Sascha Meinrath on Building Your Own Network

Fri, July 30, 2010 | Posted by christopher

A short video of Sascha Meinrath discussing the power of community networks, the need for broadband competition, and why the National Broadband Plan misses the mark.

Video: 
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Competition

Submitted by Fred Pilot (not verified) on August 3, 2010 - 10:56pm.

True market competition isn't really the issue because facilities-based telecom infrastructure is a natural monopoly as Tim Nulty has pointed out.

Instead, the issue is market failure on the part of the incumbent providers who cannot make a business case within their existing business models to upgrade and expand the footprints of the current infrastructures.

But notwithstanding their inability to serve their markets, they tend to view them as exclusive franchises, which is NOT the same thing as a natural monopoly. Thus, they view community-based next generation, FTTP providers as encroaching on their territorial hegemony and assaulting their corporate egos.

Open Access allows true market competition

Submitted by christopher on August 4, 2010 - 7:56am.

Yes- facilities-based competition is doomed to failure. But open access on FTTH allows true competition among ISPs.

Open access works

Submitted by Andrew (not verified) on August 10, 2010 - 7:21am.

Open access networks are already working, but are these projects seem to be under-reported. The City of Palm Coast (Florida) converted their City-owned fiber to an open access network earlier this year (http://www.designnine.com/press.html) and will be operating in the black in year one. Danville, Virginia's open access network is in it's third year and they continually expanding. The Wired Road (http://www.designnine.com/wired-road.html) is a rural open access network with fully integrated wireless and fiber open access services; The Wired Road has three retail providers and two wholesale providers on the network.

There appears to be a double standard when evaluating open access, in which open access networks are held to a higher standard than traditional investor-owned networks. It's a red herring to claim that open access networks have "failed" because they may be running a deficit in year two or three. No one seems bothered that the cable companies still owe billions from investments they made to upgrade networks in the early part of the last decade.

Open Access Approaches

Submitted by christopher on August 10, 2010 - 7:30am.

Andrew - the examples you cite are certainly examples where the network is proving feasible. However, they represent a fundamentally different approach as they serve extremely targeted parts of the community rather than the whole. Over time, I hope they expand to pass the whole community, but those who have tried to pass the whole community immediately without offering retail services have fared poorly. Palm Coast, Danville, and Wired Road combined probably have fewer subs than any single other retail build so it makes comparisons difficult.

That said, there is certainly a double standard when comparing publicly owned to privately owned.

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