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Coal is slowly dying away.

In California in 2006, the "Power Content Label" showed:
    - 29% coal
    - 31% hydro
    - 35% natural gas
    - 4% geothermal.

In Palo Alto, California, they're charging around $0.11/KWH for 100% green electric power. The "Green" power is of 97.5% wind and 2.5% solar. The premium is 1.5 cents/kWh over standard power. Ref: http://www.cpau.com/depts/utl/news/details.asp?NewsID=468&TargetID=10,11,12

But even the non-green power option in Palo Alto is only 10% Coal (64% Hydroelectric).

http://www.freepress.net/docs/mb_telco_lies.pdf
http://news.com.com/2100-1033_3-5166813.html
http://www.utopianet.org/what/metronet.html

Palo Alto, CA had a successful trial of FTTH, but stopped it: http://www.cpau.com/fiber/trial/ftindex.html

collegeterrace.net is a neighborhood non-profit wireless ISP co-op in Palo Alto, CA. We are insisting on being above-board with our ISP about how we are using our internet service, explaining up front that we are an internet service co-op and will be sharing service among members, and signing up for the service under the name "collegeterrace.net" so they can't claim ignorance about what we're doing. (The last thing we want is to be shut down by scary lawyers.) We just got our "Business DSL" service activated by Sprint, then 3 weeks later heard that Sprint is getting out of that business, so now we're searching for a replacement DSL service. Too bad, it was a decent deal --- 8 Mbps down / 1Mbps up for about $180 per month.

Long-term if we can get enough paying co-op members we are looking at leasing dark fiber from the city to get us to PAIX. Granted, this is a pretty atypical opportunity for a group like ours: not everybody lives in the path of a publicly owned fiber connection a couple of miles from a major internet interconnect point.

earl

Palo Alto: http://www.cpau.com/fth/

Somewhere in Virginia: http://newscenter.verizon.com/proactive/newsroom/r elease.vtml?id=69074

Theres always good info on this sort of technology here:

http://www.convergedigest.com/DSL/ftth.asp

Now we just have to hope fiber to the home is successful enough to become wide spread. Geek dream? It's 7Mbps down and 4.5Mbps up....don't know that considered fast enough to make it a dream but...

Exactly! I live in downtown Springfield Virginia, only, 10 or so miles from the Pentagon *sic* and D.C.. We have two Metro stops no more than 3 miles from our house! Verizon says they have no plans to upgrade my CO enable DSL and Cox Communications has halted plans to roll out Cable Modems to my community for unspecified reasons.

Even if either or both finally got around to offering services in my area, I'd be stuck with their definition of broadband -- an asymetric line with a pathetic up-channel (128k-ish) and so-so down-channel (640k to 1Mb).

RBOCs and cable companies don't have the vision, will or financing to provide true broadband - fiber to the home.

These folks are on the right track, IMHO, though I hope they're planning for higher data rates in the future.

The City of Palo Alto Utilities Department offers fibre to the home in parts of Palo Alto now. The city just leases dark fibre; there are ISPs that offer Internet and voice connections over it.

The program is managed by, you guessed it, Palo Alto's public utilities department. The same department installed a fiber ring throughout the city some years ago and licenses "dark fiber" (just the banwidth, ma'am) to anyone who wants to pay the drop charges plus $2,700/FMY (fiber-mile-year).

When I was living in Palo Alto last year they had a fiber to the home trial. Not enough people signed up so the whole thing was scrapped. I see at their web site that they are doing it again. Better luck this time. One thing that was promising about the Palo Alto fiber loop is that it runs right through the Digital Internet Exchange. This way the bandwidth could be available to support the 100Mbps data service.

When I was living in Palo Alto last year they had a fiber to the home trial. Not enough people signed up so the whole thing was scrapped. I see at their web site that they are doing it again. Better luck this time. One thing that was promising about the Palo Alto fiber loop is that it runs right through the Digital Internet Exchange. This way the bandwidth could be available to support the 100Mbps data service.