According to a press release issued by the City of Duluth Communication office, there will be three new fiber lines running into Duluth. The new connections should enhance speed and reliability.
The release says over the last several weeks multiple projects relying on federal stimulus dollars have been announced that include Duluth as a hub. City officials say this recent announcement may also help entice Google to build its new test network in the region.
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“Big city broadband. Rural reality.”
That’s how Socket Telecom is touting the fiber-optic network it’s set to build in central Callaway County and a sliver of eastern Boone County.
This month the US Department of Agriculture awarded Socket a $16.6 million grant and a $7.1 million loan under the federal American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Within the next 90 days, Socket will use that money to start building a fiber-optic network capable of serving more than 3,000 homes and businesses.
SARASOTA – A British company plans to soup up a number of U.S. cities — including Sarasota — with ultra-high-speed fiber-optic Internet networks.
The discussions have been going on for several months, according to Rich Swier Jr., founder of the Sarasota think tank known as The Hub and a member of a recently created Sarasota broadband task force.
“They were following the Google fiber effort and we connected with them during that campaign,” Swier said.
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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.
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.
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.
