I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment (see my comment above), but I do want to correct one statement you made.
It's time that government, at all levels, makes sure that all of that unused fiber capacity that's supposedly lying around gets lighted up and serving the people. If we leave this to the oligopolies, that fiber won't get used until it's already obsolete.
There is a significant amount of dark fiber in the ground, but that's a good thing: it's called "extra capacity." The reason it's there is because the marginal cost of pulling, say, 10 fibers instead of 1 is almost nothing. The expensive part is the equipment that "lights" the fiber; i.e. the equipment on the ends of the fiber. The fiber itself isn't going to be obsolete for a long, long, long time - fiber doesn't degrade very fast, and the carrying capacity of a given fiber strand doubles just about every year, and the cost drops, in keeping with Moore's Law. So, even if the city were to take over responsibility for the fiber-end equipment (i.e. function as an ISP as opposed to just providing the pipes, which is exactly what they were complaining about in the article), even the city would not necessarily be wise to light up any more fiber.
The real value the city could provide, as you and I agree, is to provide more "fiber to the curb" to enable more widespread broadband usage, which would then provide the cost justification for buying that fiber-end equipment.
Note that the two detractors cited in the article were representatives of cable companies, not ILECs (it mentions that the NCTA primarily lobbies for cable companies.)
What's their beef? "'Don't forget that they (the city) make us carry unnecessary community channels, they force us to provide local infrastructure...'" <verysmallviolin>Such a terrible burden, to actually give something to the community!</verysmallviolin>
The lobbyist goes on to bemoan the fact that "Municipal power boards can offer service at a fraction of the price of a private competitor. Cities use existing rights of way from the power grid to lay their networks, they face a reduced regulatory burden to get the license to operate and they do not have to run at a profit".
Then he pulls out his trump card: "At the end of the day it boils down to, do we want the government being in this business?"
Well, I'm about as anti-government as any slashdotter, but it seems to me this is exactly the business we want the government to be in. Unless we want to actually have multiple "pipes" leading to each and every home and office, the responsibility for building and maintaining the lowest level of the network infrastructure should belong to the same sort of institution responsible for maintaining the water, electricity, sewer, etc.
After all, if they really want to put their money where their mouth is, the telcos and cablecos can just lease the city's infrastructure and gain the advantage of all those cost savings. It remains to be seen whether they spend their money on that, rather than on more lobbyists...
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I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiment (see my comment above), but I do want to correct one statement you made.
It's time that government, at all levels, makes sure that all of that unused fiber capacity that's supposedly lying around gets lighted up and serving the people. If we leave this to the oligopolies, that fiber won't get used until it's already obsolete.
There is a significant amount of dark fiber in the ground, but that's a good thing: it's called "extra capacity." The reason it's there is because the marginal cost of pulling, say, 10 fibers instead of 1 is almost nothing. The expensive part is the equipment that "lights" the fiber; i.e. the equipment on the ends of the fiber. The fiber itself isn't going to be obsolete for a long, long, long time - fiber doesn't degrade very fast, and the carrying capacity of a given fiber strand doubles just about every year, and the cost drops, in keeping with Moore's Law. So, even if the city were to take over responsibility for the fiber-end equipment (i.e. function as an ISP as opposed to just providing the pipes, which is exactly what they were complaining about in the article), even the city would not necessarily be wise to light up any more fiber.
The real value the city could provide, as you and I agree, is to provide more "fiber to the curb" to enable more widespread broadband usage, which would then provide the cost justification for buying that fiber-end equipment.
Note that the two detractors cited in the article were representatives of cable companies, not ILECs (it mentions that the NCTA primarily lobbies for cable companies.)
What's their beef? "'Don't forget that they (the city) make us carry unnecessary community channels, they force us to provide local infrastructure...'" <verysmallviolin>Such a terrible burden, to actually give something to the community!</verysmallviolin>
The lobbyist goes on to bemoan the fact that "Municipal power boards can offer service at a fraction of the price of a private competitor. Cities use existing rights of way from the power grid to lay their networks, they face a reduced regulatory burden to get the license to operate and they do not have to run at a profit".
Then he pulls out his trump card: "At the end of the day it boils down to, do we want the government being in this business?"
Well, I'm about as anti-government as any slashdotter, but it seems to me this is exactly the business we want the government to be in. Unless we want to actually have multiple "pipes" leading to each and every home and office, the responsibility for building and maintaining the lowest level of the network infrastructure should belong to the same sort of institution responsible for maintaining the water, electricity, sewer, etc.
After all, if they really want to put their money where their mouth is, the telcos and cablecos can just lease the city's infrastructure and gain the advantage of all those cost savings. It remains to be seen whether they spend their money on that, rather than on more lobbyists...