Some residents voice opposition to Opelika smart-grid plan

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Optic fiber

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Although I agree with Jack Mazzola in theory, he does not understand the reasoning behind the city’s actions and he is over dramatizing the impact of the utility’s proposed network. Mr. Mazzola has it correct that selling communications services is best left to private enterprise. The government should not be in the business of providing telecommunications services.  It could provide the last-mile infrastructure to service providers that want to offer voice, video, and data services, because building such a network for a single service provider is cost prohibitive.  The city should facilitate competition for private enterprise by providing a utility that a single provider could not afford to build on their own.

I am sure that the city would collect franchise fees from multiple service providers other than Charter, but the economics are not viable for Charter and other providers to build multiple networks.  Once again I return to the fact that building a broadband network costs a bit over $1,200 per home passed in small communities.  Divide the market in two and the cost doubles which extends the time for a positive rate of return to over 3 years.  Too much for public companies.

The city is wise in its intention to amortize the cost of building a fiber network across different uses.  The fiber has the capacity to support multiple services and applications.  By apportioning the cost based on bandwidth used by a service or application, electricity customers will pay much less than if they had to foot the bill for the whole fiber network;  negating the “rate hike” Mr. Mazzola mentions.  Higher value and bandwidth services would pay their fair share which would increase the revenue to pay for this endeavor.

Mr. Mazzola’s arguments of over regulation and loss of freedoms/privacy are a little overstated.  There is the potential for citizens to apply pressure on the utility to restrict certain types of “information” that Mr. Mazzola refers.  Providing an open-access infrastructure is the way around that problem because the city is not involved in the actual content of the services.

I admire Mr. Mazzola’s principles in an age where so many of the principles of which this nation was founded are being discarded, but he needs to be a bit more constructive in his thought.  If he would like to see free enterprise flourish and receive innovative services then he should support the city building an open-access fiber infrastructure to be used for the smart grid and competitive communication services.  These goals can be achieved with the privacy and financial transparency his group is questioning.  Opelika citizens head to the polls in about a week.  If the ballot measure is approved, then citizens like Mr. Mazzola should remain involved and shape the network to achieve their goals of free enterprise and free flowing information.

By Donathan Prater | Staff Writer

While many expect Opelika voters to give the city the nod when they head to the polls on Aug. 10 for a referendum that would create a city-owned telecommunications company, that feeling isn’t unanimous.

Some opponents plan to attend the public hearing in the Opelika City Council chambers Tuesday to voice their concerns.

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Citizens Against Public Waste Call Broadband a Luxury Not a Necessity

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Technically I agree with Mr. William’s assertion that broadband services (Internet access and video services) are not a necessity…currently.  Sending and receiving e-mail or posting the satisfaction of your latest latté are not necessities nor are they guaranteed in our Constitution.  Then again neither is health care, but it now considered a human right so the current administration saw it fit to make sure that every citizen has it.

Electricity was not considered a necessity at the beginning of the twentieth century, but many communities saw its utility to stimulate their economy.  Now electricity IS a necessity because there are several life-sustaining devices that require electricity to operate.  Citizens subsidize the rates of the poor and elderly to provide them electricity.  Telephone service suffered the same fate.  It transformed from being a luxury to a matter of public safety;  thus, the Universal Service Fund.

Now we are undergoing the same debate on broadband services.  We are at the point on the adoption curve where it is going beyond a toy for nerds and geeks to playing a vital role in the economic vitality of a community.  The economic and social benefits of broadband services are well documented which bring it beyond the point of being called a luxury for the rich.  Communities should decide on the local level whether they would like to expend funds to build a broadband network if they feel that the incumbent service providers are not doing a satisfactory job.  Remember that much like water, roads, sewer, and electricity, the market for broadband services is not typically competitive in most communities.  There are typically one or two different service providers in a community.

Many communities are struggling to keep businesses and citizens in their community.  They seek ways to drive economic activity and a good broadband network is one way to accomplish that goal.  The most successful communities in this endeavor are not actually providing services, but offer open-access to any service provider that wants to sell services in their community.  The service provider purchases access from the municipality which supports the operation, maintenance, and growth of the networks.  Some communities are even seeing a net positive flow into their general fund;  therefore, building a broadband network can be done without wasteful government spending.  Before you know it, broadband networks will be necessity for the health, eduction, and safety of its citizens.

BroadbandBreakfast.com Staff, BroadbandBreakfast.com

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2010 – Speaking in a webcast by the Broadband Policy Series this afternoon, David Williams of Citizens Against Public Waste said that there “wouldn’t be any circumstances in which government should step in” where community broadband is concerned. According to Williams, even when local governments step in, there tends to be a centralizing process by which one locality wants the same services as another locality, thus evolving the process to a Federal level.

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Australia Expands Fiber Internet Network Footprint

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By RACHEL PANNETT

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Read more about key players in Australia's upcoming elections.

CANBERRA—Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard on Friday unveiled an expanded footprint for a planned national high-speed fiber Internet network that will now reach 93% of homes and businesses, up from 90% previously.

The network is a defining policy for Gillard’s ruling center-left Labor government ahead of an Aug. 21 general election.

But the program isn’t universally loved, even though it is popular with many voters. Australia’s main conservative Liberal-National opposition coalition has questioned the need for such an expensive service and has threatened to scrap the plan if it returns to power.

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Editorial: Hungry for fiber

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By Daily Record Staff

Hunger seems to be driving the new chapter in the grassroots push to build a high-speed fiber-optic network in Baltimore. And that’s a good thing.

The hunger, says Litecast LLC’s Mark Wagner, is for “something more,” in this case a potentially valuable economic development tool that might also spark social change.

This all started, of course, with Google, the California search engine giant that said in February it would pick a test market to build an ultra-fast broadband network connecting anywhere from 50,000 to 500,000 people to the Web.

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Vermont Is Wiring Itself With Fiber Because Nobody Else Will

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East Ventral Vermont Community Fiber Network moving forward…

06:24PM Thursday Jul 29 2010 by Karl Bode

Vermont already wasn’t exactly a great state for broadband, given the largely rural state is a ROI nightmare for large ISP bean counters. Their broadband fortunes were recently made substantially worse by Fairpoint Communications, who acquired Verizon‘s unwanted New England DSL network, then subsequently imploded under the not so watchful eye of Vermont regulators. Vermont’s been tired of waiting for uninterested ISPs to wire them so they’re working hard at wiring themselves.

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With Broadband Growth, Do Country Leaders Have Their Heads in the Clouds?

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Descending Clouds
Image by Gary Hayes via Flickr

Last week the FCC received flack from incumbent service providers and Congress for setting a 4 Mbit/s minimum speed for their definition of broadband because they realized that consumers are spending more time exchanging media with web sites hosted in the cloud.  Countries with the foresight to offer a minimum of 10 Mbit/s bandwidth by 2015 will continue reasonable GDP growth.

LONDON, July 26, 2010 – With the world moving toward cloud computing where services and data are delivered over broadband networks, many experts are concerned that countries are setting minimum bandwidth limits too low for future participation in the global economy.

These concerns were raised at a recent announcement by the U.K. government when discussing its objective to provide universal access at 2 megabits per second by 2015 – three years later than had been pledged by the previous administration.

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What lies beneath

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palm lined Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, near ...
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Santa Monica is making their excess fiber work for them to drive economic development and put money back into their general fund.  They receive over $1 million in revenue per year just leasing dark fiber to a few institutions.  Imaging how much they could be earning with a community-wide infrastructure.

City’s dark fiber network attracts businesses

DOWNTOWN — Something runs underneath Santa Monica. Something dark. Something that reaches into City Hall, into schools, into hospitals, into office buildings.

But this dark something isn’t exactly menacing. In fact, it’s meant to help the city be technologically advanced and attract businesses to locate here.

City Hall has been leasing its dark fiber to local businesses for four years with the intention of attracting businesses to locate here in order to spur economic development. The revenue from the leasing has then gone toward providing free public wireless internet.

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