Muni Fiber and Politics

Tue Jul 22 03:59:05 UTC 2014

On Jul 21, 2014, at 18:25 , Miles Fidelman <mfidelman at meetinghouse.net> wrote:

> goemon at anime.net wrote:
>> On Mon, 21 Jul 2014, Miles Fidelman wrote:
>>> - the anti-muni laws hurt small localities the most, where none of the big players have any intent of deploying anything
>> 
>> This is exacatly why ashland fiber network came to be. Because no provider was willing to step up and provide service. So the city did it.
>> 
>> If there were laws against it there, then ashland would still have no service at all to this day.
>> 
> 
> Is that Ashland, Oregon?  I did some consulting on that project. The way it started was:
> - They needed to run a pair of fibers from City Hall to an out-building
> - US West (I think) quoted $5k/month/fiber, at which point,
> - the Mayor asked the director of the muni electric utility "what would it cost to run some fiber"
> - after some head scratching and some research, it came down to $100,000, one time - mostly for the tooling and some training (they had the poles, bucket trucks, linesman who were rated to work near live electric wires who were sitting around waiting for the next storm to hit)
> - after that, it was a no-brainer to start expanding the network
> 
> The cool thing about the project:
> - Ashland has a bunch of places that do Hollywood post-production - they eat up tons of bandwidth shipping stuff around - really great for that segment

No to mention a wonderful Shakespeare festival, a number of very nice restaurants with good food and a pretty neat downtown to explore.

Need to get back up there... It's been a few years, but it's a lovely place to visit.

Owen