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.'"

Comments

Re:Huzzaaaa

[Detritus]

The government is constrained by the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a corporation is not. You may be better off having the system operated by the government.

Re:Huzzaaaa

[bornbitter]

...um... where are you in utah? Orem, Provo, and other cities in Utah County are part of the "utopia" project... there is already fiber laid down the center of several streets... I watched them put it in myself. Look up "Utopia" in utah county law and civil government sites... you might not be surprised that it is here, and Comcast and Qwest are doing their best to stop it. ...oh, by the way, the American Fork city network is fiber, up, and operational. 50mbs up, 50mbs down, unmetered, unmonitered, and only $25/month. Welcome to Zion my friend. :-)

Re:Let's see...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yackety-yackety-yack.

Get back to me when Union Carbide or Enron kills 625 million people like those "selfless" governments you trust so implicitly.

I'd wager a large sum of money that you couldn't give a coherent explanation of what Enron did to save your life (and no, Google doesn't count). All you know is that it's a "corporation", and corporations are "baa-d".

Stupid hippie.

Re:Who would you rather pay?

[ortcutt]

Let's see. You can pay the company so that they can pay their CEO $20 million or you can get it from your city for half the price. I think every frugal person would agree that the latter is a much better idea. I have municipal utilities and I couldn't be happier. It's much cheaper than what people in surrounding communities pay to PG&E. On a related note, I also switched from a for-profit bank to a credit union. Much lower fees and much more helpful service. I recommend it to everyone. So, I'm still trying to figure out what's so great about getting services from for-profit companies. I guess there's always ideology to fall back on.

Re:Tech support....

[Detritus]

Actually, the DMV here (Maryland) is much better than it used to be. They actually care about customer service.

As for Verizon, I recently terminated my cell phone service with them. They made it as difficult as possible. I couldn't do it on-line, even though they let you do almost everything else on-line. The local Verizon store said "We don't do that, call 611". After calling 611, and navigating through a bunch of menus, I was finally connected to some guy, probably moonlighting from his day job as a used car salesman, who spent 20 minutes trying to talk me into keeping their service.

Re:Two things come to mind:

[ortcutt]

Hmm. I live in a town with municipal utilities. It's very reliable and much cheaper than utilities in surrounding communities. It also has very good customer service. So, you can just keep thinking that it would be like the Soviet Union and I can keep enjoying my savings.

I know these guys

[djrok212]

I know alot of the guys who run this project. Used to work with all of them at PrimeLink in Plattsburgh, NY http://www.primelink1.net/>

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.

Re:Open your eyes, it's already happening

[TodPunk]

Are you serious? Do you even know what you are talking about? Here, let's get back to the basic points at hand that interfere with what you're thinking. (Note that if you read anything about Utopia virtually anywhere it's been marketed, including it's own website, you'd know most of these things.)

• - Utopia is owned by the community, not the government, much in the same way that your Chamber of Commerce (in most cases) is funded by the community, not the government.
• - Utopia itself is not censoring ANY traffice, whatever kind it may be, regardless of ports, direction, or content. If anyone does, it will be the service providers, but one does, go to a different one. MStar doesn't so far, and hasn't for 5 months it's been doing this.
• - Utah already passed a law requiring ISPs to provide a filter for content to customers that want it. They won't go so far as to deny it to all citizens (that would be unconstitutional, you know), but the availability is there to those that believe in that sort of thing. This, again, was covered on /. a while ago.
• - Lastly, and more importantly than your FUD may take into consideration, Utopia is already paid for, already being built, and already successfully being used by 100s of people just in Orem alone. I know the support team at MStar, and while Utopia is having it's growing pains, it's well on it's way.

Seriously, go read, do your homework. You'll see it's doing awesome. It's projections have been made by dozens of people, many of whom are still paranoid about financial backlash for this, but still give it a sound blessing as far as an investment goes. The future is here, and the less worriers we have about it, the faster I can start innovating with my Datacenter grade connection in my home.