CircleID

Richard,
It's still ISPs who take on the responsibility of lighting the fiber, and charging you for their services.  The point is you, the home owner, get to choose which ISP you want to light your fiber from a set of ISPs who are competing for your business!

There may be a chicken and egg problem in getting started, but with enough customer owned fibers at an Internet POP or other aggregation point, the is no reason to think this will fail.  In downtown Stockholm, where there is extensive dark fiber available for rent, you find businesses, building owners and individuals are able to negotiate with multiple competing ISPs.  Only a few sophisticated IT departments actually light their own fiber—most sign up an ISP to handle everything.  The point is, if control of layer zero (the fiber) is available to individuals, you get real competition for everything else.

I don't agree.
I won't need to be a network administrator any more than I need to be a roofer or paver.

With an open system like this there will be more room for a range of competing service levels.  Non-techie folks could pay for a full-service package from an ISP while more tech-savvy folks could 'roll their own' package of services and set it up themselves.

The thing I find most exciting about this model is the potential for fierce competition among ISPs and the lowered barrier to entry for innovative new telecoms technologies.

An interesting tidbit I picked up a couple of years ago is that of the $40/month we pay for DSL about $10-15/month is for IP service and the rest goes to the phone system monopoly for the lines to your house.