ANSEL HERZ
Remember when local comedian Brett Hamil fucking nailed it in a video-blog bemoaning his sluggish internet service? He’s back with a follow-up—still waiting, six months later, for Mayor Ed Murray to make up his mind about whether to pursue building a high-speed municipal broadband network in Seattle:
Well, Brett (and everyone who uses the internet), the wait’s unlikely to end anytime soon. For now, the city’s sending mixed signals.
For one, the city’s chief technology officer, Murray appointee Michael Mattmiller, flew down to Chattanooga, Tennessee, last month—the city I’ve been braying about as a role model for how to roll out high-speed internet service—to attend an event called “Envisioning a Gigabit Future” that was largely about extolling the benefits of municipal broadband.
In an e-mail message, Mattmiller called the trip “an opportunity to interact with others exploring how best to bring gigabit internet to their cities, and the benefits cities are deriving from gig service.”
“We also had an opportunity to spend time with the staff of Chattanooga’s municipal utility, EPB,” he says, “to learn about their build-out of a Fiber-to-the-Premise network, the challenges they experienced, and their successes.” He plans to stay in touch with EPB as he moves forward on broadband locally, he adds.
