Slashdot Mirror
Fiber Optics Come To Rural Washington
MoiTominator writes: "Here in rural eastern Washington, broadband is hard to come by. The Public Utility District of Grant County has just completed a project to roll out 7000 miles of fiber to connect business and homes to broadband services like voice, video, and internet access. All for $40 a month! Maybe I don't have to move to Seattle now." The list of service providers lists even lower prices, too.
As a (former) native of eastern WA, I can tell you this much... Billy-Bob and Susie-Jean McMullet don't give a rat's (cow's?) ass about this new-fangled "In-ter-net." It's nice to see a little sprinkling of technology stagger its way across the Cascades... however, I still anticipate eastern WA will remain a cultural and intellectual black hole for quite some time. Next up: new automotive technology that eliminates the need for gigantic 4x4s from 1980!
Just a rant from a college student who ran across to the west side of WA as fast as his car could carry him. :)
Adam "Fogie" Fogler -- Professional Paid College Student
Who is Keyser Soze?
The bad guy from the movie "The Usual Suspects". Very good movie. I'm too lazy to look it up on imdb.com and see if that's really how you spell his name.
When broadband comes up the Methow valley to Winthrop and Twisp, I'll move up there, telecommute, and never look back.
-- Jeff Paulsen
Keyser Soze loves his money...
This is pretty impressive.
It means that parts of America are just beginning to get to the point where parts of Canada were five years ago.
In the telecom business, that's pretty significant. American telephony is usually a decade behind the Canadians!
Seriously, this is really good news. If it works well, it'll be deployed in other areas. DSL could become ubiquitous! Prices would drop, and all the neat shit that we've been promised forever and a day might actually start to happen!
--
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
as God intended them
Are you sure you aren't mistaken? God specifically wrote that he wanted an IP on every tree, every toad, yea verily, every stone shall have an IP.
Your god must be a false god. A god who doesn't have a good fiber connection isn't a very good god, don't you think?
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The cable net service I got is capable of 38mbps down and 10mbps up which is a shitload of bandwidth without the need for running fiber, plus it supports a hundred or so of digital tv signals...
Do I get all that bandwidth? Hell no, cause they can't support it all further upstream. Instead I get to deal with....
Now, trust me, as someone stuck in modem hell until this became available this month, I am one happy muthafucker and am not complaining. My point is, what good is fiber into the house? If you get it, it'll probably be TOSed, QOSed, and capped until it's not that big of a deal...
and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15,
/. periodically and can't figure out why the telecom business gets this while we don't see the "I want to run a power/railroad/airline/whatever business from my basement" posts here too. What do you know about engineering commercial WANs? Backoffice ISP operations? Telecom billing? Regulatory issues?
Seems like someone's got the model backwards. Last-mile transport for $40? ISP service (including customer service, billing, Internet egress at broadband rates, mail accounts, etc.) as low as $7? You can't even find outsourced customer service for less than $2.50/mo. per sub.
Isn't fiber optic nearly free? (Kidding, though from reading all those futurists blathering about DWDM and how it'll make fiber nearly infinite, the resultant cost per subscriber nearly = $0). Why then $40 for that free fiber, unless it's for administrative costs (not surprising when offered by a quasi-governmental entity). You're being fooled, tho, when the folks are quoting you $7-$15 for the "rest of the stuff".
with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same.
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.
Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined.
More like $150 combined.
As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned.
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)?
The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing.
As Level3's horribly poor stock price can tell you, there's a lot more to a network than optical transport stuck in the ground.
Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here.
What's the complaint? Socialized medicine in the U.K. means waiting 5 years for knee surgery. Better get used to those lines if you're demanding others pay for your access.
Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that.
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!
1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used).
Initial answer: ROTFL
Serious answer: I see this question on
Your comment about "just needing to offer DNS" provides good perspective on how you shouldn't be doing this. What about customer service? Billing? Collections? Where's your traffic going to terminate? Insurance?
Incidentally, you mention usage-based billing (other local ISPs charging by GB used). How many national ISPs do you see doing this? Are you prepared to shell out several hundred $K (minimum) to buy the software, systems and such to handle this accounting from Netflow or whatever your source? Does your market even support it? (usage-based for resi?)
What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully.
Buy an ISP that does it successfully:-)
Sorry for being direct, but after seeing enough people get fleeced by ISP vendors out there looking for targets like you, I'd encourage you to use your money for better purposes.
I saw enough people put second mortgages on their homes to buy Ascend Pipelines back in the mid-90s, thinking that was their key to riches (Step 1. Buy Pipeline Max. Step 2. ? Step 3. Make big money!), only to be thrown out when the house was taken away and the cars repo'ed.
*scoove*
Since I hopefully gave you enough reasons why not to consider your ISP project, and there are probably still people that would go ahead and jump the cliff anyways, let me pass along a few recommendations gained from first-hand lessons:
- Get a good team: Technical knowledge is valuable enough to get you a job working for someone else. Underestimate the business side and die poor. Your team should have commando-type persons (able to wear many hats, think, plan, implement, document, support, etc.) of backgrounds including angel-funding (you're going to need a lot more $$$ than you think), finance, marketing, product development, telecom operations, network support, etc. Configuring a BSD box or a Cisco router is one of about 20+ mandatory competencies you've got to have.
- Write a business plan: You may think you're wasting time that you could be using to implement, but absent a plan, you most likely will never see any outside investment and will certainly die a quick death. You can bet your competitor will have one.
- Get into the angel circuit: Start pitching that plan and evangelize your business. Whoever your CEO-type is had better plan on staying out of the tech and being full-time in front of investors, media, etc.
- Plan on a quick exit or death: Your national competitors have very deep pockets and can bleed you quickly. They can raise the capital thru public markets, bonds, etc. to buy that unreachable $2 million hardware upgrade that'll take 5 years to recover, causing your customers to flee to them for better product/service. Your only hope is to capture initial customers and plan on selling for (hopefully) a nice multiple. Forget about becoming the next Worldcom... you're more likely to die from being eaten alive by a pack of starving squirrels.
Incidentally, mention to a prospective angel investor that you plan on running the company until you retire, building it to a major national powerhouse, and handing control to your kids to run is a surefire way to get blacklisted in the circuit. These people want to get a return on their investment in no more than a year or two in most cases, so unless you're going the same direction, they'll certainly avoid your deal.
- Get people that have done this before (successfully). There's nothing in this business like experience.
- (Last but certainly not least) Build a personal financial buffer that'll allow you to be unemployed for 3+ months. Odds are in this business that it'll happen to you.
*scoove*
All those fiber optic lines and the site _still_ gets slashdotted©
Very well put.
Somehow you manage to be funny where TLA doesn't.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Ashland also provides their own power so they don't have to worry as much about blackouts this summer (we are 10 miles north of California), and everyone is wired. They are also working on a plan now to have wireless internet access through the whole city within a couple years so you can go downtown to the park with your laptop and still be working. The town is just under 20,000, and is home to a college (Southern Oregon University), but it has everything you could want in a town for internet access. It could use a decent computer store, though.
This story was in today's newspaper. Rural govenments here in Michigan have been getting fed up waiting for the usual suspects to provide high-speed service. I can see this working in such small towns. Hopefully they'll get it right.
After sitting on hold for 40 minutes.
"Please remove TCP/IP, then re-install it." Why? "because we found it always solves the problem -- I guaranty it!". Will you bet $1000 on it? "I can't do that."But it works fine on my LAN. "Oh, your computer is hooked up to LAN hardware, we can't support it." But your cablemodem is LAN hardware. "No, it's a modem.
"We will have a technician come to you in 4 days between 8am and 1 pm. If it's your problem, you will be charged."CLICK
Fight Spammers!
It seems if you want to have a excessive amounts of bandwidth you have to live in the middle of nowhere...
You have to pay two charges a month for this Internet service. There is a $40/month PUD Access Fee and a $9-$25/Month ISP charge, making the actual monthly charges $49-$65/month.
The links to the homes will actually be gigabit links, shared off a community hub (a nice cisco gigabit switch basically. From there, there are specially designed meters that service as both the standard electric meter, and the fiber optic hub (10/100 Switch with Gigabit uplink).
The actual purpose of the fiber besides keeping meter readers from covering approximately 7000 square miles of county land to get every meter, is to actually provide a real telecommunication infastructure to an area where not every home has a standard phone line. Included purposes (content providers are being worked out right now) is to be able to provide:
Always on 100MBit/sec Internet
Digital Cable over fiber, both standard and HDTV streams, with pay-per-view, and abilities to pause live tv (ultimate tv without microsoft (yay)).
IP Phones, for expanded local telephone coverage and much cheaper long distance.
The money is being facilitated mostly by the GCPUD, as we have for many years, using hydro-electric power, been making extra money and storing it up. The other half is by the consumer (a $300 install fee), and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15, with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same. Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined.
As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned. The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing.
Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here. Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that.
This actually leaves me with two wonderful questions for the slashdot crowd to answer.
1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used). What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully.
2) Since where I live is 4 years off, and I don't have the luxury of things like Cable modems, DSL, or the like, would it be prudent to make an investment in 2-way satalite internet for the time being, even though in 4 years, I won't need it anymore. Tell me what you think
MaverickUW
PS, sorry about the last copy, preview button wasn't working cause of stupid internet access
As I come from Moses Lake, the largest city in Grant County, I have been excited about this project since hearing of it last summer at the County Fair while visiting home.
But it is only fair to note that while this project has great potential for residents, it has not been installed in very many areas yet. The initial projections say it will take about 4 more years before the entire county has service.
Also for prices, those are just for the individual services, the fee for the connection itself is extra, but also will eventually provide other services including television services and such. The PUD also benefits from having easy access to meter readings, one of their large motivators in the project