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Look, I'm going to give you an example of what you would consider "not urban": Grant County Washington, US, served with Internet by Grant County PUD. 91,000 citizens. 2,679 square miles. 35 citizens and 10 homes per square mile. 64 acres per home. It is almost the least populated county in the state per square mile. Seriously cow country out here. It turns out the homes are still clustered in nexuses, and the cows roam in the vast areas between. This is the kind of place where your neighbors don't bother you about your personal firing range.

They've had gigabit-capable fiber broadband in Grant County to every home for over a decade, and turned an embarrassing profit at it as they're a nonprofit PUD. And they got into it accidentally, with technology that was then as dear as unicorn blood and has since become as cheap as rice. It was actually originally a project to save money on power meter reading labor using SCADA power meters that didn't work out because the vendor folded/deprecated the device.

Tell me again how population density is an issue. If Grant County WA US PUD can wire their 35 people and 10 homes/square mile folk with gigabit broadband fiber 10 years ago - accidently, surely there's money in giving that to people who don't live in a vast desert wasteland now, given advances in technology that have improved network performance over fiber over 10,000x in the meantime.

For comparison, the population density of Los Angeles County California is now 7,544 people per square mile, not 35. It is over 200 times as dense - and this is now when the tech is cheap, not before when the tech was expensive. How could you NOT make money at that?

I'm pretty sure Microsoft would have been quite happy to pay what they promised to pay - instead the municipality is trying to charge them three times the estimate (seriously - the consequence for overestimating power usage by $70,000 was $210,000. That is unjustifiable)

But that was the agreement that Microsoft made.

I don't care. That's not what you said. You said Microsoft could have met the contractual obligation by paying what it promised to pay, but what you actually seem to now be claiming is that they should have paid three times what they promised to pay, and I'd bet it was a Red Hat or Google or suchlike data center, you'd be claiming the exact opposite.

Besides, I very much doubt you'd tolerate your power company shovelling this crap on you - especially since it doesn't form part of the contract.

"...the fastest of any US city." That's just plain wrong.

Grant County Washington has 1gbps to most houses. http://gcpud.org/customerService/fiberNetwork/index.html Information is a little hard to find on their site, but let me give you some details.

I have 1gbps fiber optic to my house; from the drop box it goes to 8 100mb CAT5e ports, with 2 more dedicated for telephone service. My GARAGE even has this, as it's running on a separate electrical meter than the house. So not only does my garage have better connectivity than their city, but it costs roughly $30/month. My particular ISP has port 80 capped at about 800kb/s, and port 21 capped at 1,500kb/s. Torrents often come in over 1mb/s. My particular cost is closer to $50/mo because I have a static IP address, and more ports provisioned than the default of 2. The hookup to the house is free, the PUD does that; see, we metaphorically raped California some years back on electricity when they had massive brownouts, so the PUD had extra money to spend. The in-house wiring of the CAT5 and the internet/TV/telephone service is all what the customer pays for.

You misunderstood me. I agree that broadband over powerline is dumb. Fiber is the way to go, and some PUDs are deploying it. Their customers get these awesome Taiwan broadband levels for about $50/month. Fiber does not have an RF signature.

Around here we have single mode fiber optics to every house(http://gcpud.org/zipp.htm). This gives us (gave us) essentially unlimited bandwidth. Since then, bandwidth has been capped at the ISP end to a measly 600kbs on port 80, and a snail like 350kb/s on 21. I used to get closer to 10mb/s through either.

Anyway, couple years ago when this was still new, a company requested a T1 line from the PUD (for reference, the fiber lines are 1gbps to the house, split into 100mbps ethernet). No matter how much the PUD representatives explained to them how much faster and 100% better fiber optics were than T1, this company said "No, we need a T1!" So the guys installed the fiber optics and told them they had a T1.

Well, in Grant county, Washington there is fiber to the home Although most people report speeds around 10mbit/sec on average (both up and down). I think the bottleneck is not the fiber, but the county's connection to the internet. I mean how many OC-192s can you find in the middle of the desert?

Are you in Grant County? My parents moved from the city/town of Moses Lake, in Grant County, only shortly after the ZIPP fiber optic network made it to their outside-town-boundaries house. I was disappointed, since my webserver suddenly went from being on a low latency link of more than adequate bandwidth (ie, my friends didn't complain about how slow it was) to a high latency cable link that barely pulls 30kB/sec upload; it's slow enough that my non-nerd friends complain about it and unreliable enough that uploads by my contributors often fail. It's a shame, although you admittedly do have to put up with living in rural Central Washington to get ZIPP/fiber... ;-)

Are you in Grant County? My parents moved from the city/town of Moses Lake, in Grant County, only shortly after the ZIPP fiber optic network made it to their outside-town-boundaries house. I was disappointed, since my webserver suddenly went from being on a low latency link of more than adequate bandwidth (ie, my friends didn't complain about how slow it was) to a high latency cable link that barely pulls 30kB/sec upload; it's slow enough that my non-nerd friends complain about it and unreliable enough that uploads by my contributors often fail. It's a shame, although you admittedly do have to put up with living in rural Central Washington to get ZIPP/fiber... ;-)

But you do have to move to rural Washington state

How about an entire county in washington on a fiber network.

This is working great in rural eastern Washington. Here is a slashdot story about it

I set up my father-in-law's office network and connected it to the ZIPP fiber network provided by the county public utility district. The connection speed is great, especially considering they are in the middle of nowhere. The connection is very comparable to my AT&T@home service, which I usually can get 400-500k/second downloads (from major sites, ofcourse).

It is really cheap, too. No installation charge, no monthly fee from the PUD. You just pay the ISP of your choice their going fee. Most are between $20-$30 for residential. Most of the ISPs in the county don't even have restrictions on the number of PCs, etc.

Over the same fiber you can get an awesome cable package with Video on Demand, for much cheaper than the local cable company (which offers less than 35 channels MAX). Telephone service as well. Check out more information at Grant County PUD ZIPP web page. I always get jealous. I am in Seattle and we have far worse connection options (it's down to Qwest DSL or AT&T@home).

The beauty is that the ISP's that are offering currently on the fiber (Yes, it is already up and running in limited test areas), are already Internet Service Providers to everything from Wireless internet to ISDN and dial-up access. They themselves are only paying $40/month (though during test period it's free) to have the fiber lit to their buildings, and don't need to make any great investment in equipment. Basically, they'll also be able to use the fiber as opposed to dedicated T-1 lines to reach the outside world, thus saving costs. Those that are already in business, all but one offers internet access over the fiber for $9 for the first Gigabit of bandwidth, and $4 for each additional Gigabit of bandwidth.

OK; obviously someone is confused. Basic rate phone for $10? Try closer to $20, then add all your taxes and charges and it's closer to $35+. No *LEC would touch you for $7/mo, even if the last mile was free. They'd probably look for no less than $12-$15 given these conditions, and still have to tack on the taxes and other fees.

Another beauty of the fiber. We're skipping standard telephone and telecommunications companies. Most of the taxes imposed on that is currently for the use of the telephone lines. Can't be charged if you're skipping them. Actually, deals have already been inked out for the telephone services at around $10 a month (you really have to check out the Website to get a clearer understanding of how this is set up. And the $40 per month is closer to a administrative fee or something like that which you said. And as you know, right now, we pay dearly to buy the fiber optic line and the gigabit routers and everything that are going into this project.

And you think they'll let a region of broadband residential customers dump into their network? Free IP egress for broadband ISPs only running DNS? If they did, your telecom companies would have litigation fired in no time. Maybe I'm misreading this, but where does a federal gov power entity get off buying an OC3 or more of resale bandwidth, even if they do resell it (a cost I didn't see mentioned)?

Point 1: NoahNet, is already set up, and is designed for use with the power grids. Point 2. Grant County PUD, the ones buying the fiber for our area, is owned and operated by the people of Grant County. We've been saving up and we're paying for this fiber ourselves. Like stated before, current ISP's are already ISP's in the first place, and are adding fiber service to their list of services. Washington State already passed laws allowing Public Utilities to provide telecommunications solutions to the people.

I don't know... the whole thing does sound rather collectivist and redistributionist. Stealing money from other people's pockets in far away states (taxpayers and ratepayers funding that Federal power program, for example) to get cheap Internet access? Pay your own way, thank you!

Again, we aren't stealing other people's money, as we are financing our own fiber. It helps when you have public utilities that use hydro-electric dams for power and don't have to worry about buying lots of energy on the open market. We've been saving for years, and are finally doing something with our money.

As for my question on setting up an ISP, I wasn't meaning as a big company, more of just providing the services for my neighbors around where I live.

MaverickUW