----- Original Message ----- > From: "JC Dill" <jcdill.li...@gmail.com>
> On 25/03/12 8:56 AM, Leo Bicknell wrote: > > In a message written on Sun, Mar 25, 2012 at 11:47:58AM -0400, Jay > > Ashworth wrote: > >> Well, for my part, /most of the poiny/ of muni is The Public Good; > >> if /actual/ bond financed muni fiber is skipping the Hard Parts, it > >> deserves to lose. > > It doesn't matter if it's a bond-financed project or a privately > funded (privately owned) project - they are using a public resource (the > street/poles) to lay their lines, and usually also using the power of > the municipality's right to eminent domain to put in or use poles (or > underground conduits) to run lines across private properties. As part > of the Public Good contract to use these public resources, they should > be required to service both the the easy parts and the hard parts, no > matter the source of the financing or the ownership of the lines. Yup; that's what I said. But it cannot be privately financed; *it must be the property of the municipality*, legally. I don't care if they sub out the actual trench and splice, or even the operation of layer 1... but they have to own it; that's the whole point. > > Fiber has a 20-50 year life. > > The biggest problem is determining how certain that lifespan is. > Remember how Netflix looked like an awesome business to deliver DVDs by > mail in 2002, and had one of the most successful IPOs of the era? Less > than 10 years later we have widespread broadband and companies can > deliver that same content by copper/fiber/802.11. Now Netflix is in the > position of being in direct business conflict with the companies they > rely on to carry their product to their customers (e.g. Comcast) and > their future is very uncertain. Can you promise that fiber has a > *feasible* lifetime of 20-50 years? Maybe in 5-10 years all consumer > data will be transferred via wireless, and investment in municipal > wired data systems (fiber and copper) becomes worthless. His assertion wasn't economic life, it was *functional* life; I think we're pretty close to 50 years from the first deployment of optical fiber, and I think it's still serviceable. The question here is: did you design layer 1 properly, so as to make it cost-competitive for a long time (see the other thread on this). Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink j...@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
