Gabrielle Gauthey, membre du collège de l’Autorité de Régulation des Télécommunications, i.e. member of the board of the French Telecoms regulator, makes some excellent comments in this interview pointed out by Dirk van der Woude and translated, with comments, by Bill St. Arnaud. I don’t normally just repost other material, but this is highly relevant to my most recent comments.
Passive infrastructure accounts for the bulk - 70% to 80% - of network deployment costs. Civil engineering costs are particularly onerous - more than 50% in urban areas... <…>
Sharing passive infrastructure appears to be the key to removing entry barriers and favoring an economical deployment of high-speed broadband. <…>
In one model, the operator is vertically integrated and installs a closed network, or a slightly open network with only resale offers. This is the preferred model of incumbents in the US.
In another model, long-term investors, which are associated if necessary with local governments, adopt an open-access model from the start, selling passive network capacity without necessarily becoming themselves operators. The passive network is made available to operators that want to sell very high-speed services. These operators install their active equipment upstream just as operators did with unbundled copper networks to deliver DSL services. This model is used in northern Europe and also by some local government projects in the US.
If only there were politicians and/or regulators in the US who understood things to this extent and were willing to speak out.
Just wanted to point out that the French interview you link and the English translation are unrelated. The French interview is on the use of IT in the French administration !
I'd be interested in a link to the French original if you can find it. In the meantime, thanks for your work !
Posted by: Ben FELTEN | March 02, 2007 at 05:40 AM
Ben, Thanks for pointing this out. That's what I get for doing a quicky post while in transit. The text I quoted came from Bill's email which is archived here:
http://lists.canarie.ca/pipermail/news/2007/000395.html
The house publication de l’Autorité de Régulation des Télécommunications in French is indexed here:
http://www.art-telecom.fr/index.php?id=21
and all their publications appear on the home page here:
http://www.art-telecom.fr/
Mme Gauthey appears to have written an article or done an interview entitled "Fiber, a real breakthrough" (my approximate translation) in issue #53 (Nov-Dec) which can be seen here:
http://www.art-telecom.fr/uploads/tx_gspublication/lettre53.pdf
The material in Bill's email may have come from this article, but I'm not sure.
Posted by: brough | March 02, 2007 at 10:04 AM