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Small Town Builds Its Own Gigabyte Network; Cost To Citizens $57/month
An anonymous reader writes "On Thursday, the board of O-Net gave approval for residents to get access to [full gigabit bandwidth] for the same price that they currently pay for a guaranteed download speed of 100 megabits per second — $57 to $90 a month, depending on whether they have bundled their internet with TV and phone service. ... the town realized that it couldn't attract technology-based businesses and that bandwidth was a challenge even to ordinary businesses. It came up with a plan — it would install a fibre network throughout the town that would connect to the larger inter-community network being built by the government at that time — the Alberta Supernet."
Well, is it gigabit or gigabyte? Because the latter would be very impressive.
Headline says gigabyte network, then the summary says gigabit. Finally, it turns out it's 100mbps.
By the time you finish reading this comment it will be 56k.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Whargarbl!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I didn't know the motherboard manufacturer makes NIC cards. That is certainly news to me.
Oh you mean Gigabit network. -.-"
Canada.. figures.... Do that in the states and get sued into bankruptcy.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Olds, Alberta
(Population eight thousand)
Getting high speed internet in Alberta anywhere outside a larger population centre has been virtually impossible, so it's interesting to see rural towns take the problem by the horns on their own with success.
crazy dynamite monkey
Gigabyte divided by 8. Not the same thing.
Its been attempted but usually fails due to local corporate citizens derailing it as some kind of communist love fest.
why can't we have something like that is usa?
I live in Sweden and pay $5 per month for a gbit. It's partly sponsored by Microsoft's program for people with no hands, but still. Just saying.
And because many other people here also have gbits, torrents work wonders. US probably isn't the same.
I want my fiber please.
Alberta Residents Complain About Internet Content Filtering Plan
I wonder if they will notice a large population influx. /me calls his realtor
"Because we're a community-owned project we get to balance out profitability versus what's best for the community."
I'm from America, so could someone please explain to me what that last part of the sentence means. Does it have to do with Q4 fiscal projections, or stocks, or something else? I just don't understand what this whole "community" thing is.
I'd still rather pay 5.70$ for 100 megabits, which would still 20 times faster than my current connection at nearly 40$ per month. Gotta love monopolies in small towns.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
There are lots of towns in the US, big and small. that have un-used fiber laying around, which was installed the last time they ripped up their streets for remodel, or which was built into subdivisions as a conditions of their permitting process. Most of this is used to tie a few buildings public buildings together, or (an a sad number of cases) not used at all.
There entire counties that have fiber running to every minor town. (Google county fiber network = 14 million hits).
Most of these towns don't have fiber running everywhere. So turning it on ind the downtown core is often avoided simply because it will cause a clamor for fiber everywhere from the rest of the tax payers. Some of it has been in the ground so long nobody knows if it works or not. Since it wasn't being used, in some cities it has been damaged by construction and nobody was even aware of it. Some towns are putting up FREE PUBLIC WIFI, using their fiber. And almost as soon as it is turned on the "won't somebody think of the children" crowd shows up demanding censorship. There are a lot of political land mines to dodge when putting this stuff to use. So far too much of it sits idle.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The boondoggle that keeps picking your pocket, on the premise that if more people are inserted as middle-men, the cost of service will go down.
"Competition in the market" is true for goods produced through labour. It does not account for structural differences in the sale of services and delivery, or in extractive "rent seeking".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Offering gigabit to endpoints isn't that hard. Gig Ethernet is cheap these days, GPON is likewise cheap for metro type situations. However, you can hook all the endpoints up at gig but if your backhaul to other providers isn't good, then it doesn't matter. You can have "gigabit" but only to other nodes on the network.
So that'll be the real question is what kind of bandwidth they can buy to hook this network up to. That'll determine if it is really fast internet to homes and businesses or just a big LAN with slow 'net access.
The big media companies that actually make, and own, the TV programs, will only sell their cable channels in bundles.
The Cable company primarily delivers product to the customer, provides maintenance, tech support of the infrastructure, and bills the customer. The cable companies would sell individual channels, but the media companies would let them.
o-net?
o-face.
o-yeah!
Ashland, Oregon did this many years ago. From what I've heard from people that live there, it's worked out well.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
When people like you make Harrar look like the jackass that they really and truly are, I give you mod points. Enjoy it. Keep up the good work and Harrar can go back under his bridge and masturbate with his tears.
Considering this is only possible by them jacking into the (expensive, very slow to actually roll out, many years in the making) provincial government's Supernet project, I really don't think it's a case of "rural towns tak[ing] the problem by the horns on their own".
I remember sigs. Oh, a simpler time!
Why should they filter? If you want filtering, pick one of the many free-market filtering tools from the competitive and totally-not-intrinsically-monopoly-prone software marketplace. The electric company doesn't care if you use your electricity to watch porn; this utility should work the same way.
Surprise, people with a common interest banding together and pooling their resources to make it happen is a model that can actually work.
Thinking about it, that's how corporations originally got started. You know, before they turned into immortal international government-corruption special interest lobby groups.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
1Mbit upstream, and behind a nat. You know its gonna be like that.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Just think how much more the build out costs will be for bigger citys.
Like Detroit?
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Therefore if you look after the collective, all the individuals are looked after.
This is the same reasoning you've used to defend corporations as not being psychopathic evil monstrosities: corporations (a collective) is made up of humans (individuals).
Sorry, do you think that even if they had absolutely no need to consider licensing and paying for the disruption to property when digging up main street and your front lawn all the way to their POP, that it would be free or even just cheap?
HELL NO.
And then, unless you're making your own backbone, you have to connect to one of the big ISP backbone providers. Who will require cost plus profit off you. And if you're stealing "their" customers, only government intervention can make them sell access to you.
I'd pay that for gigabit Internet.
I wonder if I can do this in Gardena ca. Probably not that town had a government facility going in so they took advantage