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| reply to alchav
Re: Google and The Last Mile! Most of the poles were already in existence, they belong to the electric power companies. That was why Google ended up with the disputes about pole attachment fees, worker safety near high voltage power lines, and speed of deployment. Other wireline services also use the existing poles. With the hatred, by the incumbent ISP supporters and free market solves everything believers, of municipalities deploying municipal fiber networks, there is no way either city could have spent tax money to build an underground fiber network. If the electric utility had raised rates to build such a network, they also would have been declared to be unfairly competing with private ISPs. You can say an open access model would work, but Utopia in Utah tried that and ended up getting screwed by most of the private ISPs. Also, open access would not have met with Google's experimental goals.
There are some serious discussions going on in cities that have been hit repeatedly by electric power outages and wireline service outages about putting everything underground. I think Washington DC is the latest after the massive storm this year resulted in very long outages. The issue is getting a realistic cost for the project. No city wants to have a Boston type Big Dig never ending cost overrun mess to deal with.
In new greenfield developments, underground electrical and communication utility placement is mostly the standard. It is the retrofit areas that are not very likely to get done. |
