This op-ed recommends that the city buy the division, and have it build service, which they estimate at about $100 per household, which could save $300 to $400 per household per year for those with broadband. But that means that they prefer any market for broadband to be destroyed in favor of a publicly owned and operated network. Which, frankly, would scare me if such a thing were proposed in my city.

It's not so much that any given broadband firm is so marvelous that I wouldn't prefer another. (I am surprisingly happy with my DSL from incumbent Qwest, including their fantastically improved technical support.) But, rather, that cities seem to do best in ensuring that missing pieces of all kinds are provided to those least able to advocate for themselves. This, in my mind, extends to cities providing incentives for supermarkets to be built in disadvantaged areas. (There's always an irony that people least able to afford food must travel the furthest to obtain food at prices below that offered in their neighborhood, typically through convenience stores. That's changing.)

One prominent argument that I found myself agreeing with when the discussion of municipal Wi-Fi was in its infancy was the problem of building a broadband network that used taxpayer dollars to improve the lot of some citizens, often those who could afford a variety of broadband options. Plans that used city budgets to reduce costs for telecom or provide municipal services are more egalitarian, and seem to have won the day.

In this case, the op-ed writers are suggesting a course that would eliminate all competition. Can anyone trust their city well enough that they support starting a bureaucracy that would completely de facto (not de jure) prevent any better service from being installed? Or that would require you to pay as part of your taxes for service that you wouldn't use?

The columnists do more sagely suggest that a "city-wide fibre/wireless network could be an important boost to city departments and other civic services that have growing needs for networking, such as education, libraries, police and emergency health services."

For many more years than I care to remember the Cisco Catalyst line of switches have defined Cisco's high end best in class switch line. I remember evaluating potential web hosting companies in my days at Interliant and when talking about their data center and connectivity, they defined it by how many 6500's they had.  Over the years the variety of IOS versions was maddening to try and make things work across the board.  Well after three years in development and a mere 250 million in dev costs (according to this article), the blood, sweat and tears of 500 engineers, Cisco gives us Nexus! It sounds like the name of some demonic computer that I remember from an old sci-fi movie. 

In fact Nexus is more than just one big honking switch. It runs a whole new Cisco OS, the NX-OS. Joy, another Cisco OS to work out compatibility with. It combines Ethernet with Fibre Channel. Nexus is already 10Gbps today but has the chops to go to 40 and even 100 Gbps according to the Cisco folks.  All of this for a mere 75k or so.  As the folks at Cisco say, you need to have a budget to buy this baby. But you can't be on a budget to afford it either. However, it is Cisco and I am willing to bet that this will become the de facto standard in data center switches in the years to come.

What about security you ask? Well it seems that Nexus supports TrustSec. It also supports NAC, though I guess that means Cisco Network Admission Control, and not NAC in the generic sense.  I am sure there will be plans to put cards in for IPS and other security technologies. Whether they will scale to match the throughput of this monster is another thing.