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Name For a Community-Owned Fiber Network?
CleverMonkey writes "I'm a town representative to a newly created municipal group creating a new type of telco. This group has formed to build and operate a FTTH network, and provide both triple-play services and access to other providers, to over 20 mostly rural towns in East-Central Vermont. The project is novel because of the size of the network (a cable pass down every road within 600 square miles), the low-density of the area served, and the public-ownership/private-financing model that is being used. Some of the towns included in this group currently have nothing beyond 14.4 dial-up on a good day. This project began as a grassroots effort in a couple of towns and the name they chose was ECFiber — East-Central Fiber — or sometimes the East-Central Vermont Community Network. We hope that this network will grow beyond one corner of this state, and we would like a name that is both descriptive and flexible. What would you name a community-owned, cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network covering every remote corner of two-dozen contiguous towns?"
Reflects the grass roots movement and that you're routing traffic down fibre (grass is a fibre!)
Heaven.
The Mothership
http://albertasupernet.ca/
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
I would say CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet, but it's already taken.
How about CutCo, EdgeCom or Interslice?
How about this:
Vermont's Eastern/Rural Independently Zoned Open Network
I'm sure the name has never been used.
FOG
It envelopes everything and everyone. The Fiber Optic Gateway.
14.4k dial-up, wow... how about mobile broadband? Hey even GPRS is faster than this!
And when setting up a community network, I'm also quite sure there are reasonably fast and much cheaper wireless solutions. Not necessarily WiFi (but with strategially placed directional antennas that should do quite well too), but maybe even packet radio like solutions?
Why laying cables in this wireless age in the first place? Cables are expensive to roll out and very hard to upgrade, especially when you are talking about low-density rural areas.
Or what about wireless connections for the backbone, and only wire the last bits to the homes, assuming clusters of homes that you want to connect?
CommUNITY Network sounds nice, gets the point across, etc.
COFFEE as in Community Owned Fast Fiber Enterprise E-initive ?
What, you want it to suck mightily?
Granted, it might be the only former MicroSoft product whose name you could use without getting sued...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Fiberoads, take me home
To the place I belong
East-Central Vermont, mountain momma
Take me home, Fiberoads
If you go with public ownership, you're going to run into the same problems many community wifi projects have run into. Interference from telcos at the state and federal government level. They will be all over you, and you will end up wasting funds fending off legal challenges, and lobbying the state government to not pass legislation that would destroy your project.
Instead I suggest the cooperative model that has worked for rural electric providers for over fifty years. A cooperative is a corporation that is owned by its customers. Using a cooperative organization will keep the government out, which I think will be essential to your organization's survival.
Good luck!
You don't really think that the incumbent telcos are going to let you survive to complete this, do you?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Pick the acronym first. Then decide what it stands for. Use a 'V', it is Vermont after all. Let's say you go with "VLAN". Vermont Local Access Network. That was easy. Or "VICAR". Vermont Internet and Commodity Access Route. Another easy one. "RAVE". Rural Access for Vermont Enlightenment. See how easy it is? Just remember: Acronym first. Meaning second.
Grassroots Open Access To Serve East-Central Vermont
I would call it IntarWeb, or Interbutts, or some other dumb slang word for the internet, and then go around and sue the pants off everyone that uses it online. This way has three advantages:
1 - you have a lot of built-in name recognition
2 - you have an extra revenue stream from suing idiots
3 - you will force said idiots to stop using at least one dumb slang term, the whole world benefits!
I don't know if it works similair, but here in Ã-rebro/Kumla it's called "StadsnÃt":
http://www.stadsnat.se/
Simply "Urban network".
The prices are right atleast, I think you can get 10 mbps for 99 sek = 10.5 euro / 16.65 us dollar.
"Home and Office Porn Efficiently Delivered"
Perhaps in California or Florida your argument might make sense, but this is Vermont we are talking about here. I grew up in that part of the country. There is an enormous sense of community spirit that cuts across town and even state (why isn't Hanover in on this?) boundaries. These are very small communities we are talking about here, so this basically IS a cooperative. You can see it in the way they share school systems, mutual aid for fire and ambulance support, snow removal, and the like. The towns already own their own infrastructure for water and sewer, and in some cases they own their own electrical power infrastructure. They do things for themselves and they don't need the feds or Verizon to tell them what to do. Owning and running their own computer network is not a stretch at all.
Slashvertisement it may be, but it shows just how far some people in the U.S. have to go to get even semi-high-speed networks where they live despite the countless dollars in subsidies given to the telcos for improving network access across the country. Obviously AT&T, Verizon et al. have done so much with the help of subsidies that financiers are trampling each other like gold miners to get in on the Vermont market.
How about The Eastern Regional Autonomous Network?
(1) It's a play on Terra (i.e. of the Earth, appropriate for a buried cable)
(2) I'd guess it's appropriate from a speed context (I don't know for sure, but Tbps speeds seem within reason for a light pipe)
(3) When Verizon et al hear about this, they'll shit their pants because of the threat that other communities would join in and/or duplicate it. So they WILL come gunning for you on both the regulatory and legislative levels. They'll sow as much FUD as they can... and this way, their efforts will be known as 'The War on TERA'. Keeps things simple that way: freedom-loving people everywhere will already know which side of it they stand on, as will those who prefer to remain enslaved to our corporate masters.
Listen to what I say, not what I mean...
Here's the obvious: you mentioned that the community is already calling it "ECFiber". The only difference I might suggest is just calling it ECV instead of just the EC part. Or maybe ECF (?). Whatever you call it, kudos to your community for taking on such a great project!
You might be right. The city of Alameda tried it with traditional cable and failed miserably. It has a bond payment due soon and revenue won't even cover the interest.
Lowell, Michigan also tried and gave up in 2007 when it realized that the cost of upgrading the system to modern standards would far exceed the value.
Running a telecom service in an underserved area is more expensive and complex than many people think. Often, the area is underserved for a reason.
That said, maybe fiber will work. Or maybe it's worth it as a social value to the community, even if it's pricey. Fingers crossed for you.
How about this: "Screw You, Verizon".
Name it Metamunicipal: Get your fiber here.
--
Toro
Why muck about? Fairly obvious extrapolation of G-PON:
Gigabit
Passive
Rural
Optical
Network
G-PRON! Or G-PORN if you will, but that is just crass.
which is totally what she said