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Utah Cities To Provide High-Speed Net Access
Instarx writes "The New York Times reports that Salt Lake City and other Utah cities plan to install an ultrahigh-speed optical network as a public utility project starting next year. The network would provide internet access [for about $28 per month] in direct competition to slower commercial offerings. The network would be capable of delivering data over the Internet to homes and businesses at speeds 100 times faster than current commercial residential offerings. It would also offer digital television and telephone services through the Internet."
The article points to the sluggish economy as a hindrance to this sort of deployment in Utah, as well as other municipalities, but I think it may actually help the project.
When you look at the vendors, their pricing has just dropped because they are hungry. So, you can get incredible pricing for the equipment, the electronics, the fiber, all the things you need. Because the economy's down, interest rates are down, so that's going to help financing.
And because they don't just have a free flow of cash in the telecom world, there are companies that are very interested because they don't have the capital riding on somebody else's network. You take that all together and the timing actually is pretty darn good.
As far as municipal involvement in this, the genie is out of the bottle in my opinion. Municipalities across the country are either going to do the retail or the wholesale, but they're going to do something. And they're not satisfied to just sit and wait when an incumbent or some private sector company decides that they're big enough and it's worth their while to come in to build the networks.
The speeds to be provided "are way more than what most consumers need in their home," Mr. Fenn said, adding, "Why provide a Rolls-Royce when a Chevrolet will do?" As I see it, the project is more like building an 8 lane bridge when a 4 lane will do just fine. Of course, I think Salt Lake is very very wise for making the decision to do it. Getting everything on one large "pipe" is what most cable companies are already planning. Hell if telephone companies thought that they could push TV over twisted pair they would be talking about it too. A few "watchdog" groups are a little worried about the spending, and I don't blame them, exp after the tech boom bubble burst. However, I am not sure of the price of rolled fiber cable, but I think it's a safe bet that it's better than it was 3 years ago.
The grass is only greener, if you don't take care of your own lawn.
I just hope they aren't taking money away from everyone else in the state to pay for something that's only going to benefit the cities.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
About damn time.
Well, it's a good idea in some ways, but isn't there major potential for DOS attacks? I mean against the local network, can't you monopolize pretty much all the bandwidth of the neighborhood fiber? I guess you can get into QOS metering and stuff, but that's a hassle.
This is really cool though in that it goes back to what the internet really is - peer to peer at its lowest level. Everyone is a client, everyone is a server, everyone has a public IP. No more of this corporate-shoved consumerism dreck. Very cool
funny munging
this seems all well and good, but what about local ISPs in utah? How are mom and pop shops expected to compete with the government? Hopefully this doesn't happen in PA, or I'd be out a job, and very very angry at my local government.
The costs are substantial. Mr. Morris said Utopia would spend about $1,100 a home to run the fiber network by each house in the 18 cities involved, and an additional $1,400 for each home that decided to be connected.
What would you personally do with $1100 dollars? Would you spend it so you can have the potential of spending another $1400 and monthly fees to get more bandwidth than you would ever need right now?
Now how about enforcing that on every homeowner in your city?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Leave this to the free market of competition -- any time the government enacts these "wonderful projects" it ends up costing bigger bucks than if it was done for profit. How many non-users will pay higher taxes so that the actual users can get a service they way? How many ISP jobs will be lost? How many useless government jobs will be added?
Is this what you want? The same bureaucrats who have ruined education, who have done nothing but porked their budgets out of control -- you want these guys serving your high speed data?
From the article:
Jerry Fenn, the president of the Utah division of Qwest, the regional telephone company here that provides its own high-speed Internet access, said there were few uses yet for the network Utopia plans to deliver.
The speeds to be provided "are way more than what most consumers need in their home," Mr. Fenn said, adding, "Why provide a Rolls-Royce when a Chevrolet will do?"
This is exactly the line of thinking that prevents projects like this from implementation all accross the country. Just because "it's more than we need" right now does not mean it won't be down the road. It's the chicken and egg situation of the tech sector- no one will build it until there is a need, but there will not be a need unless it's there for people to develop uses on. Sort of ironic coming from a society which prides itself in gas gussling SUVs and exhorbitant homes.
Even though I live on the other side of the country, I hope this goes through, if not for the geeks of Utah, but for the hopes that municipal (read not controlled by draconian corporations) communications infrastructure can be rolled out in other places too.
Ummm.... a small percentage of people here feel the need to pay some other company, most definatly NOT blockbuster, to edit out the "bad stuff" for them...
For the rest of us, there's nobody telling us that we can't go pick up a move that's rated "R" if we want to, or for that matter go to an adult video store with "XXX" videos, or get them on pay-per=view, or whatever... Sure, they've tried..but failed, since the majority of people figured out that it was a stupid idea to begin with.
So I can pretty confidently say that they won't try to force a filter onto people, we're not talking about China here!
I'll be the first to tell you that Utah has some oddities...especially when it comes to alcohol laws. But if you haven't lived here, (and I have, my entire 27 years), then forgive me for being blunt, but you don't have a clue.
Is the job of the government to provide high speed internet service to homes?
The job of the government is to provide whatever we, the people, want it to provide. It's quite common to task governments with running businesses when the private sector has failed to deliver.
if it's directly the government's service, there is a large potential for filtering or other restrictions on access, and a much greater threat for logging one's activities. I do not like this idea.
Utah has the kind of government its voters elected. I don't like that government, you may not like it, but they do. As long as it's within the Constitution, they are free to do that.
I wouldn't want my telephone, television, newspaper, radio, or internet access to come from one extremely powerful group who would have a significant interest in manipulating information for their own benefit.
Well, that's exactly what you are getting when you leave those things to big businesses. Government-run services are preferable in my opinion. In fact, "government run" doesn't mean "centralized"--this kind of effort is an excellent candidate for being run at a city/town level.
I prefer government-run to big-business-run. At least governments are accountable to voters. The best situation is, of course, to have lots of little, independent companies. But that isn't always achievable.
...why did it have to be Utah?
Oh well, if it turns out profitable there,
maybe other areas will copy the idea and we can finally catch up to Canada and Malaysia in terms of
bandwidth per connected household.
Maybe this could also bring back the days of people running personal servers off thier home connections. I miss surfing the web at the edge of the network. With so many EULA's preventing servers period it has slowly started to mirror other content distribution systems.. all push all the time.
/* * pope1 */
The local government will have access to logs of every site you visit, every email you send/receive will pass though it's network.
I'd have to do some heavy reading into their privacy policy before I signed up for this.
Not everything is analogous to cars. Car analogies rarely work.
That should read "Utah Taxpayers To Provide High-Speed Access".
There's a Mercedes gap too. I want one and can't afford one, but it's not government's job to do anything about it.
Perhaps that's just wishful thinking on my part. Personally, I don't place myself in either camp. It all depends on the product being produces. Do I want a for-profit company making decisions about my medical coverage? Hell no! Do I want the government making my car? Of course not!
In this case, it only makes sense that a critical infrastructure like Internet service be provided by the state. Charging me $50/month for my broadband connection seems ridiculously high. Either the the cable company is terribly inefficient or they will be making money hand over fist far into the future.
We all know companies set prices where they will make the most profit, the public be damned, with no obligation to social justice issues. They don't care if nearly 33% of the population can't aford to shell out $50/month for broadband. All that matters to them is that it will make them more money if they gouge those who can afford to pay and leave lower income folks out in the cold.
<a href="http://www.joblessjimmy.com">Work is dumb and so is Jobless Jimmy.</a>
This project is interesting and is more or less the way people here in The Netherlands are thinking the future will be like. I have personally worked on projects like these and the general idea is like this.
1. The only worthwile infrastructure for the future is fiber. This is a statement of fact/religion. Wireless may be nice in your house, but as a shared infrastructure it doesn't work for high speed data services.
2. Having companies lay 2, 3, 4, 5 parallel fiber infrastructures to each house amounts to a huge investment which you can't earn back over time.
3. To save on the investment on the physical and datalink layer. The fiber and active components at the end of each street are owned by a not-for-profit organisation, this can be customer owned, owned by housing corporations, Public Private Partnership, public organisations or maybe even private organisations.
4. Routing is done in such a way that local traffic stays as local as possible. You can actually make local traffic free, because the fiber and active components have been paid for already (with a mild cap maybe to keep people from hogging bandwidth)
5. The whole network is hooked up to one or more central locations which act like Internet Exchanges. Here corporations hook up their networks. An ISP could expand its network to individual users via VLAN's. An end user just subscribes to a VLAN to get a service. This allows for easy access to end users for all suppliers and for easy changing of suppliers by end-users. At this central location you will also find bandwidth intensive services like video on demand. (Just like one builds an electricity intensive company next to a hydrodam)
6. It would be great if you could have indivdual vlans per device, so your IP-phone hooks up to a different vlan than your securitycam than your ISP-connection. This allows for easy access to multiple services without the nescessity to route everything through your ISP first. Power to the people.
All in all given an investment of about 1100euros per household this would amount to about 15 euros per month for 15 years. This would generate a total revenue of about 2700 euros for 15 years. That would about cover for organisation, maintenance and new kit every 5 years. On top of this the end user would get a service bill where each service gets indidually charged.
So all in all: Physical and datalink layer are a utility, all higher layers are not a utility and need to be payed for one way or another. Though local traffic could be free.
Use Adsense for Charity
Personally I dont think we need to focus on this yet. Rural people like me (in indiana) rely on poor dial-up service (max of 40k), and we already are talking about people in cities having fiberoptic, while, yes, ruralites have Can we focus out side the box of city limits?
Eat a Chicken, You know you want to.
How long before the existing companies (telephone, cable) file for a court injunction to stop this from happening...
Municipalities across the country are either going to do the retail or the wholesale
Many have been, and in spite of the track record and sufficient demonstration of their inability to operate as a professionally run telecom entity, many still aspire to do things more interesting than running their local water plant.
What is important for any consumer (and citizen, in the case of a municipal considering getting into commercial enterprises with your tax dollars) is to understand the dynamic of motivation in any operation.
In Utah, the complaint is being made that too many commercial entities are ignoring the demand for broadband. Being one who provides this to a third of a fly-over country state, I can tell you that the claims of interest in broadband (even at 60% comperable city cable modem prices) is far less than the claims. I've had communities present us with petitions with over 200 signatures, only to discover that less than 20% of that number were actually prepared to pay for the service when it was finally provided. (It wasn't price or competition - but rather a large majority of parties signing it to pad the numbers in the hope they could bring something good to their community - without they themselves actually having to purchase it!)
And we're motivated by the consequence of failure being of significant disinterest (forget about making great profits at this point - broadband in rural America is being operated exceptionally well if you're breaking even) . Contrast that with a municipal. They are used to 8:30 to 4 work hours, not twelve-hour days, expect to sneak out early Friday and never work weekends. They're typically overstaffed with undercompetent people and solve problems by throwing more bodies at the problem, or (god forbid), hiring and believing consultants.
Their motivation? It's typically prestige and recognition. Failure isn't a possibility, as they will quickly transfer moneys from their monopoly operations (water, sewer, etc.) either legally or illegally (watch out for those creative loans from the monopoly that get "forgiven" and wiped off the books a few years later, or the illegal transfer "loaning" of assets, including employees, vehicles, equipment and office space that is billed to the regulated monopoly but actually put to use within the broadband operation).
The result: you end up paying the highest water, sewer, electric, etc. rates in the state. One municipal in our region, who decided to offer broadband (in spite of three - yes, three - other broadband offerings) has an electric and water rate over 40% higher than anything remotely close in the region. That and creative accountants.
Worse yet, the municipals simply do not understand the telecom business. They're used to product life cycles of 5 to 10 years and don't understand capitalizing something that'll be obsolete in 12 months. They don't understand that core business means you need to have expertise on the subject - they'll hire consultants to an extent that ensures their project will never be profitable. This leads to unfortunate purchasing decisions - e.g. buying proprietary equipment from a company that goes bankrupt and leaves the municipality with an investment in junk (this happens more than you'd think - in fact, one of the proprietary near-line of sight vendors in our business that has the most success with municipals is a breath away from chapter 11 or 7, but they nail the municipal process by building their confidence up in the sales process about how easy this broadband stuff is - "heck, this stuff sells itself and is nearly self-installable!").
Now you're really in trouble, as a consumer of the water/gas/electric from the municipal. Consider for a moment - what would you do if you disagreed with paying 50% or more for your utilities to subsidize a pathetic broadband operation? Have you evern looked at how you can get rid of your municipal management? They're very hard to remove - most are unaccountable to the political process and report only to a w
The most telling part of the article isn't the price of installing fiber. It's the exorbitant rates (and apparantly, incompetence) that the cable and telecom companies charge.
The article gives a price of $470 million for a fiber-optic network connecting Utah cities at 95 Mbps. Not only that, but it comes out to be $28/month averaged over 40% of potential users.
The cable and dsl companies mentioned were paying $370 million and $100 million respectively to upgrade their systems to a lightning fast 3 Mbps (slower for dsl)!!! Not only that, but they charge about $50-60/month for the same service that the fiber network could provide for half the price!
For everyone else out there who's in love with the idea of the "free market", I think it's pretty clear that the cable/phone companies have become a little too content with their respective monopolies. This project could help clear out the deadwood (trying to tack high-speed data services on to networks clearly incapable of it) and jump-start competition at an entirely new level of service.