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Cities Building Own Fiber Networks
cmburns69 writes "It's been posted before that some municipalities have plans for building their own networks (such as Utah's UTOPIA). There are many people who don't want that to happen. But despite that, CNET News has coverage of some success stories regarding 'a growing number of municipalities, state and county agencies, and local governments that are building their own networks.'"
I'm not sure which is worse...the government having control of my line or the cable companies having control...
These communities are fueling the future economy...one where the corporate media cannot control all of your information. I just wish I could be involved in this in my own city. Multi-megabit pipelines for pennies on the dollar. Everyone needs to support this.
Why not use (buy) all the Dark Fiber everyone cries about from the Telecom Boom in the 90's?
How can a company compete when the playing field is not level?
Sad thing is that there are enormous quantities of dark fiber here in the US literaly doing nothing. Enormous increased bandwidth is immeadiately available and it is being kept off to create an artificial shortage. If telcos wont make their fiber available at reasonable rates to the people of the US, than the cities have to do it for them.
We here in the US are NOT at the top of the world when it comes to bandwidth available to the masses, I believe top would be South Korea. The whole thing is absolutely deplorable, were squandering our once high tech lead in the name of greater profits. By the time the powers that be finally realize it, it will be hell to catch up.
So, um, aren't public companies meant to be less efficient than private ones?
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I hadn't truely thought about it in this context, but why shouldn't all houses/apt's/condo's etc get net connections like a water line or a sewage line(yeah, that analogy isn't lost on me either). It should just be. You would then get actual services(mail, web, etc) through external providers. Seems to me like this is really how it should be.
dimes
I hope we see more of this kind of thing in the future.
For some reason the sound of more wireless stuff increasingly makes me want to build my house like a faraday cage. Sure, cell phones and radio won't work, but then I don't have to worry about the amount of traffic going through my head at all hours of teh day.
This will lend an interesting spin to the American concept of democracy. The candidate who makes the biggest contribution to the local governing authority or network contractor will have the best spots in internet advertising. In years to come as a greater percentage of the overall population migrates from television and radio to the internet this will have increasing impact. Nothing really changes. Money rules and those who control it rule by proxy. Only a fool believes the pretty propaganda that is heard in public speeches. It is meant to appease the blissfully (and often vehemently) ignorant.
Voting in one form or another is among the oldest traditions known to man. Rigging the vote is the most obvious bald-faced secret.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Most bigger cities run their own water and sewer facilities for better or worse.
This is just about the same thing. You should save a significant amount but it's not incredible. Eventually the city will have to hire corporate managers to run the service as a business so it is self sufficient.
They will charge what it takes to stay in business and a little more to pay for "expansion."
I guess the upside is that this will encourage adoption of newer technology instead of the rusty pipes they're using now. C'mon, DSL? Twisted copper is so last century.
> So, um, aren't public companies meant to be less efficient than private ones?
(I'm assuming that by "public companies" you mean companies owned by the government.)
No, that's just one of those stories corporations keep telling to keep ownership of businesses like utilities in private hands. You can run any public business well, or run it poorly; it all depends on the management, just as in the private sector.
The folks defending private ownership like to raise the threat that any government-owned business doesn't need to watch it's bottom line, because they can always get a bail-out from raising taxes. What they appear to forget to mention is that any major business of enough impact to the local or national economy can always get the same deal by twisting the right arms. Sometimes management can get direct or indirect subsidies for their company even if they aren't in danger of going out of business; they just have to start hinting that they are likely to move operations elsewhere.
Geoff
I think I see a trend here. Maybe for them it really would be easier to muzzle the entire internet than to produce p
Keep fees very low.
Use the revenue from that service to maintain the service, expand and even pour it back into the city's budget.
Or, they could
I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down.
the article is about bringing fiber to individuals at their homes, not radar installations for millitary use. How much of that Tiger Song was usable by the common citizen of iraq in "the late 80's" as you say?
you are comparing apples and oranges.
Is it the role of Government to build a wholesale fiber network?
Yes, I believe it is infrastructure, similar to Roads. It does not make sense for each private service provider(FedEx, UPS, etc) to build it's own road to you house or company. Instead Government provides the road allowing the citizens to have cost effective access to private services.
Having the government provide a wholesale fiber network will allow for more companies to compete without the overhead of building a network. This will reduce prices, at the same time as improving what is available.
I agree that this is a good thing at the moment, but city governments often don't act much better than commercial companies when they set themselves up as a monopoly. Eventually the tendency will be for those local utilities to compare their prices and services to other monopolies rather than the bottom line.
A competitive and free market is still the best way to insure the best value for the best service over the long term. With telephone pole space limited, it seems unlikely that wired communications will ever truly be competitive, so perhaps government sponsored utilities are the way to go, but remember when ATT ran the show on behalf of the government... they wouldn't even let someone connect their own phone to the network let alone a computer. Government sponsorship often means government regulation of content and use. If this model became popular, then how long till those restrictions that are found in a Comcast customer contract, like not hooking up any "servers" or not having multiple computers behind a firewall, suddenly have the force of criminal law rather than just contract law. It is one thing when a company can stop doing busines with you, but quite another when they can throw you in jail.
The cable and telco that whine about unfair competition seem to conveniently forget that that their facilities were paid for under regulations that gave them monopoly status. Most municipalities that get into the broadband business do so because the incumbents have not provided anything but vague promises for the future.
....Bethanie....
Nice troll, really nice troll...
"Or, they could
* see it as a cash cow and milk it for more than you're paying now, sinking the money into higher salaries for town officials
* farm out the maintenance to the lowest bidder, who has 20 hours of downtime/week
* outsource support to india
* decide that 500kbps is fast enough for everyone
* mandate Windows usage if you want to get on the net
* any number of other stupid things"
You mean just like the private companies who do it now, charge more for their service, and provide less in return? Holy Crock-O'-Shit, Batman, I don't want to compete with that!
"I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down."
Uh, one small but eternally permanent problem with that - towns, small municipalities, and other cities can't tell X Internet companies to "get your ass in here and compete, or else we'll do nothing."
Or were you referring to offering incentives to attract Internet-access companies? If so, thanks, but no thanks to corporate welfare.
Companies don't need to compete. If the government can provide a service better than businesses, then they should. The public wins by getting better service at a lower price. What on earth could be wrong with that?
There's nothing worse than people who are willing to suffer inferior service at bloated prices, just to conform to some ridiculous capitalist ideal.
The justification for the FCC is that airwaves are publicly owned and therefore the public can control the content that goes over them. The FCC is supposed to represent the public.
If governments start to own significant chunks of internet backbone, do you really think they will decline to create an internet FCC or expand the current FCC to the net? Do you really think that a government power grab is worth it if you can get a cheaper broadband line (that will be paid for through taxes anyway)?
Intellectuals! Liberals! Peacemongers! IDIOTS!!!
"Or, they could ......"
All of which, they could be voted out for.
Can you vote out your corporate provider?
1) I think you might be confusing the installation and maintenance of cabling infrastructure with operating an ISP. These are two very different things.
2) Everything in your list can be (and is being) done by a private company. There's nothing special about governments that makes any of that more likely.
More detail:
If there is already fibre now with services running through it, more fibre won't drive prices up. If there's no fibre already, and it's offered at an uncompetitive wholesale rate, and you can't afford it, as an individual you're scarcely worse off without it.
This might happen, and it might not. I work in a government environment - contractual stuff rarely comes down to the cheapest price - it's the best price for an agreed service. Provided the tender process is kosher and guarantees uptime etc. this is a non-issue. Again, a private company is faced with the same choice.
If it's infrastructure they're maintaining and not an ISP it makes less sense to outsource bulldozers and guys with shovels to another continent. I will not delve into the politics of outsourced tech (eg ISP) support here because it's been done to death and isn't relevant anyway.
Private ISPs do this all the time. There's nothing inherent in fibre that puts a ceiling on throughput, except how much of it you decide to lay. Somewhere somebody has to make that decision, but how likely is it that such capital expenditure wouldn't have a clause in the brief that it has to be useful for at least x years?
As mentioned earlier, this is an issue if you're an ISP, not a piece of fibre.
Sure everyone does stupid things sometimes. I think any sane person would agree that private companies are just as able to make poor implementations as governments. The difference is that private companies dry up and disappear so nobody can see them when they stuff up - governments generally hang around and wear the cost through the electoral process, to a greater or lesser extent.
I'd rather see towns mandate multiple cable/DSL providers and let the market drive the prices down.
It all comes back to this: if private enterprise has had a decade of mainstream acceptance of the Internet and still hasn't found it cost-effective to sink some cable in areas where municipalities are considering it, then do the residents and businesses there just miss out? This is as much an ideological position as anything. But the fact remains - mandating multiple providers is already there and it hasn't resulting in one bit of fast data transfer (pun intended) for places that won't drive enough profit.
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
In an area like mine (Silicone Valley), the ability for tech workers to work from home would seriously decreas the amount of traffic on the roads, which would be a Very Good Thing (tm) for this area.
Unforunately, you can't do much about factory workers, except replace them with robots, but from my experience growing up in Michigan (Flint), they seem to be rather averse to that (although it's slowly happening more and more).
But the ability to work from home has lots of advantages, or at least working from satellite offices or small towns.
I don't have broadband at home in the Santa Cruz Mtns, but 5 minutes away is a coffee shop with wireless, and I can code from there for a cup of coffee an hour, and save me a 45 minute-each-way commute, and only use about a 1/10th the fuel for the day.
Eventualy, as more and more "white collar", or "tech" jobs move in this direction, I think we'll see a shift in traffic patterns and how people work.
Obviously you can't work from home every day, many people need shared access to things like hardware, and of the kind that can't be divied up, but I fore see an increasing percentage of people doing so in the relatively near future.
The USA is indeed a very large company - nice freudian :)
The size of the country doesn't have anything much to do with it.
The USA has a population density of 30.12 km^-2 and estonia's is 31.15 km^-2 so given that every cellphone tower covers a fixed number of square km, you'll need the same number of towers per head of population to cover each country.
Since you'll be deploying about 200 times more towers in the USA, you'll have slightly higher costs connecting them together - but that should be offset by the economies of scale.
Estonia has a GDP per capita of USD 11k which is about a third of the US GDP - that should imply that far more people can afford cellphones in the US so it should be even more cost effective.