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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.
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