A Municipal Failure > Marietta = Mismanagement

reply to Doctor Olds

Re: Marietta = Mismanagement

What blows my mind is that it was never available to me and yet the main trunk/cable runs less than 3,500 feet from me.

To have less customers than fiber per mile run is mismanagement in my book. Or head in the sand fever.

"FiberNet has about 180 customers along 210 miles of fiber-optic cable stretching from Kennesaw to Alpharetta and into Atlanta"

What business plan?

»www.mfn.net/mfNoFlash.html

Just for grins I rechecked their site and they are still not available to Residential customers (big mistake!!) and they claim they have 450 Miles of Fiber in operation!! WTH??

»www.mfn.net/mfoptic.html

That is why it failed. They didn't cut in the home users. This project was a joke. But we all know all the anti-muni people will use this as an excuse. And cite this as the only case of failure. Gross mismanagement by a group of people who had no right to even be heading up even a bathroom planning.
--
"It's always funny until someone gets hurt......and then it's absolutely friggin' hysterical!"

reply to Doctor Olds
Lets also not forget the employees.. 28?! That's a whole lot of support staff for only 180 customers. They should have been able to support that user base with half the support staff, if that.

reply to Doctor Olds
If Marietta had stuck to Marietta instead of trying to compete in Atlanta, they'd have been fabulous. They have one of the most reliable and competitively priced services in the market.

Instead of focusing on their own area like most muni operations they thought they smelt money in Atlanta like all the rest who built operations in Atlanta during the .com boom.

In short, a municipal operation should serve ITS OWN residents and businesses FIRST. Not try to move into all the other territories around it... no matter how lucrative they look.

- Davoice

reply to BosstonesOwn

said by BosstonesOwn:

---

.... This project was a joke. But we all know all the anti-muni people will use this as an excuse. And cite this as the only case of failure....

---

The problem (as I see) is that Marietta did not stay in it's Municipal Area and it was not offered to Residential Customers. That just makes it a failed Business Venture more than a failed Municipal Venture, right?

At least the Kutztown Muni:
"embarked on an ambitious plan to string fiber-optic cable to all of its homes and businesses"

reply to mjcrocket

said by mjcrocket:

---

said by BosstonesOwn:

---

.... This project was a joke. But we all know all the anti-muni people will use this as an excuse. And cite this as the only case of failure....

---

Wrong, we are going to see more examples over the comming months of these types of systems failing or tottering on the brink of failure! The municipal system in Kutztown, PA is surviving only because of a large subsidy from the town! In 2003 the town reported the operation had an income of about $670,000. This income was about equally divided between subscriber payments and subsidies. Without the subsidies, this operation would have lost about $300,000. The details are in an article published by the Philadelphia Inquirer on June 18, 2004:

»lw.pennnet.com/News/Display_News···D=102774

Now that one local government has admitted its failure with Municipal Fiber Optic, I think the door has been opened to allow others (who did not want to be the first one) to admit their operations have not been sucessful!

---