencies to transmit channels, and (once on-demand TV and Internet service began) how best to allocate bandwidth between downloads and uploads. The choice back then was to waste a bunch of tax dollars on funded research to try to figure out solutions to these problems, with each person's biases and political pressure influencing the results. Or to throw the market at it, letting the bad ideas die by sheer economic unfeasibility. We needed to have lots of different cable companies back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Today, these problems have mostly been solved. Most Cable TV and Internet providers have standardized on the same solution for their networks (DOCSIS). And I think most everyone will agree that the end-game here is fiber to the home. That's a pretty good sign that the industry is ready to be converted into a utility - with the government providing the pipes, while private companies provide the content. So this move to a municipal fiber network is the next logical step.
You still need the ISPs though. How best to allocate shared bandwidth, most efficient way to interconnect multiple tier 1 and tier 2 networks with your ISP, negotiating deals with those upstream providers, whether bandwidth limits or monthly caps are the way to go, do you charge by GB of data consumed or use a flat monthly fee, etc. These problems all remain, and the solution space is cloudy enough that it's not at all obvious what's the best way to do each of these things. So you have the government provide the physical pipe as a utility, while private ISPs provide the content that flows through those pipes. And let competition filter out the bad ideas from the good.
This is how internet service used to be! The current generation growing up just naively assumes that your local telecom company is your ISP, and can't even wrap their head around this idea that you could choose an ISP separately from the company that shows up to your front door to wire it.
This is the market solution to Network Neutrality. The "golden age" of the internet was back when the telephone companies just provided the wires, and people could sign-up for whatever ISP they wanted. Then, when telecom companies bought out the ISPs, and the two markets combined into a single vertical slice, is when the problems started. With monopoly came DNS servers that redirect you to ads, paid prioritization of traffic, no more static IP addresses, no more allowing people to run servers, etc. Network Neutrality is so much a battle about restoring the internet to the way it was. I fear it won't be successful unless we restore competition to the ISP market again.
Why not take the fiber into the city's hands to begin with?
This gets around the "unfair competition" drum that the monopolistic ISP's beat on relentlessly, as well as removing the "natural monopoly" drum beat at the same time.
If the city owns the infrastructure, then the natural monopoly problem is solved: only one set of wires is run. But then there is the second solved "problem": private companies cannot argue that the city is "unfairly" competing against privately owned companies. The city is letting private companies manage and operate the service, but without monopoly power of infrastructure ownership to wield against customers.
This is exactly the model that needs to be implemented across the country.
A town in which I once lived built a cable TV system somewhat similarly. They contracted the building of the infrastructure and granted the builder the first year of service. After that, potential service providers (only one per year for all users; programming service plus hardware maintenance for the system) competed for the annual contract. Annual competitions meant that that town's cable TV system offered far more at significantly lower prices than any other municipality around. The infrastructure belonged to the city, and contracts to upgrade/expand it could be set up when necessary. I've never seen a better model for that, and Ammon looks to have implemented a modern equivalent for Internet service (instant competition being possible due to technology improvements).
A word of warning for Ammon: that town's system changed to an inferior model due to corruption—large cable companies bought the city council (to change the rules) and especially the state legislature (to preempt such an arrangement). Do everything you can now legally to make a poison pill of the whole thing for any potential predators. That is, make it so it cannot be profitable within any reasonable time frame to discourage those guys from buying it away from citizens.
User Taxes are okay, if you don't have service, you don't pay the tax. Heck, even using a Muni Bond would be an "okay" way to fund the initial infrastructure build out. Again letting the people choose (via bond election) rather than mandates by bureaucrats a thousand miles away.
And this will be the REAL open market to all sorts of new and interesting products/services.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Basically, WOW operates in same way, except that the private company runs fiber to the home, rather than the city.
Regardless, they have multiple ISP, TV,and Phone providers that end users can pick from.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
It doesn't "add" anything to the situation at all. It's extraordinarily rare that a municipality allows more than one ISP to lay fiber. Even assuming they had the foresight to require the ISP allow competitors to have access to the fiber at reasonable rates, you'd still have a single point of failure. The only difference is that in this particular municipality's case, the single point is in the control of a public entity charged with keeping it running, rather than in the private hands of a private ISP with an incentive to engage in funny business and who may not want to engage in costly repairs because it'll hurt their bottom line.
Most Dutch citizens already have this service and churn is pretty low. I have seen an ISP fold precisely once over the last decade, and ISPs without customer service do indeed see migration of existing customers to better service providers. The excellent staff on the helpdesk is actually one of the things my current ISP advertizes and also one of the reasons I'm their customer.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
So I have fiber broadband provided by my city. Via traceroute I can tell the city uses L-3 to talk to the rest of the world. Is this proposal simply about being able to change the L-3 part of the link? So L-3, AT&T, CenturyLink, Comcast, Google, etc. would then contact my city to arrange a 10gbps (or 40, or 1, or whatever) pipe to the rest of the 'net then charge us users individually, with the city getting a cut to cover the last-mile costs, and somehow know that my traffic which goes over the same fiber as my neighbor needs to be routed to Gooble while my neighbor's routes to Comcast?
The town provides a glorified fiber LAN. The ISP is presumably responsible for connecting to the Internet.
You aren't really changing ISPs, the City is still the ISP. They still get you connected to the Internet, but instead of directly connected to the Internet, they connect you to an intermediate, who charges you a surcharge to get to the rest of the Internet, and presumably offers you some other value added services, though for me I don't know what they would be.
The city is not the ISP. The city runs a metro area network. 3rd parties are selling internet access over the MAN. Basically, they're following the same model that Texas uses for electric utilities.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Switch ISPs in SECONDS? Too slow! I want hyper-switching technology!
That's the irony of the current situation. i'm in a city where there's municipal fiber going in, and consequently comcast beat them to the punch and have 2gig service available nearly everywhere. Now ever centurytel is realizing that they need fiber if they want to compete.
In theory by the end of this year I'll have three fiber choices, each offering at least 1 gig symmetric (and i actually spotted in a locate that AT&T have fiber less than 50' from my house so that's another potential option).
Of course people who live in areas with no competition get 5mbit dsl and they fucking like it.
I have been whipping this horse for the better part of a decade as the only real way to stop the abuse of the customer by the ISPs and provide service to all. Of course the ISPs cry that it is unfair. In fact it takes the power of monopoly out of their pocket and puts them in the position of having to compete with other companies that they didn't have to compete with due to paying bribes to the counsels and utility commissions. This is great but you will never see it in medium and large cities as the incumbent ISPs and telcos will simply pay the ones making the decisions to back them and fuck the public.
The regulatory infrastructure killed the DSL providers. They had to lease their lines from the telecoms, while also competing with the telecoms. They were doomed. I used one of the last ones, Cavalier Telephone, for years.
I was referring to speed-traps and traffic cameras, actually. Ringing any bells? Do you think, your downloads of torrents or "excessive" Netflix-watching will be tolerated by the city any better, then your driving "at excessive rate of speed"?
As I said, if the town owns the cables, then the town is the ISP — yet another government monopoly. The talks about "switching ISPs" is nothing but spin.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
A solution in search of a problem. Actually running cables to each house is rather easy. Where it is not done, it is due to local governments' interference, "sensible regulations", and bribe-seeking...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Yes, that's how it works here in Sweden, and has for the last decade or so.
Of course an open network allows you to switch ISP just by calling them (or indeed using a web page), and of course no equipment needs to be changed, what would be the point of an open fiber network if it did?
The fibre company (used to be city owned, but is now private) run the fiber network including end-points (CPE) and the ISPs deliver service. I can currently choose between eight different ISPs.
But yes, it takes several hours to change ISP, can't see why I'd need it to go faster though. (And of course, if you've ordered optional extras like IP-TV, instead of the CATV that comes with the system, that equipment has to be changed, but that's more on you.)
Stefan Axelsson
It appears you don't know what ISPs do, or even how networks work, but that didn't stop you confusing your high opinion of yourself with knowing things! Yay for you!
This would be great if I could simply skip the ISP part. All I want is a connection from home to the backbone. I don't want any other ISP "services" like email, web hosting, packet sniffing, ad injection, port blocking, etc.
Unfortunately, it just sounds like they're adding yet another middle man.
Now: You -> ISP -> Backbone
New: You -> Municipality -> ISP -> Backbone
And if I understand that right, I don't think users would really care about what ISP they have (the same way they don't care about which backbone providers their packets traverse). It's the closest connection that is the one users really care about (and have the most trouble with).
But but but then how are you going to outsource your help desk to India and get those sweeeet profiiiiiiits???????? /s