[1st-mile-nm] Mea Culpa and Comment

[Marianne Granoff]

I agree with almost everything that you have said about NLR and I2,
but I have to take exception to this last paragraph.  A great many
of the rural areas of our state have more than adequate fiber
deployment because the rural phone providers in this state have
invested in fiber deployment for over 20 years.  For the most part,
these rural LECs put their customers first.  On the other hand, some
phone companies with dense population centers in NM put their money
in 1) other states, 2) paying attorneys to fight regulation, 3)
paying SEC fines for past bad behavior, 4) paying their high-priced
executives' defense attorneys in criminal lawsuits, 5) paying for
expensive media advertising saying how much better they are, 6) paying
lobbyists to overturn consumer-oriented regulation at the State and
Federal level, and 7) paying attorneys to fight with their customers.

The challenge is not to "push" network services to the edge.  The
challenge is to understand that the same services can be had in rural
areas of NM today, but that such services will cost much more because
the cost per person is more in rural areas.  I would offer that the
solutions can be found by inviting the rural LECs to partner in some
innovative ways instead of paying out-of-state consultants mega-bucks
to find out what exists.

I have never had a rural LEC in NM tell me I could not order a T1/DS1
or a T3/DS3 (usually provisioned on fiber).  Our urban phone company
has responded that they cannot provide even a DS1 on more than one
occasion, unless I want to pay "construction costs".

My two cents.

Marianne Granoff
NM Internet Professionals Association



At 08:34 AM 2/12/2008 -0700, Arthur Maccabe wrote:

>In the end, it's critical that New Mexico move forward in building
>adequate communication infrastructure.  This is far more important in
>New Mexico than in our neighboring states like Arizona or Utah where
>population is much more centralized and they tend to ignore the rural
>parts of the state.  I like to think  of our challenge as the need to
>push (network) services to the edge.  As we go through this process,
>there will be false starts.  We can spend our time complaining about
>the problems that we have run into, or we can try to learn from
>failures and move on -- there's clearly a lot more to do.
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