How Connecticut Set Itself Up to be the First Gigabit State

Connecticut is moving ahead with a statewide gigabit broadband initiative after resolving a surprisingly simple, but common, issue standing in the way of fiber deployment.

Connecticut needed this. Lately, the only noteworthy contribution my home state has made to the national news is Aaron Hernandez, an apparent psychopath who earned millions of dollars playing football while (allegedly) murdering anyone who looked at him the wrong way. Continue reading

Financing Public-Private Fiber Networks Becoming a Reality, Say Experts at Broadband Communities Summit

AUSTIN, April 27, 2015 – Raising funds to build high-speed internet infrastructure through municipal debt financing is finally becoming a reality, according to a panel of financiers and broadband builders speaking earlier this month here at the Broadband Communities Summit.

Members of the panel, “Municipal Debt Financing and Public-Private Partnerships,” surveyed the landscape of typical municipal bond financing — traditionally used to build transportation infrastructure — and discussed how it applies in the broadband space. Continue reading

Medina County Fiber Network’s growing pains end; revenues rise

Medina County Fiber Network director David Corrado works out of the Medina County Economic Development Corporation's office at the county administration building in downtown Medina. Donna J. Miller, The Plain Dealer

Medina County Fiber Network director David Corrado works out of the Medina County Economic Development Corporation’s office at the county administration building in downtown Medina.
Donna J. Miller, The Plain Dealer

MEDINA, Ohio — The Medina County Fiber Network that carries cost-saving broadband services to businesses, government buildings and school districts is approaching a pivotal year in its development.

“With nationwide carriers bringing their Internet, voice and Internet-transmitted television services to the county, we are concentrating now on doubling the customer base from the current 50,” CEO David Corrado said. Continue reading

Cities Tackle Broadband Imperative

2014-10-30-getimageI want to be an optimist about this effort, but I am afraid that it will turn out to be another of many conferences bureaucrats attend using taxpayer money. The contribution that broadband services makes to economies is well documented and understood so listening to highly paid consultants restate what they can read in a magazine or report is not a valuable use of time. Instead they should use this forum to openly share results and experiences in deploying broadband infrastructure. They should learn what business models work and what don’t work. This forum should present ways to stimulate new applications of services and promote competition of service providers. I hope that “Next Century Cities” is used as a constructive tool to share the knowledge of broadband infrastructure deployment and service provider competition and not as a way to grow government over the private sector.

There is a new organization in town and it’s quietly getting the attention it deserves.

Called “Next Century Cities,” it met last month with mayors and executives from 32 cities in Santa Monica, California to talk about the new economy, the critical importance of broadband infrastructure to economic wealth and well being and the vital role cities must play to succeed and survive in what is fast becoming a turbulent, knowledge driven world. Continue reading

Why the U.S. Has Fallen Behind in Internet Speed and Affordability

Not often will I agree with opinion from “The New York Times,” but in this case they are pretty close to getting it right. After you dig through the comparison to other cities and slamming of our communications service providers they get to the heart of the matter by saying that a duopoly is not competition and competition will lower prices and improve the quality of service. Note that I did not mention “speed.” 

here are structural differences that make the U.S. different from Asian and European countries such as our lower population density and more people living in single-family dwellings. These two facts dramatically increase the cost to build a network to where at best two providers can make a decent ROI. Why do you think that AT&T and Verizon keeps shedding their rural territories? Where we see competition, we see lower prices and better services. Another reason many of these countries have lower prices is that governments have subsidized building of these networks with taxpayer dollars easing the challenge of turning a profit to service providers. In many of these countries service providers use to be owned by the government so they still have a cozy relationship. Continue reading

Municipal Broadband From a Different Perspective

I’m going to step into it big time here and make a bold comment. We have too many politicians and lawyers trying involved in driving broadband services and not enough business people and engineers. Politicians and lawyers should be trying to facilitate the penetration of broadband services, not drive the business. We have technical solutions to these issues, but they have yet to really gain traction in the U.S. for the reasons I mentioned above.

Like too many issues in our society, this one seems to boils down to whether you believe in big or limited government. The big government types are perfectly willing to compete or eliminate commercial enterprises in the name of fairness or some other lofty goal. The truth is that they always have an ulterior motive. Municipal broadband enterprises are at best a 50/50 proposition, but those odds are not sufficient in my view when it comes to sticking taxpayers with the bill. Our Constitution says nothing about guaranteeing citizens the right to the Internet nor is it a public safety issue. Universal Service was a deal concocted by AT&T with the Federal Government to allow their monopoly to continue. When divestiture occurred, it was a holdover for the RBOC. 
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ESB, Vodafone Team for Irish FTTB Network

The big news in the story was that this network will be open access, but Lightwave glossed over that point.  Even though Vodafone will be one of the premiere service providers, other service providers can also lease capacity on the network infrastructure from ESB.  This model should be emulated in many other areas of the world to promote broadband competition.  It would reduce the chatter over net neutrality in the U.S. if we saw more open access broadband networks.

Lightwave Staff

ESB FTTH deploymentIrish power utility ESB has selected Vodafone as its partner on a €450 million project to deploy an open-accessfiber to the building (FTTB) network across Ireland. The fiber-optic network initially will reach 500,000 premises in 50 towns, leveraging ESB’s existing overhead and underground infrastructure.

The FTTB network will deliver download rates of 200 Mbps to 1 Gbps, the partners say. This will represent a significant upgrade for most subscribers, based on data from Irish telecommunications regulator ComReg that indicates 43% of fixed-line broadband users in Ireland receive speeds of less than 10 Mbps.
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