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and for the suckers still on Comcast the added competition has forced them to drop their prices in the area to $33/month (well, at least until you add in all the random taxes + fees + surcharges), so even the big guys are having to play along. The best part of this all is that the city doesn't actually pay for the fiber at all unless the project fails, so the only question is why all of the towns in this area don't have it already.

Believe me, if things go well then Comcast will have competition like never before.

I'm in West Jordan and working with several people to help move Utopia forward. I've spoken with my City Council though some still think wireless is awesome compared to fiber. some need to be educated on how silly that really is. Other's still think S.B. 66 is alive and well (prevented other cities from joining Utopia. Thanks Comcast!)

Other cities are starting to figure it out. White City Township (South of Sandy) is VERY interested in joining Utopia. My wife and I attended their last council meeting. Very interesting. Some guy wanted them to bring in Comcast thinking it would be better. We "enlightened" him before the meeting :-) Explained what the company is doing with terminating people's internet access. What a screwy company.

Draper is also discussing bringing Utopia to the city. My wife and I will be speaking with their City Council in case anyone starts talking about bringing Comcast into the picture (or any other non-Utopia provider). We're also visiting with other cities who are looking at bringing Utopia to their area. It's my intention of making sure people understand what a bad idea it is to rely on companies that wish to maintain their Government sponsored monopoly.

I keep telling people Utopia is like public roads or public airports. We need that infrastructure if we want to compete with the world. We're already in 24th place with broadband penetration. Very sad.

The town that I'm in (in Utah) did one better.

What it has is a city run fiber-to-the-house system. Basically, it works in that just about any provider can signup and provide service on the network, so you get your choice of internet providers while operating on the same network. You can checkout the background here: http://www.utopianet.org/ . The service also allows for more than just internet, you can run IPTV and VOIP services over it as well, on separate chunks of bandwidth so your phone doesn't drop out when you're downloading your "used car ads" from usenet.

One of the providers is a bit cheaper ( MStar ), but from the reviews (on dslreports) I have read, it's pretty crappy service. They have low monthly bandwidth caps, do torrent filtering, and seem to have a tough time letting their users hit anything near their purchased transfer rates. So, this may sound like your local cable company, but there is one important difference: There are more providers than this one using those same fiber lines.

I'm using XMission ( http://www.xmission.com/ ) as my service provider, and so far it's been a pretty much perfect experience. The first day, I decided to test the limits of my pipe, and I seeded two different distro ISO downloads through bittorrent. My results were what I had expected, when I was downloading, I got up to the advertised 15Mb/s, and when I was seeding it would hit 15Mb/s as well. So, UTOPIA has given me the choice of if I want the cheaper service with a lower QoS, or the more expensive service that is rock-solid.

Overall, I would say that having this network available has made things like network neutrality much less important to me, because I know if the ISP I am on should ever go evil, I can just make a quick phone call and switch to one of the other providers on the line. It's amazing the service offerings you can get when you get the free-market back in full swing, and for the suckers still on Comcast the added competition has forced them to drop their prices in the area to $33/month (well, at least until you add in all the random taxes + fees + surcharges), so even the big guys are having to play along. The best part of this all is that the city doesn't actually pay for the fiber at all unless the project fails, so the only question is why all of the towns in this area don't have it already.

Starting in the early 1990's, the Clinton-Gore Administration had aggressive plans to create the "National Infrastructure Initiative" to rewire ALL of America with fiber optic wiring, replacing the 100 year old copper wire. The Bell companies - SBC, Verizon, BellSouth and Qwest, claimed that they would step up to the plate and rewire homes, schools, libraries, government agencies, businesses and hospitals, etc. if they received financial incentives.

- By 2006, 86 million households should have already been wired with a fiber (and coax), wire, capable of at least 45 Mbps in both directions, and could handle 500+ channels.
- Universal Broadband: This wiring was to be done in rich and poor neighborhoods, in rural, urban and suburban areas equally.
- Open to ALL Competition: These networks were to be open to ALL competitors, not a closed-in network or deployed only where the phone company desired.
- This is not Verizon's FIOS or SBC's Lightspeed fiber optics, which are slower, can't handle 500 channels, are not open to competition, and are not being deployed equitably.
- This was NOT fiber somewhere in the network ether, but directly to homes.

Oops. My apologies. I should have paid closer attention :-)

It's here Utopia

I had it correct on my blog. You would think it would make it here also :-)

the correct link is Utopia

From his blog, looks like the website should be: http://utopianet.org/

I believe that should be www.utopianet.org.

The way it works on my local city-owned fiber network the city just provides the pipe (or tube, or truck). I have the option of choosing between several competing ISPs for data service on the network. The ISP handles my transport to and from the internet, the city-owned network only handles the transport between my ISP and me. I can choose different providers for data, phone and TV or I can get all 3 services from 1 provider or I can just get 1 service (or zero). The city is just providing the road, FedEx, UPS and DHL are still free to compete for my business.

Why anyone would enter a contract that states "You pay me every month full and in advance and I promise you nothing" is beyond me. Even mafia hitmen have more customer friendly terms, I think. But if you think that's fair trade practice, you may like to view that bridge I have on sale here...

They know they can get away with it. Look at the company TOS and AUP. It's a lot like Comcast's (which I used to be a customer over 4 years). You simply can't trust these guys. I'm pushing we go with something like Utopianet and basically build our own fiber infrastructure. It's like public roads and the service can be provided by another entity.

Hopefully if enough people complain about it we'll have our country follow the tech leaders like South Korea and start building a public infrastructure that will provide everyone's Internet needs.

what you pay for then stop paying for it.

in the contract or at very least in the sale, they promise you a certain bandwidth, if they can't deliver what they promise you don't need to pay what you promised.

Unfortunately it doesn't matter. I've gone through this issue over and over again. They simply don't care. I've created a blog to help other's learn exactly what to expect from companies such as this. BTW, my contract said "unlimited use for a flat monthly fee". It's very clear they don't intend to honor that part since they are terminating customers who "abuse their network". Pathetic.

Basically if you use more than 9% of a 6 meg residential service then you are an offender and they can terminate your service up to a year. Time Warner isn't much different from what I'm told.

This is why we need a public infrastructure such as Utopianet. This way if a company abuses it's customers they can switch to another provider and keep their infrastructure.

Time Warner and Comcast simply don't care about the customer or investing in the infrastructure. They are in business to make money. Period.

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

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.

As much as the cablecos would like to make us all go "oooh" and "aaah" over this technology, it's still incredibly unimpressive. We won't see rollouts of this technology for at least a year and most projections show just 40% of cable subscribers will have access to DOCSIS 3.0 by 2012. It's really not all that impressive considering that projects like UTOPIA and FIOS are currently delivering better speeds than cable and can ramp up to 100Mbps+ without much in the way of equipment upgrades. UTOPIA can even do 1Gbps+ with a minimum of new equipment. This is just another way for incumbent providers to squeeze more blood from the turnip that is their aging copper-based plant. The stock market will reward them now, but the market as a whole will be punishing them in 5-10 years.

I have 15/15 in the US for $30/mo. It's a government-funded fiber network over which any provider can sell data, voice or video.

I've had trouble with comcast DNS for quite some time. For some reason, the DNS servers my modem automatically finds are extremely slow or overloaded, and the first request for a domain name almost always fails (the second is usually successful). The good news is that there are a lot of quality free DNS providers that work much better than comcast.

Fortunately for me, there's a FTTH provider in my area that will hopefully be installing my neighborhood soon...

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.

...which is why nowheresville, UT, is deploying their own.

'Course, communities solving their own problems might seem a bit "leftist" to some folks.

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

I'm glad to see this finally on Slashdot. I've been pushing for Comcast to provide full disclosure since I was terminated. I didn't have DSL in my area until last Monday so now I'm not dealing with 28.8 speeds. While this may be legal, I'm hoping Comcast will come clean. I really appreciate Carolyn from the Boston Globe for publishing the story. There are many other articles coming from various consumer advocate groups in the next couple months so stay tuned.

Since Comcast disconnected me in january, I've found dozens of people who have been disconnected across the country. What's amusing is Comcast is untilling to disclose what "Acceptable Use" is. They only point to their AUP/TOS on their web site and tell you to read it and follow it. Cox Communications and other reputable providers will tell you what Acceptable is in real numbers (50 Gigs a month, 80 Gigs and so on). Comcast will ONLY tell you an example of what Abuse is.

They say an abuser downloads 256,000 photos or 30,000 sounds or 13 million (that's right, million) emails a month. So on my blog I posted what Comcast is saying in english. Abusers of their system are downloasing around 200-250 Gigs a month which is 100 times more than their "average" user. So the average user is only downloading about 1 - 2 Gigs a month. Hardly using the service in my book. Not really streaming video, purchasing movies from Amazon.com Unbox or anything. If you purchase 2 HD-DVD videos from Amazon and download them then you are already violating AUP/TOS with Comcast. Tonight I've updated my blog to include stories of other's who are providing videos for download online.

I've posted my story on the web at my blog. I'm hoping to get the word out and have people look at fiber networks such as Utopia. Their fiber infrastructure provides choices. If a company (such as Comcast) is abusing customers, they can choose another. Of course having a 1 gig pipe to the house is also faster than anything Cable can provide. Must be why Verizon is rolling out FiOS.

Anyway, Major Kudos to Carolyn at the Boston Globe!

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.

"So if everybody's watching TV at 8pm, and they're all watching different channels, the telco office needs somewhere between 150 gigabits to 1.5 terabits per second."

That's why people are waiting for the goddamn fiber we have been paying for all these years. It gets pretty sad when government is more efficient than business. Only way people will get fiber in their lifetime is through municipal projects such as UTOPIA. Don't see me complaining about my triple play.

The company I work for just got a fiber connection from XMission that is 30 Mbps download AND 30 Mbps upload. It costs only $125 per month. For home users, it is only $40 per month for 15 Mbps down and 15 Mbps up.

How are we so lucky you might ask? Several cities banded together to create a world-class, 100% fiber optic network that they extend to every home and business in the member cities.

This municipal fiber broadband project is called UTOPIA and you can get it if you are fortunate enough to live in one of these cities that provides it.

So if you're disappointed by the Internet access in your area, see if you can get your cities to setup a network like ours. Be forewarned though, our incumbent telco and cable company fought and lobbied very hard against it. We're lucky that enough of our city council members were forward-thinking enough to go ahead with the project despite significant pressure from the incumbent telecom providers. Now we all reap the benefits.

To see how this does work out in the US check out UTOPIA. A coalition of cities in Utah got together and made a plan for laying out fiber to every home and business. A few quick points about it:

1. The government owns the fiber but does not offer any services directly. Instead other businesses offer internet, phone, and TV services through it.
2. 15Mbps up/down connections available from $40/month (less than the $60 I pay for 5Mbps/384Kbps), or 30Mbps from $125/month.
3. Connections are standard 100Mbps, but can be requested as 1000Mbps.
4. The UTOPIA is faster and more flexible than Verizon's FIOS system. (Verizon uses a passive optical network while UTOPIA uses your typical actively switched setup.)
5. Every report I've read from a user has been positive. Overwhelmingly positive.

I am mostly libertarian, but even I can see the current setup is completely broken. Broadband is no necessary to infrastructure that it would make sense now to have the government build it out like they did with the roads. It would be expensive, but at least it would be done, and that is what we need.

The problem with any sort of state run industry is that it tends to murder off private competition. State run monopolies always have two advantages over any private corporation. State run monopolies can easier push through legislation to make it harder to compete with them, and state run monopolies can always make up for inefficiency, poor planning, and higher operational costs with tax money.

I agree, and I wouldn't want a municipal government acting as an ISP. On the other hand, in my opinion the best source for the "last-mile" communications infrastructure is the same entity responsible for providing the roads and other fixed infrastructure; in most cases that is the city government, although it could just as easily be a private organization. (In many regards city governments, unlike state and federal governments, tend to resembly co-ops or private companies with the citizens as shareholders. The major differences relate to the form of income (taxes instead of rents) and eminent domain.)

Ideally I would like to see something like the UTOPIA project in Utah, where the cities provide (and own) a fast fiber-based communications infrastructure and lease it out to individuals and companies on a non-discriminatory basis. (Important: this must be funded locally, preferably through the lease fees, and especially not with state or federal taxes.) The city itself does not provide Internet access; instead, individuals can subscribe to any ISP connected to the municipal network and access the Internet using that ISP as a gateway. The system eliminates the ISP's natural monopoly by separating the infrastructure from actual Internet connectivity, something that (IMHO) should have been done from the beginning. Besides reinstating competition among ISPs it also allows "non-Internet" data services, such as VoIP and IPTV, to be offered simultaneously over the same network; these can be offered over the Internet itself, of course, but are generally more efficient when routed over the faster municipal network. People can even offer their own services--community web sites, game servers, IPTV stations, etc.--over the local network at far better speeds than they would get through any ISP.

I have seen this happen with phone, electricity and television. Some for of government local or national will have to provide the fiber network(not incentives) if Americans want to be able to have the kind of connection the rest of the world has had for years now. I don't see Corporations being able to pull off something like fiber rollout since they would have to invest now for future gains. The Corporate culture with their "shareholder value" mantra and nearsightedness will leave America in the dark ages of the Internet.

If you want a good model look at what Utopia has been able to do despite bitches and cries by the likes of Qwest and Comcast. Also one should realize that fiber will be the last rollout of cables needed for the foreseeable future(unless of course we find something faster than the speed of light).

Or you can just have the city build the network and give equal access to all providers. This gives a level playing field to any provider that wants to take advantage of it. Comcast, AT&T and Qwest sure fought tooth and nail against it but in my locality we actually made it a reality. I have a 15 Mb data pipe (that's both down AND up, thank you very much!) that costs me about $30 per month. I haven't taken advantage of any of the television or telephone offerings yet, but they are there if I wish to do so.

Having a community-owned network guarantees that the providers can't just cherry-pick the wealthy customers as was described in TFA. The network is available to every home in each city that it serves. Data is becoming a valuable utility and I think that a public infrastructure is in everyone's best interests.

Equal access from anyone to anyone.

Be nice if that was true. From their web site, emphasis mine:

Service providers who want to offer services on an open network are welcome to apply to UTOPIA. While the network is being constructed and the number of users is limited, practical necessity dictates that the number of service providers will be increased gradually. For service providers to be added to the UTOPIA Community MetroNet fiber-optic network, they must meet the following criteria

Look at the coverage map. They've just wired a few small cities alongside I-15. They don't even have service in Salt Lake City.

So, over here in the flyover country in a little state called Utah, a bunch of the cities have gotten together and done something great. These cities have decided that letting one company run the phone and another run the cable TV has gone on long enough. They have run their own fiber, and operate it like the roads. Equal access from anyone to anyone. Their website is http://www.utopianet.org/

Now, instead of getting crazy plans with no upload and bad ping times, I have my choice of four different providers for data, three (soon to be four) for voice, and three for video. All running on the same set of community fiber. The data plan I'm on right now is 15mbps SYMMETRIC for around $45/month. Business plans through this same company ( http://www.xmission.com/ ) give you a full 30mbps for $110/month. Oh, and I get a 26ms ping time to google, and 2ms ping time to my ISP.

If you had options like this, you wouldn't need to worry about the net neutrality bills, because if your service provider started degrading service for something you liked, you could just jump ship because there would be plenty of other options for you. You wouldn't be stuck under the iron fist of some "controlled" monopoly.

Seriously, call your city council and ask them why your city isn't this cool yet. I mean, if Utah can do it... what's stopping your state?

The real way to get net neutrality is with municipal broadband. Projects like UTOPIA give consumers multiple ISP choices, so if somebody charges or blocks something they don't like, they switch. The fiber is there. MS and google both like net neutrality, and this is probably a cheaper way to get it than lobbying for b0rk legislation.

I'm loving the fact that my city council (in Utah) voted in the affirmative to support the Utopia network here. I use the service at work, and am awaiting the install to my residence right now. Many other cities were lobbied successfully by Comcast and Qwest to vote the initiative down, and are now wishing they had not fallen for the lies!

Over the Utopia network, residential customers can get a 15meg SYNCHRONOUS line with static IP for $40/month. Business customers can get a 30meg synchronous line for about $125 (depending on bundling with VoIP and promotions). There are currently four ISPs offering internet service on the Utopia network, so you also get to take your pick. It's a WONDERFUL system to have in the area, even though they're not finished deploying some segments of the involved cities, and still working some of the kinks out. I hope other cities in the nation are successful in emulating it, and that they will likewise not be bought or talked out of it by the incumbent providers.

As a sidenote, the presence of fiber-to-the-home in my area has helped keep comcast and qwest in check. I can get Comcast's highest-speed cable modem in my area for about $20/month as long as I happen to mention that "i'm considering this new fiber-optic thingy I heard about in my neighborhood ..."

I'm loving the fact that my city council (in Utah) voted in the affirmative to support the Utopia network here. I use the service at work, and am awaiting the install to my residence right now. Many other cities were lobbied successfully by Comcast and Qwest to vote the initiative down, and are now wishing they had not fallen for the lies!

Over the Utopia network, residential customers can get a 15meg SYNCHRONOUS line with static IP for $40/month. Business customers can get a 30meg synchronous line for about $125 (depending on bundling with VoIP and promotions). There are currently four ISPs offering internet service on the Utopia network, so you also get to take your pick. It's a WONDERFUL system to have in the area, even though they're not finished deploying some segments of the involved cities, and still working some of the kinks out. I hope other cities in the nation are successful in emulating it, and that they will likewise not be bought or talked out of it by the incumbent providers.

As a sidenote, the presence of fiber-to-the-home in my area has helped keep comcast and qwest in check. I can get Comcast's highest-speed cable modem in my area for about $20/month as long as I happen to mention that "i'm considering this new fiber-optic thingy I heard about in my neighborhood ..."

They spent it all here in Utah :)

http://www.utopianet.org/

Seriously, we have FTTH here and its great. It probably covers 50 to 75% of the population center for the state. At home its 5Mb up/down with no restrictions on use. We also have it at the office which gives us 30 Mb up/down and its only $130 per month. Yesterday at work, I checked something out from sourceforge and was downloading at peak 5 MBytes per second and averaged about 2.2 MBytes per second. So its starting to come, but you have to live in Utah. :)

Ok, so I'm gloating a little bit.

-br

I like what the data say just fine, thank you. You said off by an order of magnitude, implying $15,000 per customer connection on average, over ten years.

You should know that UTOPIA ISPs are currently selling 15 Megabit/sec residential connections for $44/month. How much of that price do you think is being forwarded to UTOPIA? My guess is about $20/month. Xmission (http://www.xmission.com/utopia/index.html) is a good example.

Now of course UTOPIA's long term viability depends on delivering cable television services over their fiber as well.

MStar Metro provides video + data packages ranging from $58 to $90 per month, plus somewhat higher priced voice + video + data packages. Under UTOPIAs current scheme, carriage charges are divided into essentially fixed fees for those three separate categories.

It is worth recognizing that UTOPIA is basically a large, MPLS based Ethernet VLAN. With the proper equipment one can be connected to multiple providers at once, each on a different VLAN #. Voice, and video are generally delivered on separate VLANs, with separate QoS controls than plain old data, although usually one gets some combination of voice, video, and data from the same provider.

Current information can be found here:

http://www.utopianet.org/news/teamemail_may06.htm

Now as far as costs are concerned, relatively rural cities are often cheaper than urban suburbs because the fiber does not have to be buried. In Utah at least, even in rural areas, houses are generally densely located around a town center, and not scattered hither and yon. All those town centers in the remotest sections of Utah are viable candidates, those living three or more miles away from a town center are likely to be more economically served by wireless services for a long time. Wireless ISPs are a big deal in Utah to serve an amazing number of areas, even in urban centers that are not reached by DSL or Cable. (Pretty much Qwest and Comcast, respectively, although Qwest provides DSL carrier services to other ISPs, and Comcast does not).

Cringley's figures are accurate. Please check out these outside plant costs from Utopia Net, the largest municipally owned fiber project in the United States.

http://www.utopianet.org/business_case/costs.htm

In the great state of Utah (minus NewSCO), of course.

Come move to Utah, home of the open and publicly-owned Utopia high-speed network. It is open to any ISP that wants to provide service on the network. $44 a month gets you 15 Mbps download AND upload.

http://www.utopianet.org/metronet/index.htm

This is a model for how municipalities ought to own their networks.

I recently signed up for a connection through Utopia that is both faster (15Mbps/15Mbps vs 4.5Mbps/384Kbps) and cheaper ($38 vs $48) than my previous cable connection.

Comcast and Qwest fought tooth and nail to stop Utopia, I'm glad that there are still some people that don't bend over when big corps demand it. It's about time some cities did an end run around the last-mile duopoly of the telco/cable companies. It created a level playing field for smaller companies to compete with the big boys. Currently I am only subscribing to data service but you can also get phone and television services over the network.

Community networks like Utopia prevent abuse by the major companies. Networks like this remove the last-mile leverage that is currently exerted by the existing players. Let the telcos play their "tiered internet" game, if they get too oppressive the people will just remove them from the equation.

http://www.utopianet.org/corporate.htm

Utopia is a project in Utah that looks at web service like a utility rather than a corporate-controlled entity. I personally like the idea and I think we should take the future of the net this way rather than a business oriented way. At least for household access.

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!

Well, there's Utopia (http://www.utopianet.org/), and it's already live in some cities with an average speed of 10Mbps Symetric for Data with the possibility of using the connection for Voice/TV as well... Should be available at my hosue in 2-6 months (the work crews are about 3 blocks from my house right now, Woot!) For those who don't know what it is, a bunch of cities in Utah got together to build a Fiber Optic infrastructure that any service provider can use. Qwest and Comcast lobbied long and hard to get it shut down, but since the cities weren't actually offering services, but allowing any provider (including Qwest and Comcast if they so chose) to offer service over it, they failed to get it shut down. For people living in cities where it's already available, you can get your Comcast monthly bill cut in half by calling Comcast and mentioning that it's available in your area. Seems competition is already good for the consumer.

I'm sure its been across slashdot before, but Utopia (http://www.utopianet.org/) is currently under construction in Utah cities, and you can already have service installed in some Orem neighborhoods. According to the FAQ (http://www.utopianet.org/faq/faq3.e.htm) speeds will be asyncronous 100mbps to residential, and 1gbps to businesses. I happen to live in one of the cities which is currently having fiber pulled, and have attended several of the monthly public meetings and it is definitely not "vaporware". I think that this type of metropolitan connectivity will be the norm throughout the civilized world, when other cities see what it will do for them, as far as bringing business and strengthening the local economy.

I'm sure its been across slashdot before, but Utopia (http://www.utopianet.org/) is currently under construction in Utah cities, and you can already have service installed in some Orem neighborhoods. According to the FAQ (http://www.utopianet.org/faq/faq3.e.htm) speeds will be asyncronous 100mbps to residential, and 1gbps to businesses. I happen to live in one of the cities which is currently having fiber pulled, and have attended several of the monthly public meetings and it is definitely not "vaporware". I think that this type of metropolitan connectivity will be the norm throughout the civilized world, when other cities see what it will do for them, as far as bringing business and strengthening the local economy.

UTOPIA is pretty much what you talked about, except it wasn't the government that bought the equipment, it was a private company on bonds. It's community owned, essentially, so nobody controls the hard wire or other equipment.

It's an interesting model. While there are some other small differences, it's still a good idea either way. I can happily say it's been a joy to work with the fiber guys and see them have their bugs they're working out to make this all work. Now if we can apply the same principles to other things, like DRM or Patent controls, we could make some progress against Corporate Bigotry. Hehe, Open Source ISPs are just an awesome concept, no?

It's being set up here:

http://www.utopianet.org/

Ok, this is just silly. Slashdot has covered Utopia on numerous occasions, which aims to do just this across ALL of Utah. I live in Orem and I can attest, it's happening. It's just a matter of waiting for it. 100mbits up and down for cheaper than I'm paying for cable is making me a bit antsy. *sigh*

In Utah we have close to the same thing.
http://www.utopianet.org/

It will be on line soon.

It is a open network with the services open to any one that has the money to set up a isp or tv station.

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.

Because it's still going to be the WAN from LAN network that we'll be working on forever.

I've got a LAN setup running 200x as fast as the fastest WAN/Internet connection readily available (minus a special order and uber expensive DS3). And at the pace we're going, the US is getting slower and slower as far as the Internet connections go.

Right now I can completely rewire my office and home for $5k with state of the art, high end network components and have it done in less than a week. I can't get close to those speeds with my net connection for 4x that price ($20k/year).

That being said, there is still hope somewhere

This is more or less what's currently being tried with the Utopia project. A consortium of city governments are paying for the cost of running fiber optic lines to every residence and every business within their city limits. ISP's will lease the lines from the Utopia group, but will not control those lines directly. Anyone who wants to put in their own infrastructure and run it is still welcome, of course, but it's really unlikely they'll be able to compete with Utopia's economies of scale and coverage.

One big advantage of this is that Utopia doesn't have a profit motive to block certain types of traffic. There is no "Utopia" traffic to favor, so hopefully you can avoid the anti-VoIP bias that a normal ISP has.

Yes, the market will take care of everything.

Question: How many broadband providers service your area? In mine there are two. If a third one wants to come into my area, they'll have to build their own lines or rent them from one of the existing providers. I honestly don't see the latter happening.

Your free market talk doesn't work. When it comes to Internet to the home, the words "natural monopoly" are appropriate, and the words "free market" are not. The only way I can see for providing a true free market for Internet service is if the government provides the infrastructure and leases its lines out to private companies at a set rate schedule.

That way, getting in the game only requires setting up your own servers. No building out redundant lines, no sending installers to individual houses to run wires and poke holes. Everyone has equipment that allows them to access any of the providers, and providers have to compete with every competitor and in every neighborhood. The UTOPIA Project is attempting to do that for Utah.

But since it requires government involvement, socialism must ensue, right?

Personally, I would much rather have the war over VOIP fought in the legislature and the courts than on my ISP's routers.