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Google Fiber Work Hung Up In Kansas City
alphadogg writes "When Google announced last spring that Kansas City, Kan., had landed the tech company's much-pursued super-speed Internet project, the company gushed about the local utility poles. Now it turns out that differences over where and how to hang wires on those poles, and what fees or installation costs may be required, have created a troublesome bump in plans to launch the project."
We knew there would be resistance bordering on armed rebellion. This is like delivering food aid to Somalia. Google knew going into this they needed a lawyer for every trench digger and fiber hanger to deliver Kansas City from the early 20th Century, and should have budgeted a hundred million dollars to grease the wheels that turn the gears of industry. There's entrenched opposition to this in Kansas City with incumbent warlords defending their turf, as there is in the rest of the nation. This isn't really surprising at all.
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Maybe I'm missing something, but fiberoptics aren't conductive. That's one of the beautiful things about it. Why would they need steel-coated cables to protect them from the electric lines?
And why use poles at all? Place everything underground where it's protected from weather. And it looks a lot tidier too.
It's a bit more expensive but the maintenance is a lot lower so the total cost will even out.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
This is when you say "Ok, our #2 city is ______. If we can't resolve this in the next month we're going to go with them." There are PLENTY of small towns and cities around the country that would jump at the opportunity for Google Fiber (as show in the application turnout).
Let everyone in Kansas City know it's local politics holding stuff up.
Did you even read the article? Oh wait, this is slashdot.
The article talks about unequal treatment. One provider offers the same public service as Google, but they're not getting special treatment and free access to the facilities. Then there's the issue of higher costs associated with hanging fiber near electrical wiring. You don't want your workers or customers getting fried, so there will be additional costs.
Dude, it's like 4-8 times more expensive to lay fiber underground and this is a well documented fact. It's vastly superior for sure, but at a very steep price.
Normally, everybody who hangs wires on poles pays a share of the pole cost. But Google negotiated a contract where they don't have to pay if the fiber optic cable is close to power lines, instead of further down where telephone and TV cable lines go. Working near power lines is dangerous and slow, and when it's done (which is rare) the work has to be done by people trained to work on power lines. Usually, nobody does that unless there's some spot where there's no good alternative. Google thought they could do a lot of it and save money. Wrong.
Here's a summary of the subject. Doing this without getting someone killed is not easy. There are major headaches associated with hanging fiber in the power line space. It may be necessary to cut off power on the power lines during installation. While the fiber is non conductive, the messenger wire which supports it is usually steel, so it cannot be pulled into place in the power line space while the power is on. Electricity customers hate having their power cut off for installation work.
Besides, for "last mile" connections it doesn't help much. Any electrical boxes or pole-mounted equipment have to be down in the communication space on the pole, and the drop to the house has to come from down there. Only for long runs without drops is there any win for hanging fiber in the power line space. On rural lines, where long runs are likely, there's usually not that much wire on the poles, so there's no reason to do that.
Somebody at Google had too cute an idea, and they've run into the real world.
This question may just show that I'm from Europe... But I really wonder: why use utility poles at all? What's the reason? Here, almost all cities and towns got a fibre-optic network during the last three years. I too have a fibre connection in my home, just like the rest of my town. During all of these activities, utility poles weren't even considered. It was clear from the start that the fibres would go underground. Everywhere. So narrow (50cm or narrower - that's about 1 to 1,5 feet for non-/. readers) trenches were dug in every sidewalk. Where roads had to be crossed, a kind of horizontal drill was used. The same for going from the street to my house: a narrow hole was drilled under my front garden, leaving no visible trace of the fibre. (Actually, it may have been more "pushing" than "drilling", but that's a minor technical detail). I'm just saying - im my state of mind, going underground is just sooooo logical, that alternatives weren't even considered. Why is it so different in the USA?
Out where I live there's a little podunk town called Ephrata, Washington. Their power utility thought to get Internet to their customers before it was banned as "anticompetitive". So now out here, hundreds of miles from the big city and miles from your nearest neighbor you can get gigabit internet over fiber for $80 a month, and can have for some seven years and more. It's not a density thing, it's not a money thing - they're actually turning a profit at that fee that they have to get rid of because, of course, they're a nonprofit.
Can I get that here in the city? No. My public utilty failed to get grandfathered in back in the day and now claims "no interest" in doing so - even though they have something like 1000x the population density of Ephrata and it doesn't matter anyway because the governor signed into law protectionist legislation that prevents my power utility from competing "unfairly" with cable companies for Internet access. Thank God she's got my best interests at heart, or I might have gigabit Internet now and may have killed myself with gigabit broadband HD pron.
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BTW: If you live in Ephrata and have a spare closet, I'd like to work a deal for some hosting where I pay your whole power and Internet bill in return for you ignoring a couple little boxes. People from Grant County with 100Mbps fiber may also apply.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sigh. Listen to yourself. You should just stop posting comments on slashdot and just do what you are suggesting. If you're successful, slashdot will link to you. But before you do that, you should read this post on this subject. http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2627934&cid=38745922
If you read through the article, the problem isnt resistance, its disagreement about how to run the fiber. Noone wants Google to abandon the project, they just cant agree on how to implement it.
It's a bit more expensive but the maintenance is a lot lower so the total cost will even out.
That's a misnomer. The maintenance of utility poles, pruning branches, and ensuring service lines don't get cut often fall on the power utility provider, not the cable or telecom companies.
Putting fibre on power poles is in every way a far cheaper option even in the long run than burying it. If you had to build your own poles, and do your own maintenance sure the costs would start to rise, but this isn't the case for most telecom / cable companies. It is why they opt to put them on the poles in the first place.
There will always be objections about the minor details. That's the last line of defense. I'm glad it's not about saving the habitat of the naked gerbil, or whatever.
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1. The city agreed to Google's terms in lieu of tax breaks (usually worth billions over 10-20 years).
2. BPU should have been contacted by the local govt BEFORE approving the Google deal.
3. The incumbent telcos are bitching because Google will be eating their lunch...shit...they'll be eating all their meals...
Remember, taxes paid for the CableCo's to build out most of their infrastructure. Taxes paid for the TelCo's to build out most of their infrastructure.
Of course, I understand that there are safety concerns here, but that should have gone into hour one negotiations, not 11th hour politicking.
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Sometimes I think I might want to retire over there, maybe Wenatchee. But then I think of the 20 years I spent in Yakima and come to my senses. But NWI/LocalTel does have some sweet pipe. I'm over there (from Tulalip) about twice a month to turn up circuits. Hell, my T-Mobile phone doesn't have signal in downtown Grand Coullee but the freaking tire store had 50Mb/50Mb service. They could have 100/100 for $5.00 more, but the 50/50 is the lowest plan available. Fuck Me!
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For the record, this is happening with Kansas City, Kansas, the suburban (though arguably much less nice) counterpart to what everyone thinks of as Kansas City in Missouri. KCK opted for a rushed agreement with Google to secure rights. KCMO actually thought about this ahead of time and secured a deal that avoids this, though they could only announce it several months later. The second half of the article goes on to talk about how the Missouri part of the project (the much bigger part) is still on schedule and on budget. So, yeah. Still waiting on getting fiber to my door, but AT&T just laid a bunch more cable and keep hounding me to switch to them, and Time Warner keeps asking me to update my internet plan. So I've gotta think Google has turned some heads in the area and gotten some comapnies a little worried.
Did you even read the article? Oh wait, this is slashdot. The article talks about unequal treatment. One provider offers the same public service as Google, but they're not getting special treatment and free access to the facilities. Then there's the issue of higher costs associated with hanging fiber near electrical wiring. You don't want your workers or customers getting fried, so there will be additional costs.
I did read the article. The unequal treatment argument is, in a word, bullshit. The local incumbent utilities, if they had been, you know, competitive, could have attempted to sell the same service to the community for the same terms. But they didn't, for the simple reason that they were doing what they've been doing for decades; sitting on their fat asses because they have never had to actually compete.