Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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.

5 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Sounds awesome. by TsuruchiBrian · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Sounds awesome. by silas_moeckel · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      --
      No sir I dont like it.
  2. 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...

    --
    Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
  3. Re:Wow by darkain · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  4. 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...