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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.'"
This has the potential to take the power of broadband away from the cable and phone companies, and treat it as a utility. This is a great idea, and I don't know about you guys, but I sure as heck wouldn't mind some of my dollars going towards movements like these. Monopolies over broadband are sickening, and growing more and more. Currently, I pay $100/mo for 512 sync, because my ISP is the only ISP in my small town.
Bored? Why not join a decent mess
With wireless mesh technology, it would seem simple enough to set up a community internet without any central government or corporate provider at all. Besides, if the city controlls it, then it is only a matter of time before they monitor it, you should see the list of restrictions that most city libraries impose if you want a taste of whats to come.
some municipalities have plans for building their own networks ... There are many people who don't want that to happen
I'm usually in agreement with complaints about monopolies but in some cases they have their uses. This is one of them. Rather than several companies all running their own cables everywhere in town, it is a LOT more cost effective (and therefore more likely to get done) to have ONE set of cables. Note that this cuts down on construction (digging up the streets for buried cable) and/or clutter in the sky (poles and cables strung along).
As citizens, instead of private consumers, you have to use the apropriate weapon in case you are unhappy with the service (for whatever reason). In the case of a government owned service, use the vote.
So given that one provider is more efficient than multiple providers in this case, consumers have a choice. Do you want a government sponsored company to run it or a private one? Keep in mind there are plusses and minuses on both sides.
Here in Sacramento, Surewest Broadband offers 10mbit Fibre (to your home) for about 50 dollars a month, if you live in a neighborhood with Fiber in it. A little over a year ago they bought out the company who was originally providing it (I can't remember their name), but they had been around for a year or so before that. The fiber is still slowly being laid around the city, and hopefully I'll be getting it pretty soon.
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http://www.surewestbroadband.com/products/resid
MoFscker
...look up the municipal fiber history of Anaheim, CA. In the late 90s they tore up a bunch of streets streets burying their own fiber. They were going to provide data, video, even telephone service. They set up a NOC, had miles of fiber run all through the city, set up a telephone switch... and then they shut it all down. They used hacksaws to cut through the ends of the fiber rather than disconnecting it as they ripped out the switch and other equipment in the NOC. Last I heard, a nearly broke ISP had taken over the space where the fiber all terminated, and was using the tail end of bundled fiber sticking out of the wall, dark fiber that feeds all over the city, as a peg to hang spare CatV cables.
Ashland, OR was one of the first cities to roll out a municipal cable internet system. For years I had been calling the cable company and asking when cable internet would be available. Then the city decided to create its own network. Within a few months the cable company had the entire cable internet system working. The two systems now compete with each other, with many people choosing the city owned provider over the faceless corporation because they prefer to help out their community.
The lesson is simple: Without competition, the current cable/phone companies have no incentive to make things better.
"Dark fiber" is kind of a misnomer. It implies that there's a resource that's being ignored. There is not; all this dark fiber is on runs stretched across the country, but if there's no fiber in the cities themselves, there's nothing to light it up with. Nobody's squandering anything; save the companies who laid so much way, way overly redundant fiber in the first place (but they're mostly out of business anyway.) The US will invariably be slower than most other countries to roll out new, expensive technologies-- this is guaranteed by our large land mass, not to mention the fact that most of that land is livable. Comparing the US to a country like South Korea is unfair; South Korea has about 2% of the land mass that the US does.
The same thing happens with cell phones. We were stuck on CDMA/TDMA forever because it was so expensive to upgrade the networks, and we're only now getting nationwide GSM as the rest of the world is phasing it out in favor of 3G. Building infrastructure is very, very expensive, and a company will only do it if they know they can make money off it. That's not apparent with municipal fiber, because the vast majority of consumers will not pay more than about $30-40/mo for internet access, and they can offer DSL or cable at that price and consumers will pay it. They don't even know what a kilobyte is, they just know their porn sites load up real fast. High bandwidth killer apps will drive the need for faster connections.
Today's "new" cities are planned, why not plan the bandwidth as well as the plumbing, water supply, roads. If anybody has ever been to Edmonton, Alberta you could see how a planned city works in so many ways. The streets are all numbered from the centre out (I think it's that way). Give someone your address and they know how to get there just by following the streets. Internet access is becoming just as important as streets nowadays. Unfortunately it has to be done by the governing body, the only drawback I see.
Stay tuned for new sig...
and greedy corporations can't control the roads (pay me for a license, pay me a monthly access fee, pay me again for joining the flow of traffic just now, now pay me some more at a rate of n-per-mile... plus tax and environmental fees).
Uhh... I beg to differ.
Even our government (Provincial government of Ontario, Canada) can't seem to be able to control the skyrocketing rates the Highway 407 corporation has imposed. Unfortunately with few alternative ways to get around for those of us who live in the 905 within a reasonable timeframe, we are at their mercy. Whether or not we actually use the thing.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
The problem is that the government has no incentive to invest the time and money keeping the system current.
As anyone in Los Angeles can tell you, the best way to make sure that the infrastructure is built once and never updated is to let the government control it. Just look at the 405, 105, 10, 60, 5, 210, 134, 2, 91, 710, 605, 110 freeways. Of all those, I know of two areas of "construction" (maintenance) in the last few years: repaved the 5 for about 10 miles through Burbank, and they added about 30 miles of new highway and called it the 210 (from Glendora to San Bernardino). The rest is a torn up collection of pot-holed, congested asphault. Not exactly what I want the internet to resemble in a few years.
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Finally, someone listened! Municipal data networks make perfect sense. Many municipalities manage their local utilities, adding data services to that I think is the natural extension.
The pricate telephone companies are never going to outlay the cash for significant upgrades to a local telecom system. They would much rather stick with their relatively old lines and equipment and charge their customers and arm and a leg for them. When the cities and counties own the lines, they're going to get a better price on services because they can shop around. I'm not saddened by the stories of woe coming out of the local Bells. Municipal data networks are being built and proposed because there is a need for them that isn't being met by the current owners of the data networks.
I don't understand why they don't work with the munis on these projects. Instead of whining about competition they should offer to manage the networks. They can get the management dollars without the outlay for construction. I suppose they don't like to play games where they don't make up the rules. If they're concerned about municipal networks competing for commercial services it because the market is the telcos' to lose. There's plenty of areas of the country that have a lot of cheap office space and a high standard of living. They do not however have the sort of data infrastructure that many businesses are looking for and are thus avoided by larger businesses. Building competitive data networks can draw a lot of business to an area. The Bells want to focus business in particular markets where they have a lot of leverage while a municipality wants to move business where it is.
It's sad that the telcos are so successful in their lobbying to prevent municipalities from reselling excess capacity. The money an RBOC makes it not going into local communities. The money Bumkiss county makes however does go into the community. In Georgia where the schools stand to make money the situation is even worse. The school districts could generate cashflow by selling something they're not using and wouldn't miss. At the very least it would be possible for their network to break even an essentially give the county schools a free 10Gb data network. At best they could put money back into that county's coffers. Even if those dollars don't go directly back into the school system the schools could still benefit. Hopefully the legislature in Utah and the SC in Missouri's case will see the telcos are whining about having their uncompetitive monopolies taken away and side with the municipalities.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I read an interesting article lately about a company in Vienna, Austria, which has developed a machine called "cable runner" that can deploy fibre cables in sewage tunnels. This eliminates the need for digging. It mentions though, that this is not meant for a wide network but rather for point to point connections. Oh, here's the company's website.
Looked like an interesting idea to me.
well... I'll take my chances on government, I guess, since the cable company maintains its content-control by refusing to wire the neighborhood.
Besides which, at the rate media companies are growing, it's going to be hard to dif governmnet and cable
[this sig has been trunca
Last I checked, "corporate media" weren't stopping anyone from putting up websites, ...
:port portion of a URL. In a recent job, we had a collection of boxes with browsers on them for testing our web pages. We couldn't connect to anything but port 80 from several of the Macs (the ones running OS 9).
You haven't checked in my neighorhood. We have two cable ISPs here, Comcast and RCN. Both have blocked incoming port 80 for several years now, and have no plan to open them.
Now, it's true that I can put up a web site. But you can't get to my port 80, so you won't see what I have to say.
Now, I can run a server on another port, that's true. And I do at times. But I did discover that there are browsers out there that don't implement the
Also, it says right there in the TOS in the ISPs' contracts (from both Comcast and RCN) that you aren't permitted to run servers. Period. No web servers. No mail servers. No ssh servers. No echo servers. Any server is grounds for termination. They can do a port scan at any time, and if they get even a single connection, they can legally terminate your service instantly.
Here in the US, governments can't do that. They are subject to the First Ammendment. But corporations have no such limit. They can legally terminate (or censor) your communications at any time, for any reason. They don't even have to tell you their reasons. The laws are similar in lots of countries.
So if you want to be able to use the Internet to communicate, the most reliable way (and the only way protected by law) is if the infrastructure is owned and controlled by the government. They have to let you talk; corporations don't.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Considering that the [major] purpose of the internet is for infomation, do we really want control of our information consolidated into a single entity whether it be government, AOL, or Verison?
Big Brother aside, I don't think that state/gov agencies should be in the business of business.
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--- Just say no to negativity.
Our company has designed fiber cable systems for about 60 power utilities, most of them municipally owned.
Here's a page with links to most of them.
There are many more North American cities with fiber systems we didn't design. The weblog Community Broadband Networks has links to a number of them. The weblog also has a summary page with about 1800 article links you can skim. About half cover municipal broadband projects of some sort.
Al Bonnyman
Community Broadband Networks