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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."
Perhaps Utah is different from where i live...
But as a d00d working in an ISP that offers both high-speed wDSL and dialup, i say they missed the mark by about 5 years.
Sure there are geeks like us that demand high-speed inet, but for the most part, i see people leaving high-speed in droves to go back to dialup.
It appears that even though broadband is cheaper than it has ever been, there are enough people still trying to justify the cost to check their email a few times a week.
The Internet Craze Is Over(tm).
do() || do_not();
Remember, this is Utah, where Blockbuster is too risque, so they edit R rated films to PG standards. I wonder if they plan on running some sort of web filter on their connections, it would be local government reflecting the will of the people.
>partner=FIRSTPOST
Kudos to you man !! This is the best first post I have ever seen.
Is the job of the government to provide high speed internet service to homes? As much as I like the sound of inexpensive bandwidth, 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.
The government does not provide phone infrastructure, it instead regulates the companies that provide telephone service. 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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I live in South SLC - it would be great if it happened, but I'm not holding my breath. I've waited years for DSL and only finally received cable (w00t!)
Note that Provo (about 35 miles south) has such a network, but they're still having last mile and content problems. Provo has pulled fiber all over the city, but no one is providing content, or subscribing. Also, keep in mind that Utah is ultra-conservative. Provo, for example, created their own cable TV system because they didn't like the soft-pr0n on AT&T's cable system. Ironically, Provo has a higher per-capita consumption of soft-pr0n that the US.
Anyhow - I for one will welcome our new fiber overloards, but I'm not holding my breath, and I'm very suspecious as whether or not content will be regulated.
I work for the Local Government in Lafayette, Louisiana and we've been rolling out fiber for years now all over the city... Businesses and residents can buy access through numerous resellers which all specialize in different things... Including one or two that specialize in delivering high-speed wireless access to your house. :)
Of course LARGE cities end up in the news for mentioning they'll be rolling out fiber someday now, while us smaller cities that have had a fiber network for a couple years never get mentioned.
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Hell if telephone companies thought that they could push TV over twisted pair they would be talking about it too.
Actually, telephone companies are already looking into this using vdsl. Hardware such as this TUT Sytems can be used to send out several tv channels, internet, phone and more.
Forget filtering... any decent lawyer would be able to make a constitutional case out of that Utah or anyway else.
Now what would scare me with government run ISPs is their complete compliance with the rest of the government (i.e. the judiciary). Is Utah's state run ISP going to fight subpeona's of their users traffic records? Of course not! The government and media are all ready so far under the covers together that handing one control of the pipe while the other controls the content is a Bad Idea. If you thought the broadcast flag was bad, wait till they set the evil bit on the state run routers.
Just curious, but I know that my state (IL) has "no compete" laws that basically say that the government cannot compete in established industries. e.g. They can't open a donut shop because that would hurt Krispy Kreme's business. Do other states have similar laws?
I personally think this is the appopriate way to move forward with public infrastructure. The community pools together resources from taxes to pay for its own infrastructure - and then allow service providers to pay for access (to help defray up-front infrastructure costs) and actually compete for consumer dollars.
Create a municipal digital network, and allow cable/telecom companies to actually compete. If anything, people should have learned their lesson -- when Comcast offers to build your infrastructure 'for free', its monopoly is going to cost more than the upfront cost to have done it publicly.
Similarly with power lines and water/sewer. There is a basic conflict of interest between a corporations who are focused on profit above all else, and the public good which is focused on dependability and quality above all else. for example: consider the power transmission infrastructure.
sure, if the consumer cares about quality and dependability, the free-market should bear out those providers who manage such standards. However, the shared infrastruture -punishes- companies who invest (all its competitors benefit from the increased quality, only the investor takes the financial hit and then has to charge -more-, pricing itself out of the game).
The logical step is simply taking jurisdiction of the local lines back on the local level, and the long-haul lines on the federal level (think US highway/road system).
it's not like our infrastructure couldn't use a nice big upgrade anyway. and the telecom industry could certainly benefit from some public works projects to bid on.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
A note about the funding for the project from the above web site:
The UTOPIA business case indicates that wholesale usage fees, charged to service providers based on their use of the network, will generate enough revenue to pay the capital investment costs, operating expenses, and debt service obligations associated with building and maintaing the network. No taxpayer money will be needed. However, in order to secure a competitive interest rate on the bonds that UTOPIA will issue to cover the cost of network construction, member cities may pledge to guarantee some of the debt.
So Utah tax payers (me included) won't be paying for this from our taxes. I can't wait, however, until ISPs in Utah start passing the cost of the whole thing onto me (the consumer). Sure I can get Gbit speeds. The "basic" package may cost $28 (probably at speeds comparable to current cable), but wait until you ask for a full Gbit/s. I can get a DS3 (45 Mbits/sec) for about $20,000 per month right now. No thank you. I'm happy with my 640k/256k DSL at $50.
The only possible reason I see is price fixing.
Anyone else see a different logical reason for it?
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
"When the demand is more than phones, then work on it. Do not try and predict demand."
The demand is obviously being constricted by the dearth of cheap pipes. If we wait for the "demand" to grow enough to justify private investment in FO to the home, it will never happen. The present setup is just dandy for whomever is selling pathetic connectivity. They will not roll out replacements for their current cash cows.
Think of it this way. Pretend that, instead of bandwidth, the "scarcity" is water. An imperfect analogy, 'cause water is finite and bandwidth is infinite... though the difference actually helps the argument.
Anyway. Pretend that we all lived in a area with no water lines, 20 years ago. People got their water from wells, and toted the water to their homes on their shoulders. Not a scarcity situation, for people got all the water they could drink.
Now pretend that someone invented a water pipe that piggybacked on existing equipment, and that water was found to be a resource that could simply be manufactured and shipped. People discover that they can use water not jusut for drinking, but for cooking.
Then someone discovers that they can build giant sluices that enable the supply to be increased twenty-fold to each customer. But, instead of the government building the infrastructure, a hundred thousand businesses compete to supply the water using products from vendors who try to maximize profit.
Imagine that the orignal well owners insist on covering their original invenstments + maintenance + cash to buy lots of other companies.
A state of balance eventually occurs when the businesses find their sweet spot financially. Instead of gallons of water per minute, people pay a reasonable price for a trickle of water, enough to wash their face and take the occasional shower. They don't NEED all that water, really. And who wants to put all the pipe companies out of business?
An artificial scarcity is maintained, with the vendors of the pipes and the providers of the water maximizing what profits they can.
Now, what if the government simply had built the pipes and the water could go sluicing down the pipes for practically nothing? Suppose the government, as the main supplier, could dictate terms to the piper manufacturers, forcing the equipment prices down?
One could say that the government wasn't necessary to supply water, because the trickle was enough, and the businesses needed to make a decent profit.
But who decided that? The businesses. Who speaks up for the consumer of water? The government, which they own.
The government could have supplied the water from the beginning, at orders of magnitude lower cost.
If you don't think this is possible, I point you to municipal water supplies in the real world. If they had been provided by the free market, we'd be metering water like champagne.
It's not in the same ballpark though. Broadband connections and high-speed access to the internet is critical to the burgeoning information economy. Having a Burger King, McDonald's and Wendy's in the same town is not.
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
Electricity was a luxury for a long time. Back then, people had been without it all their lives and thus used nothing that depended on it -- wood stoves, oil lanterns, horses and oxen, ice boxes, etc. Fast forward to today and everything runs on electricity. I'd bet a fair number of homes in the US don't have the materials to even start a fire without electricity. Shit, even lighters employ electricity -- piezo element striker (there's nothing to ever wear out like a flint.)
:-))
Just like everything else, once everyone has a thing for long enough, they don't know how to do without it. I grewup (well half way +/-) in a world without the computer -- in the 70's computers where the size of builds. I've worked with computers for ~20 years now; I wouldn't know how to function without them today.
HOWEVER, "broadband" is still a luxury and will remain so for many years to come. 56k modems (53k/48k/whatever) are perfect usable, but time consumingly slow. 128K ISDN/144K IDSL is quite sufficient for what 90% of the world does (legally) -- email, web browsing, IM, any number of games, etc. I used 28.8 dialup for ~5 years, and ISDN for ~7 years. I switched to an Earthlink cable modem about a month ago because it's 1/5th the cost -- yes, cost not bps was the reason and earthlink because they provide dialup for free when I'm out of town. (the increase in speed is a nice bonus, tho'
[1981 first introduction to a computer -- Tandy TRS Model I, 1984 first computer of my own -- Tandy Color Computer 2.]
In many parts of the world this is done by Government borrowing money to fund the construction, then maintaining it as a public asset, often raising profit from it either directly, or as a result of more economic activity enabled by the service. In the end you have a debt paid off and an additional public good.
For example, a phone system such as Australia's telecom (before it was sold) gave the government a big revenue intake without some of the practices that led to the breakup of the big US Telcos.
With something like a bus service that often loses money, there is still an advantage in the lower pollution, fewer car crashes and so on, but you'd need to crunch the numbers to estimate total loss/gain
Further, government funding of public infrastructure often allows society to function in a civilized manner -- the idea that poor people should simply be excluded from transport and so on will only create a subclass who never vote and hold no respect for their fellow citizens.
Of course, all this public investment in public infrastructure is only a good idea if you have honest, capable, well-meaning Government, which is why so many governments are selling their assets, and even the assets of other countries which aren't theirs to sell...