Laserfiche WebLink
3. Existing Infrastructure <br />One of the first tasks in conducting a broadband feasibility study is to undertake an evaluation of the current competitive <br />landscape in the municipality. This includes looking at what existing infrastructure is present as well as researching what <br />current providers are offering residents and businesses in terms of services and pricing. This section explores what private <br />and public infrastructure can be found in Louisville. The main purpose of this task is to take inventory of assets and to see <br />if any existing network components (fiber, copper, towers) could be available to be leveraged by the City in a network <br />build to offset deployment costs. <br />3.1 Private Infrastructure <br />There are several types of private infrastructure in the City. The first type is fiber or network assets of the current <br />residential broadband providers — Comcast and Century Link. Unfortunately, neither Comcast or Century Link will provide <br />a map of their infrastructure under the grounds that it is confidential and proprietary. Both companies assert they have <br />100% coverage in Louisville, so we must assume there is substantial provider infrastructure in the City. This is more fully <br />detailed in Section 4. <br />It is important to note that while there is significant provider infrastructure in Louisville, providers generally do not make <br />their infrastructure available to be leveraged for a City -network build. Instead, the providers will only offer leased or lit <br />services to a City. In other words, in order for the City to build a FTTP network, it would have to overbuild existing Comcast <br />and Century Link infrastructure. <br />The second type of private infrastructure is network assets owned and deployed by wholesale or business enterprise <br />providers. In Louisville, there is one carrier in this category by the name of Zayo. Unlike Comcast and Century Link, Zayo <br />makes their infrastructure maps public on their website. In addition, the City currently leverages some Zayo fiber and has <br />a contract in place with Zayo. <br />The last type of private infrastructure are cell towers. In a suburban community, the cell towers are secondary to <br />underground fiber assets since most communities are looking to build a fiber network and not a wireless network. To <br />determine what cell towers are in the City, VPS searched both the FCC and FAA databases while deleting duplicate towers. <br />The FAA database is only for submitted tower applications, and the Google Earth imagery is a bit dated, so it is difficult to <br />confirm if these towers were truly constructed or not without physically going to the locations. <br />Maps of private infrastructure found on the following pages include: <br />• Zayo Fiber Network maps for a 3-mile view <br />• Zayo Fiber Network maps for a 5-mile view <br />• Zayo Fiber Network maps for a 10-mile level view <br />• Private Cell Towers in the greater Louisville area <br />7 <br />