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As much as wireless has a "cool factor", it still sucks. I can't get my Linksys wireless AP to throw a reliable signal 50ft through the house even after buying high-gain antennae, upgrading to a 3rd-party firmware that lets me double the output power and switching to 5.8GHz cordless phones. A municipal deployment might use better equipment, but dropping several thousand dollars on an access point that might cover a radius of several hundred feet strikes me as... inefficient at best. Considering the signal issues with wireless and the limited about of throughput per AP, you're investing in a dead-end technology that won't ever be able to deliver the hallowed triple-play that reduces customer churn.

Fiber deployments, on the other hand, offer a steady amount of bandwidth and lots of it, enough to offer uncompressed HD programming, 15Mbps+ Internet and voice. Those triple-play customers are less likely to switch providers even without a service contract so the revenue streams are not only larger, they're also more stable. Muni fiber deployments like iProvo and UTOPIA cost more up-front, but they also experience significantly higher take rates.

Muni wireless is failing because cities tried to take the cheap road to better Internet access. Let that be a lesson to those who are too cost-conscious to do things right.

Oops...nowheresville, UT already has residential fiber. See http://www.utopianet.org/ and http://www.iprovo.net/

Maybe you've heard of UTOPIA or iProvo? Both of them are large muni fiber projects in Utah that act as wholesalers. UTOPIA already serves six cities and iProvo just finished its build-out last year. Combined, they provide service to somewhere in the range of 300K+ users.

Even Utah can do it.

Oh come on, Orrin is wacky, (same as Bennett) but with Utah being the reddest state in the union (yes, it is redder then Texas), their seats are the SAFEST of all the seats in the US Senate. Barring more people moving from California to Utah (which is happening), Orrin and Bob can come afford wacky radical right wing extremist ideas, the rest of Congress can not.

Maybe that is what we need to do, organize a mass /. move to Utah county kind of like what the Free State project is doing in New Hampshire. As an added incentive to move, Provo has a FTTH project called iProvo that is going smoothly, and Fiber is being laid out in Orem, and other Utah counties via UTOPIA. Come on /. FIBER TO THE HOME! We can take over Utah!

Given that you could get a 50mbps DSL connection for less than $40/month in Japan, I would assume not much.

Hey now. Some parts of the US aren't quite as far behind as others :)

For example, in my city they are just finishing installation of a citywide fiber network. Very freaking awesome, but what's better is that I can get (and am going to) an amazing Internet connection. For $40/mo I get 20Mbps download and upload with a public IP. That's right, $40/mo, and when I asked about running my own server they said, "That's fine, just don't host anything illegal." Double that and you get unlimited local and long distance VoIP and local cable in addition to 20Mbps Internet.

See? Fiber really is good for you! :)

http://iprovo.net/ just check their site, my in laws already have it and the speed of the connection puts my cable to shame

How often do you think that 100 meg (bit, probably) connection is going to be maxed out? Likely never.

Hahahaha. Verizon isn't planning on just serving up high-speed Internet with their Fiber-to-the-whatever rollouts.

They're also planning on things like television and video-on-demand. At 4-6 Mbps (IIRC) per channel, you'll use up that network capacity very quickly. (I won't go into the details of how you multicast that much data to the set-top boxes.)

I saw a presentation recently on passive optical networks, which IIRC is what Verizon is using for their rollout (or it might be another RBOC, I can't quite remember at the moment, and my notes from the presentatio aren't handy). For a gigabit PON, you've got one gigabit per second available, total, for all subscribers connected to that passive network (anywhere from 2 to 64, depending on the number of optical splitters installed). In addition, you have very limited upstream bandwidth.

I'd much rather see Verizon and the other RBOCs deliver Gig-E straight to my home using active optical networks--Fiber to the home, not fiber to the premises or fiber to the curb. Something like what Provo, UT, is doing with their iProvo project http://www.iprovo.net/. I saw a presentation from World Wide Packets (the equipment vendor) on that a couple weeks ago, and it's very impressive. Almost makes me want to move to Provo.

But who sets the service price targets?

For all the backwardness that is Utah, do what they are doing in regards to a telecommunications system. Specificly look at Provo and their community fiber to the home network, iProvo.

What they are doing in Provo, (and subsequently with the UTOPIA project in other Utah cities) is have the city (or organization, in UTOPIA's case) build and maintain the infrastructure. The city / organization then leases out that infrastructure to small businesses across the state that provide the actual service to residents. The system is maintained by the fees charged to local ISP's that in turn provide Internet access to the populace.

It is amazingly simple, yet, Qwest and Comcast has fought tooth and nail to shut both projects down in the State Legislature. To date, they have failed, though as a casualty, Salt Lake City has unfortunately pulled out of UTOPIA (damn you Rocky Anderson) along with a few other cities.

I theorize that the reason most of the attempts have failed, at least outside of Salt Lake County, is because of a strong sense of community that comes from a communal belief in holding all things in common, refereed to as the United Order

If shit like this continues I might have to grin and bare Utah's backwardness if I don't want to surcome to corporate control of Internet Access.

Just like this project is being done in only one state in India, I know of at least one state in the U.S. that is doing this. Utah. There is a fiber optic network known as UTOPIA that is being rolled out state wide...except where I live. I live in Provo, and the city planners decided to do it their own way. I will grant, however, that Provo's network is being rolled out a lot faster than UTOPIA is being done. There's already a significant portion of the city with access to iProvo (it's on the richer part of town, of course). But, I don't live in that area. I'm a student barely managing to survive on Top Ramen, and really crappy broadband.

[RANT]The stupid ISP that handles the Internet access for my apartment complex doesn't know how to set up their network! They put idiotic bandwidth limits on users - you get 64 kbps for free, any faster and you have to pay more - and the lousy network they set up can't even handle a fifty percent load. I paid extra for 256K, and I only get that in the morning when everyone else is at school, or late at night when everyone else is asleep. Oh, and you're only allowed to use your internet connection for 5 hours a day. Any more than that and they charge you a dollar an hour. Not to mention how poor the installation was.[/RANT] O.K., now I feel better. Next semester I'm moving into a house and getting cable for my broadband.