WASHINGTON, July 14, 2010 – Santa Cruz, Monterey and San Benito counties want $43 million from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration fund for high-speed internet.
$12 million in matching or in-kind contributions have already been promised to build about 312 miles of broadband fiber from downtown Santa Cruz into rural parts of Monterey and San Benito County. Continue reading
Google thanked the communities that responded to the Google Fiber for Communities RFI in a wonderful video complete with tear jearking music. Additionally, Minnie Ingersoll released the URL to a new web site for the project that tracks the progress of the project and calls for community action to remove barriers to open-access municipal broadband networks. We anxiously await Google’s announcement of the cities that they select. Their efforts to drive municipal broadband are being felt before the first backhoe starts digging.
In February we announced our plans to build experimental, ultra-high speed broadband networks. Over the past several months, our team’s been hard at work reviewing the nearly 1,100 community responses to our request for information—not to mention the nearly 200,000 responses from individuals across the U.S.
By Sean Buckley
When the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency (UTOPIA) open access Fiber to the Home (FTTH) emerged in 2002, it was heralded as a hero by extending broadband to areas where the incumbents just did not feel they could make a good business case work. But ongoing financial losses and a lower than expected subscriber base, has forced UTOPIA to realign its strategy.
To get its vision off the ground, UTOPIA has asked its 11 member cities to join together to form the Utah Infrastructure Agency, whose goal would be to raise up to $60 million to finish building out its network. Although UTOPIA said in May it required more money to complete the network, this week was the first time it has laid out its new strategy that its member cities still need to approve. In addition, UTOPIA put in a bid to participate in Google’s Fiber Communities program in February.
One state down and 18 to go to allow municipalities to decide their own fate on the best broadband network option for them. Elimination of these laws is no guarantee that every municipality is going to enter the telecommunications business. Most of them do not have the expertise for such an endeavor which is why they will turn to private companies to assume that responsibility. If the incumbents could afford to upgrade the last mile networks in rural communities then there would be no need to consider leveraging the long-term financing of municipalities. The problem is that investing in rural broadband networks is not something that most public companies can do. As more and more communities build that last-mile infrastructure, I predict that the incumbents will start purchasing capacity or fibers from them.
“O joyous day! O rapture!” blogged a community broadband advocate on Monday. “That insidious bill [that] incumbents’ pocket legislator, NC state Senator Hoyle, tried to pass to kill muni broadband networks met its final demise over the weekend.”
Indeed it has. North Carolina Senator David Hoyle’s (D-GA) now-defeated amendment (S-1209) was cosmetically titled “An Act to Ensure That A Local Government That Competes with Private Companies in Providing Communication Services Has The Support Of Its Citizens.” But advocates of city/county backed high speed Internet projects just knew it as the Municipal-Broadband Must Die Die Die bill.
In our continuing series of previews for the “Connected States of America” documentary, TelecomTV’s Guy Daniels visits the headquarters of Google to learn more about the companys plans to create a Fibre City. In an exclusive interview with Google Chief Technology Advocate, Michael Jones, it now appears that there may be more than one winner — good news to the 11,000 cities that want the prize. Further previews will appear in NewsDesk every week.
Kansas City is looking for a private partner to help expand its fiber-optic network.
City officials on Wednesday issued a request for proposals from companies willing to help extend the city’s system beyond its existing 16 miles, mostly within the downtown loop, and the 27 miles under construction. The documents asked that the new lines connect all city-owned buildings, traffic signals and public safety communications equipment all the way to Kansas City International Airport.
Another community is taking their destiny into their own hands by building their own minicipal broadband network. Note that they will be building the network out to anchor tenants, like businesses, first followed by homes. CFU plans on using a PON system to start, but it looks like they are burying enough fiber to switch to active Ethernet down the road.
CEDAR FALLS — Cedar Falls is getting an express lane to the information super highway.
Cedar Falls Utilities is installing to-the-premises fiber optic cable throughout the community. Construction on the three-year, $17 million project which also includes a contract to Salesforce integration service is set to begin this fall.
The fiber optic cable will replace the existing coaxial cable that carries Internet and cable television service. The upgrade will offer maximum Internet speeds hundreds of times faster and give CFU bandwidth for up to 100 more HD television channels on its cable system. On Thursday, the CFU board approved the contracts for the project.
