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Seattle To Get Gigabit Fiber To the Home and Business
symbolset writes "Enthusiasm about Google's Kansas City fiber project is overwhelming. But in the Emerald City, the government doesn't want to wait. They have been stringing fiber throughout the city for years, and today announced a deal with company Gigabit Squared and the University of Washington to serve fiber to 55,000 Seattle homes and businesses with speeds up to a gigabit. The city will lease out the unused fiber, but will not have ownership in the provider nor a relationship with the end customers. The service rollout is planned to complete in 2014. It is the first of 6 planned university area network projects currently planned by Gigabit Squared."
I for one believe in internet. The internet makes people stupid and shortsighted, which is why I never use it. My secretary and wife Laura handles all my internet usage for me. As internet usage increases, so will moronosity, advancing the day when I shall rule the world! Ha ha ah ha ha ha ahhhhahahaha!!!!
UNITE with the Campaign for a Free Internet because today, our future begins with tomorrow!
Forced socialism for company expenses,
and cutthroat law-of-the-jungle capitalism for company profits?
Sounds American to me!
(*) when using the most recent version of Internet Explorer; 96kbit/s otherwise
I think it is awesome that they are trying to get fiber through out the city but 55,000 is a really really small number. From the math in the article it is going to cost them $3636.37 per residence/business they connect to the network. Any idea how that compares to google's plans in Kansas city cost wise?
This is perfect. All FTTH/FTTB should be tax supported "infrastructure" instead of run by thieving corporate scumbags. All fibers should terminate in a neighborhood or regional carrier-neutral "meet me" room where anyone with backbone (pun intended) could offer connectivity to any customer just by running a jumper or configuring a switch remotely. Then the customer is free to choose the flavor of thieving corporate scumbag he wants to deal with. Sign me up for a mix of Level 3 and Cogent please!
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
So the company gets shitloads of money on what is basically a government-supported
Forced socialism for company expenses,
and cutthroat law-of-the-jungle capitalism for company profits?
Sounds American to me!
I hope this trend spreads so that the incumbent telcos are left only with the choice to either make good on their 200 billion dollar "promise" or go screw themselves.
Seattle threatened the local ISPs to do this sort of thing about 8 years ago, nice to see that they're finally putting some of that dark fiber to use.
It's just a shame that I live slightly outside that area. OTOH, one of my friends lives in the area, so maybe I can mooch internet from him.
As a former Seattlite, I applaud the city's efforts, and I wonder what this will mean with respect to cost for the end user and competition in the market:
" The city will lease out the unused fiber, but will not have ownership in the provider nor a relationship with the end customers"
Can there be multiple lessees along particular routes, or is the whole thing likely to be gobbled up by Comcast or FIOS?
Enthusiasm? But isn't that kind of public intervention an horrible communist-like threat to free market?
Oh, wait, ISP have not yet started their media campaign against the project
First they get legalized weed, now this? I really gotta move.
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
...Comcast and Verizon fight it out with 1 megabit per year increases for the next 1000 years.
Yeah, Seattle is the best place to live. You all wish you lived here. Suckers.
first
Can't wait for this to happen across the country.
I'm in Kansas City hence the reason I was able to be fp.
Be prepared to pay double or triple what you should for this. This would be more efficiently handled by the private sector in a competitive environment. There is no reason tax dollars need to go to subsidize this when it has been proven time and time again that government involvement translates into higher prices, more screwups, and more debt for us all.
YES!!! I have been suffering under the Comcast/Century Link (aka Qwest) for 7 years. Minimal competition means that they only have to maximize profits.
I love this city: our utilities are clean and environmentally friendly because of a great administration. Although the public transit system isn't as nice as NYC, we are fixing that too.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
Democrat City, County, State.
Bingo.
But after all the laws and regulations pass on whats legal and illegal on the internet, all thag bandwidth will be wasted.
Going to save myself the time to write "how" but if youre well informed I think you understand.
Ah crap, analogy came to mind...
56kbps connections could get the job done for what the internet will become if we keep allowing it to be regulated.
Organize your neighborhood then city and pass a bond you can then defer the cost of capital investment over 30 years. Amazing communism plus capitalism defeating unregulated oligarchies in the free market.
i've been sitting in seattle, well, since forever... and this is at least the third try at this. comcast the evil monopoly that holds seattle in its death-grip will try everything that was successful at shutting this down and then-some before letting this through. they will start with "incentives" (building computer labs in the schools for example), then move to bribes (there's a hot mayor race coming up. watch if one candidate suddenly gets a zillion in outside funding. "but that's illegal!!" yeah... right), then legal threats like suing for restraint of trade (which have turned the trick before). they may also get federal, using a bribed federal regulatory agency to shut down the endeavor. so as much as i'd love to see this, and might even directly benefit, this ain't going to go down smoothly. this is a fairly fidgety "David" against an massively monetized Goliath.
First legal weed and now this!!! Damn Seattle is becoming a greater place to live!
I was offered that several months ago. But the downside is the monthly cost.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
you paid for the city government to lay dark fiber for years, then they are handing it off to a private company who will gouge you to flicker lights at the ends of it?
yes I know there is more to it than flickering lights, but I also know the ISP is not going to provide this service for operating cost + small percentage, they will run with it, charge as much as every other fiber service and you footed the bill for their infrastructure, that is "on lease" at a deep discount for might as well be life.
If this had been a good idea, then there'd be no need for the government to get involved. Individuals having free choice would have spent this money in a way that better fits their individual needs, most likely stimulating more decentralized, less censorship-prone means of delivering a high-speed connection. Even though there are private companies involved, this is nonetheless socialism (fascism). Once government is involved, restrictions (ex. "Net Neutrality") are sure to follow and spread. Trading freedom for useless extra bandwidth (that like 99% of people don't need) is never a good thing.
--libman
Ticks me off continually that I still can't even get wired broadband in NY state, 10 miles outside of a college town, one mile off a major state road. Last time we asked, they told us we should get together with our neighbors to raise 30,000 dollars and then they'd do it.
Not even DSL. Hell, Caller ID doesn't even work. It's pretty thoroughly ridiculous.
We use the awful wireless broadband devices from carriers. 5gb limits. Pretty much banned from engaging in culture that way. If you disagree, try it.
And anybody who tells me to move, I'd slap you upside the head, if you said it to my face. Not everybody can move when they want to. We certainly can't.
Now if you can just get the markets to move their HFT machines to Oregon, you could have PINESTREET and trade in CARBON CREDITS, maybe a branch of the Federal Reserve, you could print money, lots of it!
Although it won't fix any of our problems, it will only make them worse, but not much worse then the shit fags in DC are doing.
There's a reason it is unconstitutional for government to compete directly with private enterprise, but providing common infrastructure for use by all is compatible with the mission of government.
What they ought to be doing is leasing CAPACITY on the unused fiber to any company who wants to be an ISP. Then, there can be real competition and real choice for consumers. To lease all of the capacity to one company might run afoul of equal protection, since it is basically giving a company an unfair advantage over others.
But, a step in the right direction.
The municipality still owns the fibre. They lease it out. So the city should be making money off the infrastructure and the company will be making money off the individual subscribers.
Also a city is far more likely to allow for much longer term profitability than a corporation is. This will allow them to roll out the fibre to places that a corporation would ignore.
I live in Chattanooga, TN, a city supplied with gigabit-speed fiber internet provided by EPB, our power provider. While gigabit speeds are available, they start at $300/mo for residential areas, and it was just revealed that businesses must pay a rate of $9,000/mo if they intend on using it for anything data-intensive. So, the option is there, but it's not cheap.
On the plus side, their offering of 100mbps internet is affordable, extremely reliable, and probably overkill for most of what I do. Comcast can't touch it.
I would also like to know how this compares with the deployment costs and deployment methods used by EPB in Chattanooga, TN for their Gigabit network. http://chattanoogagig.com/. I had a 100MB synchronous connection in TN for the same price I pay Comcast for a 20Mb down/ 364kb up link in Seattle area.
Every day is Saturday and all the rainbows have silver linings.
I wonder who of normal users needs gigabit speeds?
Are there any usage caps in this cyberhighway paradise?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
According to what I've read in the local paper, the total investment for EPB is going to be around 500 million for their buildout, though that's including their Smartgrid infrastructure as well.
Actually, from what I've read, they realized they were doing everything they'd need to run an ISP to do the SmartGrid, said hey, let's not waste the labor, and got into the ISP business. Comcast and AT&T freaked out, went to court, failed, went to the legislature and got a law that served them, but left EPB to keep doing what they're doing.
Now Comcast is paying the local paper to shill for them against EPB, but they can't deliver the speeds.
Typical last mile infrastructure is normally rated at something lik $1000 per serviceable address, so they are over cost but fiber costs more than copper, splicing is harder, and glass seems to cost more (not sure why but even for a short jumper it seems to cost more)
So your per subscriber cost isn't as crazy as your thinking it is.
The state of internet in Seattle has been embarrassing enough that I think people would more or less give away the capacity to have access to more than a 1.5mbps uncapped connection that is the max in some parts of the city. Although, that might have changed in the last year with all the CenturyLink upgrades.
Latency though, is a different matter and none of the options offer acceptable latency.