The Maine Connectivity Authority (MCA) shall offer, on an open access basis, non-discriminatory carrier-neutral interconnection in perpetuity to potential terrestrial and wireless service providers including, public, private, non-profit and other parties making a bona fide request for interconnection for any network segments funded by the Middle Mile Grant (MMG).  MCA’s policy is to allow interconnection on the MMG funded routes at any point where commercially and technically feasible without adverse impact to the network and where sufficient excess capacity exists, or where prior contractual obligations that govern the use of infrastructure exist. Parties wishing to interconnect or co-locate must sign an interconnection/colocation agreement with MCA and abide by all applicable engineering and technical standards.

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MCA shall review each request and provided that such access does not exceed current or anticipated capacity limitations, or have other adverse impacts on the network’s reliability, financial viability, or operations, and that the party requesting interconnection is in good standing with MCA, MCA shall allow the interconnection.

Rates and terms for interconnection and colocation in network shelters, including one-time and ongoing charges, to the MMG funded network shall be commercially reasonable and nondiscriminatory. MCA may offer network peering or connection to the Internet at one or more locations. If it does so, such inter-exchange shall be on commercially reasonable terms and a non-discriminatory basis.  If a party requests to interconnect with MCA’s network where no point of interconnection or splice points currently exist or were preplanned for interconnection purposes, the requesting party shall bear all reasonable costs to improve the facilities to allow for interconnection.

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MCA shall contract with a network operator to manage the network, the sale of dark fiber via IRU, and lit services to service providers for the transport of telecommunications and networking data through the means of optical waves, circuits, or bandwidth backhaul. The operator contract shall bind the operator to the terms of this Interconnection policy. 

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Portions of the network operated by MCA’s operator may be subject to network neutrality provisions.  MCA’s policy in offering lit services is to not give preference to any lawful content over any other either by source or destination, network protocol, or content.

 

MCA’s Open Access, Interconnection and Network Nondiscrimination policies are subject to the needs of law enforcement and reasonable network management. As such, MCA may employ generally accepted technical measures to provide acceptable service levels such as caching and application-neutral bandwidth allocation, as well as commercially reasonable technical measures to prevent spam, denial of service attacks, illegal content, and other harmful activities