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Tacoma Goes All In To Support Municipal Fiber

Posted by samzenpus on from the greased-lightning dept.

Peterus7 writes: The Tacoma city council just voted unanimously to invest and upgrade their Click! fiber network as a municipal ISP, which likely means gigabit speeds. This decision was made in light of a proposal from Wave Broadband, which wanted to lease the municipal fiber backbone for 40 years initially, then 5. This vote came after the Tacoma Public Utility board passed both resolutions, to lease and go all in as a city run ISP. Now that the proposal has gone through to allow the city to sell service as an ISP, Tacoma will be added to the growing number of cities with municipal fiber.

3 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Not sure how long this will last by rsilvergun · · Score: 3, Informative

    if the Republican's take the Whitehouse. AFAIK all of the candidates oppose Municipal Broadband. Certainly all the serious contenders do. Whatever other complaints I have against Hilary (and there are many) that's not one of them...

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  2. Re:Woooo by darkain · · Score: 3, Informative

    We've had this municipal fiber network here in Tacoma since the 90's though. The major issue at hand was that the city had proposed to lease it out to another company, and now it looks as though they won't be doing it. http://www.usmayors.org/bestpr...

  3. Re:Sounds awesome. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    copper is expensive, fibre is cheap. Admittedly compared to what you would expect them to cost, but there's very little diffference between them costwise now, and most of the cost is putting the buggers in. Ask about Dark Fibre. And glass doesn't degrade like copper. Vitreous substances are more resistant to water damage and other chemical action than metals are, which is why you get glass test tubes, not copper ones.