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IMO, the private ownership extention is the major flaw in the idea, and then one hits the same standardization problem that has always plagued these approaches. Just like the roads (and electrics, water, etc) the customer demarc needs to be expected to be near the property's border. There will always be circumstances where lines are extended or easments granted, but a presumed curbside/pole junction box for a single-family dwelling in urban/suburban makes infinitely more sense. And let the municipality (or a regulated transmission entity of some stripe or similar) manage the link at demarc, fiber bundles, and passive optical equipment. To bootstrap, establish cross-connects to the entities which already have neighborhood rights of way (telco, cable, competetors) that are able to handle the optics. The imagined telecommunications hub for the municipality would need to be stingy with colo, and have expansion contingencies... an emphasis on being a large cross-connect facility rather than a datacenter would encourage interested service providers to have a footprint (think, business tax base) in the muni or nearby, also driving more colo business. Given how existing telo andd cable deals get structured at the local level, it would likely make sense for the 'primary' hub to be the town hall, large school, police/fire centers, or other site that normally gets its access as part of right-of-way deals. Enhancing the possibility of a multi-homed city hall or first responder center has interesting implications. So yes, fund a muni-level infrastructure, but leave it to the munis to determine its management rather than dictate either an extreme privitization, medium-touch regulated entities, or fully municipality-managed.
Fiber To The Home: Ideal Economic Stimulus?
New York.–Senator Robert Bulkley, of Ohio, has made a proposal which is certainly worth considering.
It is as clear as daylight that, to bring about any sort of recovery, somebody must start some new sort of business or some extension of an old business.
It is also clear that nobody is in sight right now who has any notion of doing that — at least not in time to do this country any good as a depression cure.
There is one business which is a public business but is also a private one. This is the road-building business. The Government pays for the roads and hires the contractors. But the roads are built usually by private contractors and with materials furnished by private manufacturers.
If there is one thing needed in this country now, in view of the development of the automobile, it is express highways running east and west and north and south. Why, therefore, cannot the Government go into the business of building these highways?
Tough Times for Local Exchange Carriers
This week, the headlines seem to be full of fresh doom and gloom for wireline carriers, who employ people in every congressional district across America. Sooner or later, someone is going to call for Congress to tap some of the hundreds of billions in 2009 economic stimulus to help the LECs through troubled times, save lots of jobs, and preserve the way we do business in our critical last-mile communications infrastructure.
Is this wise? Is there a better way?
Customer Owned Networks
I stumbled across a really interesting paper this week, written by Derek Slater and Tim Wu, and it set me to thinking. Slater is a policy analyst for Google, but not writing on their behalf; Wu is a professor at Columbia Law School.
They propose an interesting thought experiment. What if you could own your internet connection, instead of leasing it from a service provider? In their "customer owned network" scenario, homeowners would literally purchase a strand of glass, running from their house to a common point of presence, where multiple providers would compete for the right to sell services over the fiber. The property rights you'd acquire in the physical network would be quite literal — when you sell the house, your strand of fiber goes with it. It's an improvement to your house.
The optical trunk, or bundle of fibers, that winds its way through your housing development, town, or county would also be yours, owned as a cooperative by all of the individual strand owners, who would pay the equivalent of "condo maintenance fees" to cover repair costs (backhoes do get hungry, you know).
Slater and Wu call this the "Homes with Tails" model, and a 400-home customer owned network is already being built out in Ottawa, in a trial run by CANARIE. In that experiment, the electric company brings your strand to the house, and charges you an additional $0.02 per kilowatt-hour over five years to pay for it (thus encouraging you to save energy in the process).
Have it Your Way
Their key observation about a customer-owned last mile network is that you, the homeowner, would have complete freedom to light your fiber however you like. You can make whatever deal you can make, with whatever provider you can meet at the PoP, who is willing to offer you service over your fiber. You'd strike a deal, they'd set a price, they'd lease you some link-layer equipment for your house, they'd light the fiber and offer you services under contract. But they wouldn't have anywhere near the same kind of leverage that they would if they owned the glass.
Don't like their pricing? Don't like their lack of network neutrality? Don't like the cut of their jib for whatever reason? Just cut 'em loose and get another service provider. It's your fiber, all the way from your house to the exchange point. They meet you where you have the maximum number of choices (the PoP), rather then the fewest (your doorstep).
How much bandwidth would you have on tap? Well, using current laser technology and cheap commodity equipment, it's trivial to push one to ten gigabits per second over that strand. And it gets you to a PoP where you could be paying a provider of your choice tens of dollars a month for the right to sustain those gigabits, and burst to tens of gigabits, across the public internet. Yes, in a competitive environment, where you buy the data service and own the fiber to the exchange point, that's how little you might pay for retail gigabit connectivity, if declines in wholesale internet transit prices continue on their current trendline. And as the switching and transmission technology curve matures over the 15- or 30-year life of your home fiber investment, maybe you end up with terabits per second of capacity. Futureproof, baby.
Getting Off the Launchpad
So this led me to think about the challenges of launching customer-owned networks, most of which focus around the "first mover disadvantage" — if someone starts a program like this in your neighborhood, your best play is to wait until they (the rich early adopters) have paid the freight. Then you jump in a few years later and pay only incremental connection costs. But because the startup costs are really significant, and because nobody wants to look like a sucker, this in essence means that such projects never get built, except in the easiest-to-reach neighborhoods, and then only by a service provider who hopes to extract a monopoly rent over the fiber. Not what we're looking for!
What's worse, the current economic climate also makes it hard to envision anyone starting a new fiber buildout of any scale. Credit has all but dried up, making it increasingly difficult for anyone to justify sinking huge capital investments into projects that might not return dividends for years, if ever, and then only in the densest markets, and then only depending on dodgy assumptions about penetration rates and revenue per user. Verizon is bravely pressing ahead with its FIOS buildout, estimated to cost $20B over 2004-2010 to reach just 18M households in five east coast markets. But then, Verizon just laid off thousands of people, a few weeks before Christmas, as business softens and their competition strengthens. And Verizon is probably among the strongest of the wireline carriers, most of whom are too focused on their collapsing margins and inability to roll commercial paper in this credit environment to think about undertaking significant new fiber-to-the-home projects. Especially if the model (customer-owned fiber) prevents them from exacting monopoly rents when it's all built out.
Time for a New Deal?
You have to ask: wouldn't this be an interesting use for a few hundred billion dollars of government investment? If the new Obama administration is looking for an investment project that would stimulate the economy in the short term, and build a completely new set of national capabilities in the long term, a national-scale customer-owned physical network would be an intriguing possibility. The government would provide the cash and the muscle to build the network, and then transfer it, strand by strand, to its long-term owners: those who own the parcels of residential and commercial property where the fiber terminates.
Start with a mixture of rural areas and midwestern cities: economically depressed areas where carriers have arguably underinvested in the residential fiber plant relative to what might be in the long-term public interest. Send a surge of engineering companies into the field, working in cooperation with municipalities and the utilities to secure the rights of way, open the streets, install the ducts, climb the poles, string the fiber, reach the houses.
You'd have to cover a few million miles of roads, at an average cost of tens of thousands of dollars per mile. You'd have to build some reasonable number of regional PoPs where service providers can meet customers, and maybe subsidize more fiber to help the independent providers carry aggregated customer traffic back to traditional internet exchange points in the big cities. But because it's "just fiber" (no customer premises equipment, no switching, no nothing), and because you're the government, able to lean on regulated industries and secure rights of way fairly cheaply, you're still talking tens of billions of dollars, maybe a couple hundreds of billions, to cover really large parts of the country.
And because we're still focused on leaving this a customer-owned network, ownership of the fiber network would remain with the individual citizens who own the pieces of property where the strands terminate. At the end of the project, the government doesn't own the network (individual property owners do), and they don't operate it (individual service providers do, competing for individual property owners' business). The property rights would be quitclaimed to the individual property owners. The costs could even be recovered from property owners over the next 30 years, perhaps in the form of a few dollars per month surcharge built into new residential mortgages, or as a federal tax on services provided over the new network.
Limited Government Intervention, Private Ownership
None of this is new, of course. Bill St Arnaud has been advocating customer-owned network projects in Canada for a long time (he's the fellow responsible for CANARIE's Ottawa trial I mentioned earlier). And compare Fred Goldstein's vision of divesting the CO and local loops from the switching and service platform to create a set of highly-regulated "LoopCos" for truly competitive universal access. In our customer-owned last mile fiber network, some Loopco-like entities would have to bid the local contracts to maintain the fiber plant, run the fiber exchange points, and so forth, all complications that I've glossed over here.
And the general concept of a national information grid and fiber to the home has been floating around for a long, long time, at least since the PITAC studies from more than ten years ago. To my knowledge, however, the concept of a customer-owned national last mile fiber plant has never received serious consideration. What works in favor of building it this time around is the economic climate, and the size of the effort that most people are now willing to envision for the government's role in rebooting the national economy.
The hundred-billion-dollar costs for building this project are not out of line with the other flavors of economic stimulus that have been proposed. The strategic returns on the investment are potentially far higher. The technology for stringing and laying fiber is well-established, the materials readily available, the expertise distributed among thousands of local small businesses nationwide. And at the end, instead of having poured that money down a hole fighting a war, or buying every American a new Chinese-made plasma TV, you've actually changed the ground rules of the domestic internet infrastructure.. and the American economy itself.
How many gallons of gas would be saved by eliminating half the miles commuted to school and work every day? How many pensioners could live an extra year or two at home, watched over by telepresent family, instead of checking into nursing homes? How much safer would our economic infrastructure be from attack, if the infrastructure of our information economy could be spread thinly around the country? What kind of entrepreneurial innovations might emerge, what new industries might flourish, if any two American street addresses could exchange nearly limitless amounts of internet traffic on demand?
I don't know, but I'd like to find out. It would be a highly nontrivial project, and I have glossed over many of the trickiest parts, such as building and managing the exchange points, and determining who gets to colocate and cross-connect there, on what terms.. In fact, building a nationwide customer-owned last mile network would be so nontrivial in scale, and so disruptive of the existing economics of Internet edge access, that it could only be envisioned during a time of national crisis. Would the payoff to future generations of property owners be worth it? We have a rare opportunity to consider the question.
Disclaimer: These opinions are mine alone, and not those of Renesys Corporation.
Who is going to maintain that last mile? And pay for locates, fiber repairs, and moves? Don't forget property taxes for the cable in the ground. When someone owns a home or business in an area where there is a customer-owned loop there would need to be some kind of association or coop that manages the day-to-day operations (or outsources it, perhaps even back to a service provider) that represents everyone, and whether a home or business owner wants to or not, they would have to pay monthly or annual dues. It's tough to set up a system where there is private ownership extending beyond the lot lines and make it work. If it was a closed community or apartment complex where there's already association dues and the like, it's more plausible, but not for traditional homes. The advantage of the system today is that the infrastructure costs are averaged across not just a suburb or city, but sometimes across the service provider's entire service area. The closed community or apartment complex may have lower costs than other areas, but once they remove themselves from the mix they've raised the average cost for the service provider, burdening others even more. Frank
Ring! Ring! Hot News, 8th December, 2008 In Today's Issue : IWF denounces Wikipedia, mysteriously lets Amazon off; fighting HIV with SMS


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You're leaving Wedding Paper Divas to see the Deal of the Day at our parent site, Tiny Prints.
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"This invitation came out beautiful. On the sample that we ordered, the font was very small. This made me nervous that I wouldn't be able to increase the font, and fit all of the information that we needed on there. However, it turned out not to be an issue. They are able to do so much to customize your order, and after a few rounds of proofs, the designer had nailed it. And the customer service staff was so helpful throughout the whole process."
"I absolutely loved the design and personalized colors. The shimmering paper gave more of a glamorous look to it and the font gave it an elegant touch. My guests loved it as well and I received a lot of compliments :-)"
"I ordered this design in the textured paper with the bracket stlye cut. The design team was quick and made my desired changes with no problem. They are beautiful,simple and elegant.They were packaged well and arrived a week before the anticipated arrival date."
"The paper quality is very good and the printing is excellent. Shipping is very fast even in Italy and the staff of Wedding Paper Divas is really nice and helpful. I would recommend anyone to purchase on this website! My vote is EXCELLENT, I love Wedding Paper Divas."
"We ordered a sample of this on the shimmer paper and were blown away by the quality. Very sophisticated looking and quite the bang for our buck. We will be backing these on a tri fold and hopefully finding some matching belly bands. They appearance was completely different than the other two invitation samples I had ordered and was elegant and stunning"

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Company Profile for BB Disentis (DISNZ)
BB Disentis provides transportation services. The Company offers mountain lift services for skiing and other recreational outdoor activities. BB Disentis serves customers in Switzerland.
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Speaking of e-waste: Where gadgets go to die | The Economist
Source:LiveScience Difference engine: Where gadgets go to die | The Economist. I happened to use the recycling of e-waste as an example in yesterday's blog post (see: Just Read: Greening Health Care: How Hospitals Can Heal the Planet | Ted Eytan, MD), with the coincidence of this article in The Economist. What little is known » » » » on to the full article


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Mason Plumlee and the Duke Blue Devils took care of business on a road trip to Virginia Tech. Duke 88-56.
Mason Plumlee


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Looking back over the hockey season that has just come to a close, there is one game that sticks out in my mind the most…the game that I think can be looked back upon as the one that turned the entire 2008-09 Thrashers season from a complete and total devastating disaster, to one that has left us facing the 6-month long off-season more hopeful than disgusted.
It was Friday night January 16th and the Toronto Maple Leafs were in town. Coming into the game the Thrashers were 7-17-3 in their previous 27 and had not won consecutive games since the 5-game win streak that ended in mid-November. They were fresh off a 3-2 loss to Ottawa two nights prior and their record at the time was an abysmal 14-25-5 for 33 points…a pace that, if continued, would have seen Atlanta finish around the 61 point mark. That's bad…New York Islanders kind of bad.
They were the Titanic and the NHL 2008-09 season was their North Atlantic.
It was Ilya Kovalchuk's second game since being named team


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It's Chocolate week! Around the UK tastings and events from the UK's best chocolatiers are underway. To celebrate Gaucho restaurants have launched an chocolate inspired menu and recently I was lucky enough to attend an exclusive preview at the Gaucho Piccadilly.
Gaucho's Chocolate Week will see the British love of chocolate combined with Argentina's renowned beef and Malbec to create a memorable dining experience.
The first part of the evening entailed us being introduced to Malbec family of wines by Gaucho sommelier Ian O'Reilly before going on to taste them with different flavoured chocolates.
The first chocolate we tasted was a 70% dark chocolate chosen to highlight the classic match between Malbec and chocolate. The bitterness of the chocolate was countered by the sweetness of the tannins that Malbec is so famous for. The second chocolate was coffee and vanilla flavoured and was chosen to extract the oak influence of the Vina Patricia Malbec. The final and most controversial choice of the evening was the violet flavoured chocolate. Malbec is extremely well known for its floral characteristics with violets always present. The violet chocolate was chosen due to its strong character. It highlighted the Malbec's ability to tone down the strength of the chocolate whilst the chocolate lifted the floral side of the wine. I have to say out of all the chocolates I enjoyed the Coffee and Vanilla most for its silky feel on the pallet.
After this it was time to eat and boy we were in for a treat! The first course of braised beef cheeks with lamb sweetbread popcorn in almonds and breadcrumbs, humita and chocolate jus was delicious, for me there was just the hint of the chocolate which worked well with humita.
The next course was slow cooked pork belly, white chocolate and vanilla mashed potato and chocolate chilli pork. I was worried the chocolate would be overpowering but it complemented the pork beautifully and chilli gave the dish a nice kick.
The menu ended on a high with a gorgeous desert of white chocolate mousse with milk chocolate crumble, fresh and frozen fruits and almond praline served with a glass of Zuccardi Port Malbec. I polished off every bit of the desert and the zucardi provided a perfect blend of sweetness to compliment the white chocolate moose.
The Gaucho's Chocolate Week Menu costs £65pp and is available at all 14 Gaucho until Saturday 20th October so hurry!
For bookings for the Chocolate Week Menu, please contact your local Gaucho restaurant www.gauchorestaurants.com


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Readers' Opinions
Eric Malone
on January 27, 2011 at 11:14 AM
If anyone deserves a promotion and recognition, it's this guy.
From 18.104.22.168 on January 27, 2011 at 11:32 AM
I'm interested in what else other than Spider Man and Harry Potter type rides he does in the future. Would be nice to see him do something different, to see what other ideas he has, since those two seem a little similar to me. If he could put the passion and inovativtion he put into Harry Potter and Spider Man into some other type of rides (an indoor roller coaster.... or even a water ride?!), I'd be really interested in seeing the results.
Anthony Murphy
on January 27, 2011 at 1:18 PM
He would seem to be the man to have if I were Universal. His resume of attractions are impressive and they need a good head for their "Imgagineering" division.
James Rao
on January 27, 2011 at 5:52 PM
I would argue his promotion is way overdue. Should have received it after Spider-Man. But, better late than never!
Keep up the good work, Thierry!
(Now, if I just knew how to pronounce his name....)
Joshua Counsil
on January 27, 2011 at 6:49 PM
First time I've heard his name, but I'm sure it won't be the last. This gives me high hopes for Transformers.
From 18.104.22.168 on January 28, 2011 at 10:55 AM
I certainly agree!!! He's earned it!
From, "Thierry's Wife" as I've come to be known lately... and love it! Thanks everyone.


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J Majik
BiographyThe youngest member of the Metalheadz crew, J Majik's watery grooves explore a variety of moods, from drifting, contemplative ambiance to dark abstraction. Start-and-stop passages emerge into bottom-heavy, prowling breakbeats. Vocal samples add a sinister element, while shimmering strings bring touches of melancholy.
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September, 2014
Welcome once again to the website of the Scripps Ranch Music Club. This site serves our membership as well as those who have a general interest in our activities. We invite you to browse through the site, and hope that you'll find its pages interesting and informative. If this is your first visit we encourage you to return again periodically since several of the pages of this site change monthly. If you're a member, we encourage you to watch for places where you might contribute to future updates. Members are invited to share any interesting or amusing commentary that they may wish to offer to fellow readers; please send your material to
Each month the Programs page gets updated, along with the Musical Notes page, and any other revisions needed, such as Announcements updates. Occasionally a temporary feature may appear on the newly revised Home page. We make a serious effort to complete the update of the entire site before the end of the week of the most recent monthly meeting. An announcement of the completion is sent to the membership via e-mail. Comments, criticisms, and other editorial type observations by readers are most welcomed by your editor.
What's New This Month The September MeetingThe programs page contains our usual pictorial rundown of the recent meeting. This one was at Eileen and Jim's, in Tierrasanta.
The Music Notes pageSan Diego Opera Opens its 2014 - 2015 season with a marvelous concert.
Our choice this month for our featured composer/conductor/educator is Christoph von Dohnányi, for many years the Music Director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Be sure to catch the Editor's Corner bit at the bottom of the page.
The Performers' Database
Members are invited to
Wondering whether or not you performed that piece before? You'll probably find the answer in the database! Just click on the link or the arrow and enter your query.
And you might also wonder if someone else has performed the piece you're considering. The database is a perfect way to find out!
The Music Club PresidentSubsequent to the "retirement" of our two "co-past-presidents," Wendel and Russ, Alan has assumed the reins of leadership and is already hard at work designing improvements to our club's operating procedures. Some of his handiwork affects this website, and you will see evidence of it here and there. A notable example is the disappearance of the entire Members section, including the roster; this material will be replaced by equivalent documents transmitted via e-mail from Alan directly to members, and by "copy-proof" roster (see the Announcements page for details) . Members will enjoy the benefit of improved security and privacy, in particular, a near-zero probability that their e-mail addresses will be picked up by unscrupulous hackers and spammers.
We offer Alan's biographical sketch below:
Alan grew up in La Mesa and studied piano as a high-school youngster in the Pace Conservatory Program at San Diego State University in the early 1970s. He later studied piano locally for many years with Gerard Betsche, a former student of Edwin Fischer.
In addition to accompanying a few choral ensembles, Alan performed at the Athanaeum Music and Arts Library in La Jolla during his college years at UCSD, while studying in the Engineering Department. He has given concerts on a regular basis at local retirement and nursing facilities.
Alan settled with his wife, Ann, in Scripps Ranch in 1996 and regularly attended Music Club meetings until their son Jonathan was born, at which time he took a few year hiatus to tend to regular evening duties. Jonathan debuted as an SRMC guest artist at the age of six, playing as soloist in David Rubinstein's One-Note Concerto (http://davidrubinstein.net/OneNoteConcerto.html). Now in his teens and a talented artist, Jonathan has won or placed near the top in competitions and has entertained at a variety of events. His performances in recent years on violin, flute, and piano have delighted audiences at the Scripps Ranch Music Club.
We hear one of Alan's sterling piano Grand Finales at the close of nearly every Club meeting and have come to look forward to them as one of the highlights of the meeting. And we have watched young Jonathan growing up from a kid who played "one-note concerti" into an accomplished pianist, flutist, and violinist. Both father and son are musicians of extraordinary talent, and we are greatly pleased to have their family as a part of our Club family.
And a Couple of Others ...
The Musicologist
Marianne (above, left) is the musicologist of the Scripps Ranch Music Club. Long active as a non-performing member when her late husband, Bob, was playing Beethoven on the pianos of many members. A charter member, Marianne keeps active in the Club with her scholarly presentations about composers and related music topics. Husband Bob was a founding member of the Scripps Ranch Music Club. He and Marianne are depicted above in the framed portrait that adorns the living room in their Scripps Ranch home.
Marianne and Bob
The Webmeister
The monthly meetings of the Music Club and the follow-on update of the Club's website are two of Jim's favorite pastimes. The maintenance of the website has become something of a hobby by which, over the years, he has honed some skills in the art of web design and construction.
Jim is the Music Club's self-appointed Website Pooh-Bah. His interest in computer graphics began in 1983 when he participated in the introduction of the early Macintosh desktop computers into the engineering education programs which he administered.
During the time of his tenure in the world of académe, Jim also founded and operated a part-time small business which focused on website design, thus equipping him with the expertise needed to create the pages you see herein.
Our Mission
The Scripps Ranch Music Club is a small group of adult amateur musicians who like to perform for their fellow members for mutual enjoyment and entertainment. We are a performance-based organization rather than a music appreciation group. The only requirements for membership are: a serious interest in music
at least a modest degree of accomplishment as a musician
a willingness to perform as a soloist or in ensemble for an audience of fellow members.
In addition, members are expected to either host a meeting or to assist with refreshments at a meeting at least once each year.
New members are always welcome; at present there are as many members enrolled as our meeting rooms will hold, but we'll be happy to place new applicants on the waiting list.
October 2014 Meeting
Our meeting next month will be on Sunday afternoon, October 12th, at 2:30 p.m., in Lawrence Welk Village. Watch for the announcement that will come by e-mail message from the president to all members; please be sure to respond to his invitation message in order to obtain the location address and driving directions. (Your reply is important; your hostess depends on it when planning for seating, refreshments, etc., and she will appreciate it).