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Citywide Fiber Project Challenges and Goals
aLAW writes "Who wants to receive fiber at their home? Vermont's queen city, Burlington, is planning on running fiber to each household in the city. 'It hardly seems possible, but by the end of 2007, all Burlington residents will be able to pay just one bill each month for their home phone service, broadband Internet connection and cable television channels. And they won't be making the check out to Verizon, or Adelphia.'"
I wish this could happen in Utah. I see only one drawback, it puts the government in control of what you can see and do online
Talking to geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
That would be so great. I never released what a pain that working with 2 seperate companies for phone, internet, and cable is until I bought a house.
I almost bought a townhouse in Minnesota that had fiber being run to every unit. I thought that was pretty neat, and was almost a selling point for me (I went through Pulte, who gave me a new 42" LG plasma).
Companies will complain that it's against capitalism to have competition.
I'm sorry, but what is the improvement in paying just 1 bill? Personally, I prefer having my service providers separate so it's easier to have higher granularity in choice. I'd rather have the infrastructure independent of the actual providers.
see a Text Widget
I've always liked it when there was the option of a private or a publically run service for phones or suchnot, there are drawbacks and advantages to either system.
Anyone have a mirror? Mirrordot seems to be as slashdotted as the site itself. And the post is only 3minutes old:P
and only 4 posts. Whee.
At least the summary could have been better.
xiando Corp plans to do the same in Norway. We wish to cable the whole country and sell cheap 100mbit connections for 99 NOK (about $12). We just need to find investors who are willing to invest ten million dollars in our company.
The new Ipv6 ready xiando Corp 100mbit European network is expected to be ready March 2010.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
'It hardly seems possible, but by the end of 2007, all Burlington residents will be able to pay just one bill each month for their home phone service, broadband Internet connection and cable television channels. And they won't be making the check out to Verizon, or Adelphia.'
I would much rather pay a company than the government. At least I have the option to invest in that company if I have the desire. I really don't understand why so many people put so much faith in the Government.
I would prefer WiMax to fiber, even if it means slower speeds.. Dont have to re-wire my house Of course, that would be different if I am hosting a site in my residence.. and I dont plan on doing it, right now.. .
is planning on running fiber to each household in the city
So they're in the planning stage now, but they expect to have it out to every home by 2007? That's less than a year and a half away.
I predict this one will be off schedule.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
All your cable are belong to us
Not that i could interactively install perl modules from cpan.. Now i can't remember. It's been 2 years and i must admit, at home i have a linux (debian) box or two at home.
Why not, its just a question of diggin up roads and causing people great inconvenience for a long time. Why not just use wireless??
the bad thing about one bill for everything is it puts the hurt to those who live from payday to payday where, if necessary, they can be late on one small bill and pay the others. If they are late now, they would have everything turned off at once.
Also an earlier comment is very valid, since it is the government, the government will know everything and since it is part of the government, this info may be included in the national database created with the new national id card (yea they say new state driver license requirements but...) thats currently going through congress.
Here in Sacramento, CA we have SureWest and they deployed fiber service straight to the home in several parts of town. We've had the service for about a year now and love it. It's very nice to have everything on one bill. I pay around $120.00 per month for phone, internet, and television combined. My upload and download speeds stay around 10 Mbps. I'm going to miss it terribly when we move.
...having that many of your bills served by a single provider makes for a single point of failure, and that's not good. If the company falls on hard times, then all of your utilities they handle will get hiked.
A good example is Time Warner. They're serving cable and cablemodems to my area, and soon to add phone. And every few months, they jack their prices up a few bucks. Without fail. And that's why I won't fall for their "$39 a month (or whatever the price is) to call anyone unlimited!" deal. Based on past performance, I know it's bogus.
Remember that competition usually works to keep prices down.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I think something like this has to happen eventually. I think that eventually, all data-centric services to households will come over a single IP-based connection to the house. VoIP is only the first step towards convergence; next will be the delivery of entertainment services on demand to the house. Wouldn't it be great to be able to watch exactly what we wanted, from the entire library of available programming, rather than compromise on watching just those programs that are popular enough to justify sending them over a broadcast/multicast channel (be it via satellite, cable, or over-the-air)? You could make up your own programming, and watch what you want when you want, like TiVO on steroids. Add to that the benefit of having IP connectivity available to everything from your toaster to your computer. You may laugh, but if the technology is there, people will find a use for it. After all, when the idea of radios in cars was first proposed, people laughed -- but few people these days would give up listening to some form of audio in the car.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
I live on a small island off the coast of Japan and I have fiber to the curb...it's nice to see the states finally getting on-board with innovative steps. What's next GSM?
...Union Carbide (Bhopal)
Exxon
Enron
Haliburton
and on and on...
Oh yes, you can certainly reroute that misplaced trust in the govenrment to corporations. They're SO much more trustworthy.
Verizon is currently installing the fiber infrastructre in neighborhoods around Portland, OR. We have not heard a peep from Verizon about just what services they will be offering, but I have assumed that it will be phone and internet at the very least, with the possible addition of cable TV (though it would be tough to jump into the cable market against Comcast). I am curious to see what sort of up/down speeds will be possible with Verizon's new fiber internet service, and for what price.
I like having several bills.
That way I can decide what utility is getting suspended THIS month.
With one provider, I take the chance of them ALL going off if business is slow for me.
Ignorance is amusing, stupidity is annoying.
they should immediately commercialize the service so that competition will be harbored and user will get cheaper prices!
NOT!
I KUT J00 M4NG!!!
Cascade IA has been doing this for a while now (small independent local telco), rings of fiber running throughout the sprawling metropolis (~2k population) and even out to within reach of all the rural customers.
:)
For a while now all new homes even have fiber run to the premesis... difficult to believe we're "ahead of the times" back here in Iowa but it seems to be true
...will probably be a nightmare. Imagine having to stand in line (think "technical DMV") to have the password changed on your email account...
Of course there is a risk that this could keep competing private enterprises out.
TFA says: "The city is offering open access to its network -- anyone who wants to sell cable TV, Internet connectivity, or other information products will be able to use it, for a fee."
So competitors are allowed access to this net. The only problem could be the size of this fee that competitors have to pay to use the net. The fee could be too high, and thus effectively blocking access for competitors.
In Denmark where I live market-dominant enterprises (private or public) have to give competitors access to their nets for fees that cannot be higher than what is determined reasonable by a government office created to ensure fair competition in the telecom sector. This seems to work well: The market-dominant enterprises earn well by giving competitors access, but cannot set the fees high enough to keep the competition out.
Sprint planned on bring single service phone, internet and pretty much any media you want over ATM to the house with their ION product. They where about 5 years ahead of their time and the project fell apart. It was a cool demo though.
I see only one drawback, it puts the government in control of what you can see and do online
There is a way other than commercial or governmental, cooperative. It may be possible to get a group of people together to form a coop to provide access.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Common services that benefit from network effects and which assist people in the basics of life (transportation, health, communication, etc.) should, in my opinion, be provided as utilities that are at least partially accountable to the community. Usually, this means that the govenernment should have some control or ownership.
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
hah! I fianlly feel justified for not leaving the state despite outrageous housing costs, low wages, an over-qualified (and VERY competive) workforce, and poor infrastructue. Now if I could only afford an apartment in Burlington...
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
The only cities in which municipal broadband can't get started are those where the commercial broadband carriers are lobbying for laws to prohibit it. If Verizon needs legal protection from cities, which have neither special expertise nor economies of scale, to compete with them, are they really competitive? Are they really capitalists, or "state capitalists", a form of socialism where the government protects inefficient corporations?
--
make install -not war
This sort of thing isnt really a new concept. Its in the process of being done in an entire county close to where i live. http://www.masonpud3.org/Telecom/Where/
Government which is already notorious for being censorial and worse would then be their cable, Internet, and telephony service provider. Why not just make this a subdivision of the public safety department which covers the state police?
My eyes cannot roll enough to express how stupid letting the government be your utility company is and how much it smacks of Soviet-style living where the state was in charge of and owned everything prior to glasnost. The logical outcome of this is invasion of privacy, dicking around with your service by political factions in charge who don't view you favorably, corruption, and in the end re-privatization after massive political battles.
The other thought is that this would be run about as competently as the Burlington Health Department has been vigilant in keeping such places as the local Burger King from giving people food poisining. (locals know what I mean)
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
nope you missed it
Talking to geeks is like eating jello with a chainsaw, interesting, but painful.
But I guess that doesn't help you much.
Companies will complain that it's against capitalism to have competition.
Competition is supremely capitalist
FalconShould there be a Law?
Additionally, some of the internet providers offer phone services over the fiber, some use VOIP, some use more traditional methods (I assume anyway, since it is not VOIP), nobody has Television capability yet, and probably won't anytime soon. You can bet that when someone here can integrate all 3 into one bill. the other Internet providers will be out of business though and there will be a virtual monopoly in this area on Fiber internet.
Here is a google cache to a different article about the project http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:1NEgZD8tfMEJ: www.sevendaysvt.com/features/
The site is down (small newspaper hosted by a small local ISP) but I do have knowledge of this project. I am local resident and have been watching this since its inception. This project has had its share of problem like any government project some budget overruns, Verizon trying to stop it in its tracks, public saying this should not happen, etc. The most interesting objection I heard was that this (including telephone service) should be done from wireless. I would love to hear the screams when a thunderstorm disrupts 911 service. The initial budget was in the low 6 figures Burlington is a relatively small under 40k people.
So far the project is already getting some use. The city and schools are now connected together by a Gig connection (many were not doing much better than dialup). The company where I am the IT person is also their first (and only?) customer. We are getting a 1.5 Mbit through a local ISP. So far no one is making money but the ISP, http://www.sover.net/ is now able to sell to other in town businesses for cheap. I pay Burlington Telecom $200/month for as much bandwidth as the ISP will give me.
This in a city where Adelphia (soon to be Comcast) has a monopoly for many parts of the city this is a very good idea. Some may say that city government should stay out of this area but I disagree. The deregulation of utilities let them do whatever they want but also assumed that the market would help with prices and quality. How many choices do you have for cable TV?
> Vermont's queen city, Burlington
Surely I can't be the only one who envisioned Mayor Freddie Mercury opening each city council meeting with a rendition of "Fat Bottomed Girls".
I wonder if the Fiber Repairman shows ass crack. One thing you can count on is a very REGULAR repairman. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
You've got to head to the next town to get that.
I still can't wait to get out of the city. Though the geek in me is now very opposed to the idea.
I really don't understand why so many people put so much faith in the Government.
Same here, but I also don't understand why some people put so much faith in corporations.
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
FalconThomas Jefferson, 1814
Should there be a Law?
i like having different bills.
if i'm late on a bill i don't want everything cut off.
i want to be able to say look i don't need cable tv, telephone, food this month but i need internet!
this is gonna blow cuz i've never been late on my internet bill but get my electric and telephone n cable cut off all the time.
"but by the end of 2007, all Burlington residents will be able to pay just one bill each month for their home phone service, broadband Internet connection and cable television channels. And they won't be making the check out to Verizon, or Adelphia.'"
Here in Washington DC, I have had this since I moved into my house in 2003. We get cable, phone and Cable modem from Starpower (now RCN). Not a bad setup at all....
Or thinking of moving there?
Check out my dumbest idea ever (Cable modem)
Or here.
In Utah we have close to the same thing.
http://www.utopianet.org/
It will be on line soon.
It is a open network with the services open to any one that has the money to set up a isp or tv station.
This might be true if we were talking about specific politicians holding a govt. office - but we're not.
The problem I see here is we're basically asking govt. to perform another function normally left to private industry, under the assumption that there's no other way for it to get done efficiently and/or properly.
That pretty much sums up why we have a post office and NASA handling space travel.
But is "fiber to the door" really this type of issue, or is this more a case of people just getting impatient and trying to "force the hand" of corporations to roll out a service?
You know, there's arguably little reason today why we really still require federal govt. to handle all of our mail. Sure, they seem to be doing a respectably good job and most people see no huge reason to upset the "status quo" if it works. But we're long past the "Pony Express" days and the high risks involved for mail carriers. Heck, the USPS sub-contracts much of its express mail delivery to FedEx right now! But when's the last time they really asked you to "vote on it"? I do, however, recall a guy in Texas getting thrown in prison for attempting to compete with the post office a few years ago.
With a private company, you effectively "vote them out" by declining to pay for their service or product. When enough people feel it's not worth the money anymore and quit using them, they go out of business or revamp their offerings.
Yes. It's a natural monopoly.
Ok, this is just silly. Slashdot has covered Utopia on numerous occasions, which aims to do just this across ALL of Utah. I live in Orem and I can attest, it's happening. It's just a matter of waiting for it. 100mbits up and down for cheaper than I'm paying for cable is making me a bit antsy. *sigh*
This forum Sig is licensed under the LGPL.
many people trust the government more than they trust public corporations,
Like Thomas Jefferson, I trust neither corporations nor government. Government can be bad, but so can corporations, and with their wealth they have they can control government.
FalconShould there be a Law?
www.burlingtontelecom.com
I live on an tropical island off the coast of Japan and Gilligan installed fiber out here last year. Jeez, get with the program already!
Thousands of phone lines cut
http://www.sltrib.com/search/ci_2756279
A construction crew digging beneath State Street near 5600 South on Tuesday afternoon inadvertently cut a bundle of Qwest cables, disconnecting phone service to thousands of customers. The construction crew was working for the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency, also known as UTOPIA
The most expensive bit of the fiber to the home rollout is the trenches, and after that is the edge switching equipment (but not the outdoor cabinets that hold that switching equipment).
If my city were laying fiber to a bunch of houses, I'd want to see them lay two fibers to each house. The two fibers would terminate in to two different side-by-side cabinets, but run through the same trench. I'd run redundant trunk fibers to a central office-type cabinet as well.
Then I'd have the city run one set of fibers, and post a standing offer to any ISP to buy or rent the other set of fibers. This way, you get competition without most of the cost of doubled infrastructure. My guess is, no ISP would take that offer, unless the city services got so bad and/or expensive that a good business case could be made for competing.
The key, obviously, is to make sure that the government agency acting as ISP on one set of fibers is not the same power structure that gets to rent out the other set of fibers.
But, this is a vain hope. I'll be moving into a new pricey development 15 minutes from Stanford University soon, and is there any fiber to the home to be seen? Here in the heart of Silicon Valley? Entrepreneurs to the left, venture capitalists to the right? Nope. I'd need to go to Iowa or Vermont for that. Just great.
Is this such big news? I live in bemidji, MN, and my local phone/cable/internet company (co-operative, if you wanna get picky) PaulBunyan already provides all that. I don't understand if this Burmingtan has more people, or something, but... it just doesn't seem like something special to me.
Two of the guys were direct reports of mine as a matter of fact.
Anyway, servicing consumers in Burlington, is phase 2 of the plan. Phase 1 which has already been completed was to provide service to all the government agencies, which they have completed.
Good group of guys, spread across, internet networking and telecom.
If I had to guess they will meet their 2007 date.
http://iprovo.net/ just check their site, my in laws already have it and the speed of the connection puts my cable to shame
I live in Burlington and this is great. I know quite a few people that will help pay.
Almost a very good point. The benefit you get out of the USPS is that they do door to door, every single day. While this is in part by law (e.g. they're the only ones who are allowed to), you can imagine the cost of running a parallel network -- twice the expenses if two organizations are doing such. I'm pretty sure at .37 / letter, the profit margin doesn't exist for that to really work....
SIG: HUP
You're right, private industry always does it better.
Let's take the example of "private" electricity providers.
Rural electrification - http://newdeal.feri.org/tva/tva10.htm
Damn that FDR (and others). Messing in private industry. Eventually those people living in areas where the population wasn't dense enough to support high profit electric service would have crawled out from under their rocks and moved to the top 100 metropolitan areas like God intended them to.
Here in Montreal, Quebec a provider called videotron offers 5mbps cable internet, digital cable tv with video on demand and cable based residential telephone service for under $130/month... all over coaxial.
What about a government owned corporation, or do you have those in the States?
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
I live in Provo, Utah, and we have this service through iProvo, which is a public/private partnership. Having just made the switch from dialup, I'm not paying for the full 10 mb/sec, but knowing I could have it anytime gives me a warm feeling :)
Who wants to receive fiber at their home?
When i saw the title and blurb, i honestly thought they were talking about delivering crates of All-Bran to houses.
More power to you Timothy Nulty!
so you could get this situation
not many Libertarians, not worth a private company running cable to them, similar to rural Utah?
or like me, you could have lived in one of the wealthiest and oldest suburbs in one of the 100 biggest cities in the world and have no cable, no DSL, no satellite etc - pretty sad market failure in these situations, would have been nice to have an alternative there
Not Free SF Reader
I don't need to move. I have a base in Moses Lake, WA (Shitsplat in the middle of nowhere) where the county is wired with fiber. I've got a 100Mbps up/down pipe. Can you beat that, Vermont? I'm running a webserver out of my house, and it does just dandy.
So what do you think the citizens of Burlington will be more able to control - the democratically elected officials of a small government entity like the City of Burlington (staff 400 people, FY 2005 budget $200M) or Adelphia Communications (2003 numbers 14,300 people and something like $4G)?
Or differently still - there are good arguments that these kinds of services are a natural monopoly (which might well explain why almost no one in the US has them, BTW) - in which case you may have the choice of one unelected corporation or an elected government.
I mean who wants to invest that much money on something where someone else can easily compete with you? That's why most people only have one phone line or cable line to their house. Phone and cable "competition" haven't delivered high speed services (like the 50/50 M service mentioned in the article, anyway) to US households yet.
Why does anyone think it's going to?
This has been up and running in Dalton, GA for almost 2 years now. It's run as a private/public partnership primarily through the local power and water company.
I was signed up for all the TV channels, 5mbit synchronous internet with "unlimited" throughput, as well as phone service with "unlimited" national long distance for only $60/month.
I have since moved to another city, but the service was great and I myself know 6 previous neighbors and 5 family members who have switched to the service.
So, I applaud this sort of partnership.
More info iprovo.net. It is offered as a public utility from the power company. Read a little history on the project to find out why fiber to the home might not be such an awesome idea ... at least not for provo.
or else!
The time unit was not specified. Perhaps the grandparent meant 100 mbit/ns, which works out to 100 Mbit/s ;)
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
Nice try, but Jefferson was talking about banks specifically, and not about corporations in general.
Thanks, I hadn't heard this before, so it spurred me to check on it. What I found was that both Thomas Jefferson's and James Madison's concern of a corporate aristocracy was because of a large corporate owned bank:
Jefferson's Dream
The first glimpses of a powerful American company
Very few people are aware that Thomas Jefferson considered freedom from monopolies to be one of the fundamental human rights. But it was very much a part of his thinking during the time when the Bill of Rights was born.
In fact, most of the founders of America never imagined a huge commercial empire sweeping over their land, reminiscent of Hewes' "ships of an enormous burthen" with "immense quantities" of goods. Rather, most of them saw an America made up of people like themselves: farmers.
In a speech before Congress on April 9, 1789, James Madison referred to agriculture as "the great staple of America." He added, "I think [agriculture] may justly be styled the staple of the United States; from the spontaneous productions which nature furnishes, and the manifest preference it has over every other object of emolument in this country."
In a National Gazette article on 3 March 1792, Madison wrote, "The class of citizens who provide at once their own food and their own raiment, may be viewed as the most truly independent and happy. They are more: they are the best basis of public liberty, and the strongest bulwark of public safety. It follows, that the greater the proportion of this class to the whole society, the more free, the more independent, and the more happy must be the society itself."
The first large privately-owned corporation to rise up in the new United States during the presidential terms of Jefferson (1801-1809) and Madison (1809-1817) was a bank, and its rise caused considerable consternation. Legislators railed against it for decades, particularly when the Bank started involving itself in politics, and tried to terminate its corporate charter, an effort that finally succeeded when the bank went under in 1841.
In the middle of the 30-year struggle, in May 1827, James Madison wrote a letter to his friend James K. Paulding about the issue. He said, "With regard to Banks, they have taken too deep and too wide a root in social transactions, to be got rid of altogether, if that were desirable. ...they have a hold on public opinion, which alone would make it expedient to aim rather at the improvement, than the suppression of them. As now generally constituted, their advantages whatever they be, are outweighed by the excesses of their paper emissions, and the partialities and corruption with which they are administered."
Thus, while Madison saw the rise of corporate power and its dangers during and after his presidency, the issues weren't obvious to him when he was helping write the United States Constitution decades earlier. And that may have been significant when the Bill of Rights was being put together.
For as long as I can recall Thomas Jefferson has been the Founding Father that is my favorite. I didn't know much about Madison but I've been learning and like what I learn.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The people who opt to live in rural areas will always be the ones complaining that they've been overlooked when new services are rolled out.
I run into this all the time with people complaining that they still can't get a cable modem or DSL service in their area.
When you solve this problem by letting govt. take over and order *everyone* to be hooked up, you simply force all of your customers to subsidize the higher costs of connecting up the people in the rural locations.
Whether that's "good" or "bad" is arguable. With communications services, it seems rather sensible to argue the point that the more people are interconnected, the more overall value is added to the service - justifying everyone paying a little higher price.
In fact, I think private industy eventually looks at things that way, without a need for govt. stepping in and mandating it. That's why you see cellphone carriers making a huge deal out of their "coverage areas".
Comparing electricity to fiber isn't really fair, though. If you live in the "big city" and have electricity, why would you care in the least bit if farmer Fred out in the middle of nowhere gets electricity too? You'd be happier if he didn't, if it meant paying a little less on your own electric bill each month, most likely! Communications services rely on "end to end connectivity" or they're not valuable. The more people on their "grid", the better the net benefit for all users. Basic utilities such as water, gas and electric aren't this way. As long as *you* get service, you're satisfied.
Yea here in Tampa we are getting this as well Verizon spent the past month fiber'ing up the entire neighborhood and I can't wait. 200 a month for 30m down 15m up...
Wyly
www.wylywade.com/blog
http//www.wylywade.com/blog/