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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...
A previous ISP that I worked for in a rural location in Canada did this with the local town to split the costs. Its not that interesting, but I thought i'd try for first post :)
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Bran Fiber!!
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?
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
How can a company compete when the playing field is not level?
Today the cities will build fiber networks.. next they'll start paving the roads.. building sewers.. maintaining bridges..
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.
I've wanted my city to do this for a long time now. All the complaints I hear involve taxpayer money, privacy, and government abuse of such a system.
Honestly, I'm sick of paying $45 a month for Comcast. If the city would be willing to offer the service:
They could partner with an existing provider.
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.
I don't know the actual numbers, but consider the Comcast (and others) monopoly-type situation. This is not something to complain about, it's something to push for and watch closely enough to keep it safe.
has had a network like this in the works for a couple of years now. It is supposed to be finished within the next year I think.
Chaos will always win out over order because chaos is more organized
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
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.
I hope we see more of this kind of thing in the future.
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.
e nt ial/internet/
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.
> 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
He think it's a good idea and reminds people it's a perfect example of a natural monopoly, except in this case, citizens own the infrastructure, not a private organization. Go local fiber runs!
the folks living and working in the rarefied atmosphere of Palo Alto (CA) have been working at it for a few years. They also have a city run Utilities dept. and relevant experience. The trial has been very successful (i remember $90 for a fibre drop to the home) with a limited number of customers and now they are pushing for a bond-like measure to build and operate a city wide fiber access utility. As expected, the incumbent network operators (SBC in this case) is out spreading FUD at most city council meetings and with the decision makers. I hope it succeeds so we can move to a model where the road-builders are city/govt regulated and I can have my choice of service providers on the city owned/operated fiber network. Some discussions that I attended bogged down because the proposals defined fiber-to-the-home as a requirement and wasn't exactly friendly to other means of last-100ft access including wide-band wireless, ultra-wide band wireless, or copper operating at >10Mbps.
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.
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...
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.
... of about 100K population in Texas. We're installing our own fiberoptic lines for a couple big reasons. First of all, using WAN links that are operated by commercial 3rd parties does not pass muster with the Homeland Security goons for law enforcement and other public safety related network traffic. Something about being paranoid that the phone company's Middle Eastern technical employees might tap into, or deliberately disrupt the service in times of emergency.
Secondly is that all that dark fiber that's laying dormant all over our city will likely stay dormant forever because the phone company does not want to sell it unless they can make a killing off of it. When we approached them about leasing some, the dollar signs just lit up and rolled in the salesmen's eyes. They came back with a price quote that was utterly ridiculous and didn't really want to hear what we were asking for... they instead came back with basically double the quantity and bandwidth links we'd asked for. Remember that cheesy Computer Associates television commercial with the thin cardboard software salesman that keeps saying "Great!!! 500 units is is!!!" when the customer only wanted 25? That's what it's like dealing with these maroons. They don't want to sell their dark fiber to anyone, or else they'd price it according to the market.
We did the math and the cost of installing our own fiber to the various municipal buildings across town will pay for itself in under 5 years, plus since it is securely owned and operated, it satisfies the tinfoil hat guys.
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
The town I used to live in (and hope to move back to very soon) built a city-wide group of fiber links (22 nodes for a town of 20,000) that is working out rather quite well - you can get teevee if that's your wish - not mine, but hey, scifi is cool sometimes - or DOCSYS to the curb for 5 megs down or so... the upstream used to be one until the college kids saturated the network with p2p and the admin responded by capping upload. Cost for your 5 meg connection is about 30 bucks a month depending on which ISP you choose.
On the education front, the school district which I work for has 6 locations in three different municipalities. We were linked together by T1 lines that really were pretty terrible - bad connections which were weather-sensitive (not such a good thing in Oregon!), and slow even when they were running at full speed. We were approached by a local (and reputable) company which offered to build out and give us 2 dark fibers to each location and a pair of fibers to our upstream provider (thereby giving us glass all the way to the NOC), all for the price we were paying for our T1 line. Sounds too good to be true? Nope. We put out an RFP, the guys who made the original proposal won the bidding by miles, they did all the hanging from poles, trenching, etc, gave us our glass, we put media converters in, and voila! we've got screaminig connection between locations - all for the price of that cruddy T1 that we were apparently paying too much for.
The moral of this story? I guess there isn't one, except to say that what they're talking about in the lead story is real, and works. As a slashdot-friendly aside, Paul Allen, in his role of higher-up for the local cable pigopoly, swore to the City Council that he'd do everything in his power to sink the fiber project since they weren't using his Borg-infested kit to do it, preferring instead to use local people and companies. This threat occurred about 5 years ago, and the fiber network is still doing OK. Sorry, Paul =P
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
This is a metropoliton network covering most of the Greater Manchester area, using optic fibre (not crude copper) and the ATM protocol.
The fact it is using ATM (a point-to-point system) is significant. It means that lines aren't shared.
The GMING system was developed out of a project by the three main Universities of Manchester and the regional computer center, and was targetted at businesses who wanted a secure, fast system to connect to other businesses in the region.
The early talks focussed mainly on getting as many businesses as possible to buy-in. However, the ability to upgrade was also discussed. Essentially, optic fibre can support any speed you like, provided you have enough frequencies to play with. GMING was, right from the start, designed with the idea that businesses could simply buy faster connections at any time by swapping the end-points over. The only upper limit was what existed on the market.
It didn't catch on to the point of revolutionizing Manchester - a pity, as the concept is excellent and the implementation far better than any other broadband service - in the UK or any other country.
Nonetheless, it deserves the title of success. It has been adopted and is in use to the point where it is self-supporting.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
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
i live here in Tacoma, WA, and we have our own city-wide fiber optic network provided by Click-Network.. i must say, i love it MUCH better than comcast or any of the DSL providers around here. we have had the network ground layed out for several years, and everything seems to work just fine. the city doesnt offer the ISP themselves tho, currently there are three seperate companies offering internet access via this network. i'm guessing this fiber-op network is probably why the city has recieved the nickname "The Wired City"