Muni Fiber and Politics

Tue Jul 22 04:31:24 UTC 2014

On 21 July 2014 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
>
> Cheers,
>
> Miles

Cool story, however,

  http://www.ashlandfiber.net/productcenter.aspx#residential

... is nothing to brag home about.  5Mbps uploads max?  Meh, I get
more with mobile phone, plus my data is actually unlimited.

C.