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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...
Bran Fiber!!
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..
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
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
This could be a good thing, this could be a bad thing, one thing it requires is the public pay attention to who runs these things and what decisions (arbitrary or what) they exercise over them.
From the article:
That's struck a nerve among incumbent carriers, like the regional Bell operators, that are serving these areas. Not only do these carriers lose customers when people decide to build networks themselves, but many local governments, municipalities and educational institutions that build networks for their own use wind up selling services as well, thus becoming competitors to the regional operators.
Where the municipality is a competitor... Wasn't this the sort of thing that have some depression era things struck down ERA/WPA/CCC because effectively private companies taxes could be funding the government to compete with them? A shame, really, as some of these structures and works still pay off 70 years later, guess we shouldn't let that happen again.
Running a telecommunications network is not a sure thing, as many private competitive providers have already discovered.
Particularly where executives overstating profit and taking huge compensation are concerned.
Where I worked we were quoted a few times, massive amounts for running a fibre network and finally elected to do it ourselves, despite dire warnings of us not having the properly skilled people and tools to do it ("Too delicate, too sahn-se-tahv") We did it anyway for about 10% what we were quoted and it worked fine.
lastly, I've always favored the municipality putting in these kinds of infrastructre, then leasing it out to the phone/cable/internet/CCTV, what have you. More competitors make for a better market, right? But where I live there's only one company for high speed internet and one company for cable, forget any other choices. Having the public involved, assuming good people are overseeing it (and you don't usually know they aren't good people until it's too late) can guarrantee far better service than the private sector (milk every last cent you can out of that copper, baby!) can really do.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
...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.
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.
... 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.
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
In theory, I support the idea of municipalities developing networks in the hopes that subsidizing the costs will lower the current "barriers for entry" for non-profits, schools, etc. However, my fear is that a network managed by the government will have standards of use dictated by the government that will eliminate the social benefit it could provide.
Consider the radio airwaves ... a public, shared resource managed by the government. The FCC has guidelines for the content that can be broadcast over those airwaves in order to "protect" the public from content that they believe the majority of the citizens do not consider an appropriate use of that shared resource. A shared network infrastructure could be a significantly different beast, but only because the resource both is less scarce and more hidden from the general public. I can view the contents of a website without my neighbor knowing how I'm using their tax dollars. However, a concerned citizen could argue that they don't want their money used to support the viewing of certain types of web sites, and therefore that those sites should not be available over the municipal network. A similar argument has been made to coerce libraries into installing net nannies on their public computers.
These arguments are natural whenever the government is providing or subsidizing resources; if this resource is "owned" by the collective, then it should be managed according to their will. Fortunately, the free economy guarantees that if people want a network unfettered by government regulation, they will pay for it (see satellite radio and cable TV). However, in that case, the social benefits of a municipal network are lost. That means the only remaining benefit of a public network is to provide competition with the incumbent corporations ... and breaking the monopolies seems a much more cost-effective way to do that.