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Pittsburgh, Seattle Announce Interest In Google's Fiber Trial
An anonymous reader contributes a link to a press release from the mayor of Pittsburgh that says the city has announced, along with Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and the University of Pittsburgh, that it intends to respond to Google's 1Gbps FTTH (Fiber to the Home) request for information. Seattle's mayor, too, wants in on the action, and more cities will surely pile on.
ISPs/telecoms in the high-speed internet business, for the most part, have regional monopoly or duopolies in the US. I also believe a lot of their intrastructure was promoted in some way by government tax benefits or funding.
A lot of businesses won't build [infrastructure] unless they get some government tax benefits or funding.
Example: I don't recall the last time I heard about a stadium or convention center getting built without [city] putting up taxpayer dollars or passing a law to give them a tax break.
I only use those two because they're the easiest for most people to google since the process usually receives endless local news coverage. Factories are also waaaay up on the tax break & subsidy food chain.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
When "free market" (not that it's actually free... but hey, at least there's "competition") has failed repeatedly for decades, a competent monopoly with a proven track record is more than welcome.
Washington is a weird state. They recognized the value of fiber infrastrucure early because they had DOE projects (notably Hanford) that were well served by operators who were confident the nuclear fuel wouldn't kill them. That meant high bandwidth low latency connections to different points.
And then there's I-5. Washington has this international path that threads from California to Canada. I was there when they buried the fiber optic cables under I5 - they're bundles as thick as your leg. Seattle does not lack bandwidth - and they have their own peering point.
They're not even new to this - Grays Harbor county on the coast and Grant county in the center had programs that resulted in 100-1000gbps service (for many years now!) to the customers before Comcast and AT&T shut down expansion of the projects. They have the bandwidth, but they can't afford the lawyers. It's sick when that prevents progress. Maybe Google can help us here.
We had a law to allow Public Utility Districts to resell bandwidth to ISPs and build out fiber networks from the proceeds, but Comcast and QWest killed it.
Bring on the Google! I'm sure they know how to do this in a way that does not prevent progres!
Help stamp out iliturcy.