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Provo, Utah, and Google Fiber

Nowhere in that contract does it say it is exclusive.

Provo, Utah, and Google Fiber

I've got a fiber line that terminates in my basement, giving me 15 Mbits/s symmetric. I pay $39.95/mo for 50 GB of data transfer, and the fine print in the contract stated that if I went over I'd be charged at "current market rate" for the excess bandwidth. The funny thing is, I know I've gone over a couple of times and they don't seem to care (it didn't show up on my bill).

For the curious, I'm on the iProvo network in Provo, Utah. The city owns and maintains the fiber infrastructure and leases bandwidth to the ISP. I've got my choice of 2 different service providers who compete for price and customer service. The same fiber line can also provide phone and TV as well (also offered from the ISPs).

The iProvo project got started because Qwest and Comcast refused to lay wire to the entire community, so the city decided to do it without the pigopolists' help. Since then another project called Utopia started up at the state level to do the same thing. It's a matter of time before fiber to the home (and business!) is available throught the state (even rural communities). The hope is that having cheap, fast, reliable bandwidth available everywhere in the state will attract new high-tech businesses.

IMHO, this is the way it ought to be done. The line maintenance should be a city utility, just like power and water. ISPs compete on an equal footing, without the luxury of a monopoly on the service due to owning the lines. I'm going to have a hard time leaving this town because I'm addicted to bandwidth and I can't imagine it getting better than this anywhere else I go.

Salt Lake City opted not to be in the project when Qwest promised 90% build out of DSL. The cities that are on the map are those that pledged money to the project and stayed in. Qwest and Comcast lobbied the state legislature and got a bill passed limiting how new cities could join. Basically now for a city to join they have to take it to the people to make sure its ok to put the money up. The cities get the money back from subscription costs.

Also some one mentioned Provo City they have their own initiative called iProvo I believe their project started before Utopia.

I'm glad my city like other cities in this area were smart enough to do this. Now the city has created competition for Qwest, Comcast and the other Internet providers in the area. Yes I do live in Provo, & I can't use iProvo yet.

It is happening in Utah, only better. The UTOPIA (http://www.utopianet.org/ project is running fiber to every home and business in 14 cities. The city will administer the fiber and private companies (MSTAR, AT&T, etc) will sell services on the network (ISP, telephone, tv, etc).

If you live in Provo there is the iProvo project (http://provo.org/util.telcom_main.html), which is very similar to UTOPIA.

Some cities are rapidly deploying fiber throughout their neighborhoods. Spanish Fork and Provo City are some here locally.
The general idea is to lay down infrastructure for a general city purpose, like SCADA or links between city structures and schools. The communities have money to spend on these systems. Once they have 'properly deployed' the existing infrastructure, the unused bandwidth can be tapped to provide services. In most cases these cities have no interest in becoming an ISP but have no qualms about deploying infrastructure whereby competing ISPs may give highspeed access to their citizens.
The communities, however, did have one thing in common: citizens who made bandwidth and monopolistic practices of big ISPs an issue with the local governments.

When I went to college in fall of 2000, I decided to get a part-time job. I had worked for the previous year doing contract programming at a large chip company, and I had started my own small online (and profitable) business. However, I had just moved to a different city, and I didn't really know anyone who could get me a tech job.

I decided that an online search just might do the trick. Monster.com yielded nothing interesting, nor did HotJobs. As I was walking home from class one day I saw a billboard ad for FlipDog, and decided to try it.

After a quick and easy search focused down very specifically by city and job category, I found about four relevant jobs within three miles of my home. After a bit of resume touch-up, I e-mailed my resume to the interesting-looking employers. I received two e-mails back, one with an interview offer. I called the company and scheduled it for the next day.

In short, I had a job three days after my search on FlipDog.

As an aside to the story, FlipDog has some very cool technology developed at WhizBang! Labs. WhizBang! was headquartered in the same city that I attended school, and I got to go to a lecture about them. They have their web spiders crawl the web looking for job listings on companies' own sites. Then they use machine learning software to recognize and extract information (job title, location, description, etc.) from the free-form web page. That gets dumped into a database that FlipDog uses to help you find a job. Instead of making employers post available jobs on a special job site, FlipDog goes to the employers' own web sites and extracts job postings. Very cool. Check it out. (No, I'm not affiliated with them, except that they helped me find a job.)