Re: Muni Fiber and Politics

[Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>]

On Tue, 22 Jul 2014, Ray Soucy wrote:

> The equipment is what makes the speed and quality of service.  If you 
> have shared infrastructure for L2 then what exactly differentiates a 
> service?  More to the point; if that equipment gets oversubscribed or 
> gets neglected who is responsible for it?  I don't think the 
> municipality or public utility is a good fit.

I can also tell from experience in this area, that having the muni active 
network in between you as a customer, and the ISP, makes for no fun fault 
finding. The ISP is blind to what's going on, and you have a commercial 
relationship with the ISP. Their subcontractor, ie the L2 network, needs 
to assist in qualified fault management, and they usually don't have the 
skill and resources needed.

Running an L1 network is easier because most of the time the only thing 
you need to understand is if the light is arriving and how much of it, and 
you can easily check this with a fiber light meter. Running L2 network, 
perhaps even with some L3 functions to make multicast etc more efficient, 
is not as easy to do as it might sound considering all factors.

--
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se