Tacoma Goes All In To Support Municipal Fiber

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.

Comments

Sounds awesome.

[TsuruchiBrian]

I wish more cities would do this. It never made sense to me why we would allow private companies own the telecommunications infrastructure. Sure you get the benefit of not having to pay for the installation (through taxes), but then the customers are stuck dealing with a for-profit monopoly. It just seems like a giveaway to a a private sector entity whose interests don't totally align with the those of the public.

Re:Sounds awesome.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sounds awesome.

[silas_moeckel]

Proper municipal fiber can give you more competition. Unlike copper you can nearly trivially have multiple ISP's on a single strand via cheap CWDM. So Muni fiber can be primarily be a last mile network with ISP's only needing to connect at the CO. Since this drastically lowers the cost to enter a market a single fiber plant can support a nearly unlimited number of ISP's. If the Muni also puts in a L2 network it can get even cheaper to get entry. IPv6 routing makes it very easy to support multiple ISP's maybe a town one without internet access that gets people to the school's library town hall etc. Layer VoIP on top of this and you quickly can move local calls to the muni network and build a 911 system on top. Suddenly you have a working video calling system.

Re:Sounds awesome.

[dywolf]

just wait a few minutes and some of our /. libertarian pseudointellectuals will be by to tell how you this is the worst thing, government cant be trust to do it right, the market is better, etc etc, all while ignoring the growing number of cities that have done it already (successfully), let alone that the reason this happens in the first place is due to cities compensating for market failures.

Re:Sounds awesome.

[Locke2005]

Also, copper is valuable enough that it's worth digging up and stealing, while used fiber is basically worthless. That problem is only going to get worse, especially in developing countries.

Not sure how long this will last

[rsilvergun]

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...

Re:Not sure how long this will last

[fnj]

if the Republican's take the Whitehouse.

What the hell does the US Presidency have to say about the issue? It is certain states which have legislated against cities and towns exercising their natural right to provide broadband as a municipal service.

Wow

[darkain]

Wow, I just think it is awesome to see my local news here on /. for a change! I've been a Click customer since pretty much when they started in the '90s, have had plenty of ups and downs with them over the years, but glad that they've at least put pressure into competition in our local market that otherwise would just be Comcast. Yes, we have Centurylink too, but they honestly will only serve my location with 4mbps service, which in this day in age is just utter bullshit. So thank you Click for being the second pillar against Comcast here in Tacoma!

Re:Wow

[darkain]

The only downside right now, unless the proposal has changed, is that it isn't symmetrical gigabit. It isn't even fiber to the home. They want to implement 1000/100mbps DOCSIS. For those of us that want to push as much content as we pull, this is still something I hope they improve upon in their proposal before implementation.

Re:Woooo

[darkain]

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...

It's not the states

[rsilvergun]

that's at issue, it's the possibility that laws will be passed banning municipal broadband. Ted Cruz has already said he favors such laws, though to be fair he's a fringe candidate. The Republican lead House/Senate have toyed with such laws but right now it would almost certainly see a Presidential Veto. It's very likely that a Republican President wouldn't veto a law. That's why the Prez election matters. There's a whole lot of nasty stuff that's been held back by gridlock these last 8 years. A Republican win means the end of that gridlock.

Re:To be contrarian

[jabuzz]

Except the worlds fastest rural broadband which is basically a brand new FTTH build out located in the UK never got any of that public subsidy and is run as a community benefit society

http://b4rn.org.uk/