One big thing I wish were addressed: what if my landlord isn't cooperative? Generally, fiber-to-the-home is done by putting an ONT/ONU (optical network terminal/unit that handles the fiber signal) in the basement and running ethernet into the unit. You can use MoCA (multimedia over coax) to get from the basement to the unit, but a lot of places just have the coax punch through the side of the building rather than coming up from the basement (I'm sure back in the 80s a lot of landlords didn't care about what was cheap property back then). Will Cambridge make an ordinance that landlords have to allow tenants to hook up municipal fiber? In a city where most people rent, this is a big concern. If Cambridge gets municipal fiber and I can't get it because my landlord isn't cooperative, that's a big problem - and will severely impact the take rate. This has stymied Verizon's Fios a lot in New York City. Verizon will have Fios available, but can't get it into your unit. Sometimes they're able to use coax wiring in the building already. Sometimes landlords just shut them out - and sometimes the cable company will pay the landlord for exclusivity (though I think the city is moving against that).

I guess I'm left wondering how the service will get from the street to my unit with a landlord that might not care. The presentation had so many tiny details on how they were getting it around the city and such, but didn't talk about getting it into the units. I know that some large buildings in Somerville are Comcast-only because of this (one of my friends hates it about his building). If my cable connection is just something that was drilled through the third-floor exterior wall back in the 80s, but now the landlord doesn't want new punctures in their property that's now worth millions, what will happen? Am I just out of luck? I'm sure many landlords will accommodate and might see it as a selling point to their property, but it seems like it could be a bit logistically difficult in many situations. A 30 unit building isn't going to want 30 punctures in their building. MoCA is an option, but then everyone is sharing a theoretical 2.5Gbps (depending on how good the wiring is) and not really getting the full fiber experience (and MoCA can bring some security concerns since most people don't enable encryption on it and additional latency). I'm guessing that most large buildings will end up being MoCA which isn't ideal and I'd have to assume that a lot of small buildings probably just have a bunch of exterior penetrations for coax rather than wiring down to the basement.

Does anyone have details on how renters will get service in different scenarios? Is this a solved problem that's so boring they didn't put it in the presentation? I guess it just feels like it's missing because they talk about all sorts of random details like the trenching, hubs, maps of the backbone, primary, and secondary distribution, taps, drop access handholds, and fiber distribution cabinets. Again, maybe this is something that is solved, but it doesn't seem to be given what people in other cities seem to complain about. Maybe this was already discussed in other documents?