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Fast, affordable Internet access for all.
That brought to mind my recent conversation with Larry Owens, manager of customer services at Silicon Valley Power. The Santa Clara, Calif.-based municipal electric utility built fiber between its subsystems to increase the organization’s reliability. But Silicon Valley Power overbuilt that network, which enables it to lease dark fiber to the school district and service providers via its SVP Fiber entity. The electric company also purchased MetroFi, a free Wi-Fi services company that fell on hard times, to connect new smart energy meters to its offices. Those Wi-Fi assets also are being leveraged to deliver free outdoor Wi-Fi access to anyone within Santa Clara.I remember reading about this network earlier this year in a Public Power Daily release:
The technology and added bandwidth capacity allow teachers to hold virtual field trips and will eventually allow students who are unable to attend school the opportunity to join their classrooms via a home computer, Silicon Valley Power said. Download speeds have made classrooms more efficient, the utility said. "Before the fiber network, the download process was very slow and sometimes wouldn't work at all when my class tried to use streaming video to add to our lessons," said Jennifer Rodriguez, who teaches a fourth- and fifth- grade combo class at Katherine Hughes Elementary School. "Now I can utilize instructional videos off the web and stream them quickly, making the lesson more interesting and the learning more fun for my students."
Arizona Avenue, the Mid-City area and the city's office district will all be getting makeovers if the City Council approves two contracts that will connect 40 signalized intersections to City Hall's centralized traffic control system. The work represents the fourth phase in a five-phase effort to connect all of Santa Monica's intersections using fiber optic cables.
Time Warner is an $18 Billion dollar company with $1.3 Billion in profits in 2010. Verizon did $106 Billion with $2.5 Billion dollars in profits in 2010. They're not worried about Chino Hills. In fact both of these companies are actively lobbying states around the country to prevent local municipalities from entering the broadband market. I'd like to see our city enter this business and give these national companies a run for their money.Our video (included below) comparing community fiber networks to services from big incumbent providers has some there thinking that they should consider building their own network to prepare for the near future when much higher capacity networks will be needed to take advantage of all the applications moving to the cloud.
"AT&T and Verizon have slashed the frontline workforce, and there simply are not enough technicians available to restore service in a timely manner, nor enough customer service representatives to take customers' calls. Let me share some statistics. Since 2004, AT&T reduced its California landline frontline workforce by 40%, from about 29,900 workers to fewer than 18,000 today. The company will tell you that they need fewer wireline employees because customers have cut the cord going wireless or switched to another provider, but over this same period, AT&T access line loss has been just under nine percent nationally. I would be shocked if line loss in California corresponds to the 40 percent reduction in frontline employees. "Similarly, since 2006 Verizon California cut its frontline landline workforce by one-third, from more than 7,000 in 2005 to about 4,700 today. I venture that Verizon has not lost one third of its land lines in the state."Note that AT&T, Verizon, and other massive incumbents like Comcast have been wildly profitable over this term. The same trend holds in cellular wireless - as noted by the Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. wireless industry is booming as more consumers and businesses snap up smartphones, tablet computers and billions of wireless applications.
"I'm a simpleton, I've always had this view that we pay taxes and the city pays to do this kind of thing. Now if we can get out of taxes, I'd be happy to put up Wi-Fi.Excellent answer. When it comes to broadband, there are absolutely appropriate, strong roles for local governments.
AT&T's U-verse upgrade would enable it to offer connection speeds three times faster than current service — but not nearly as fast as what fiber proponents envision. Several members of the tech industry interviewed by the Guardian cautioned that another AT&T upgrade might be necessary after less than a decade to keep pace with technological advancement.Ha! Considering that AT&T U-Verse tops out at 24Mbps downstream (if you are lucky and live close to the key electronics) and a piddling 1.5 Mbps upstream, it is already obsolete. Cable networks offered considerably better performance last year -- suggesting that AT&T should stop wasting everyone's time in SF with this approach. We have previously written about efforts to use the City's fiber to bridge the digital divide and the SFBG article introduces us to new ideas using that asset.
Meanwhile, Board of Supervisors President David Chiu recently asked DTIS to examine the possibility of leasing excess capacity on city-owned dark-fiber infrastructure, which is currently in place but not being used. This could boost bandwidth for entities such as nonprofits, health care facilities, biotech companies, digital media companies, or universities, Chiu said, while bolstering city coffers. "There are many places in town that need a lot more bandwidth, and this is an easy way to provide it," he said. Sniezko noted that other cities have created open-access networks to deploy fiber. "This is really effective because it's a lot like a public utility," she explained. "The city or someone fills a pipe, and then anyone who wants to run information or service on that pipe can do so. They pay a leasing fee. This has worked in many places in Europe, and they actually do it in Utah. In many cases, it's really cool — because it's publicly owned and it's neutral. There's no prioritizing traffic for one thing over another, or limitation on who's allowed to offer service on the network. It ...
The program was selected for this award in the economic development category for the network's effectiveness in attracting technology companies to the city and supporting existing Santa Monica businesses with a leading edge broadband infrastructure, city officials said. Santa Monica City Net's model is being replicated by the cities of Burbank and Long Beach, and is in review by Chicago and Calgary.As we explained in Breaking the Broadband Monopoly, Santa Monica started with an I-Net on which they could not run commercial traffic and slowly built their own network that had no conditions on how it was used. In the past, this network has received the "Significant Achievement Award" from the Public Technology Institute (PTI). This press release recaps some details from their network:
The City created a telecommunications master plan and built a fiber optic network that connected 59 buildings used by the City, Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, and Santa Monica College. Savings realized by this project enabled the City to construct its own municipal fiber optic network, Santa Monica City Net, to support traffic cameras, security cameras, real-time parking advisory systems, a traffic signal synchronization system, and real-time mass transit signs. The City also leases dark fiber and lit services to local businesses for affordable broadband. The results of Santa Monica's advanced broadband initiative are a reduction in construction costs of new broadband service, an increase in purchasing power of connected local businesses, and a broadband market expansion for global Internet Service Providers that now offer service to small, medium and large commercial buildings.
The Camino Fiber Network Cooperative was formed in 2009 with the recognition that unless county residents and businesses — particularly those located in underserved central portions of the county — step into the gap and build their own infrastructure, the county is in clear danger of being left without modern telecommunications services. That would render it an undesirable location to purchase or rent a home or operate a small business, degrading the county’s current and future economic viability. To avoid this scenario, the Camino Fiber Network Cooperative intends to construct a consumer-owned, open access fiber optic to the premises network that will meet today’s needs as well as those of the future. For membership and other information including a consumer survey, visit the co-op’s Website.
Currently the co-op is surveying the community through the website, www.caminofiber.net; trying to sign up members for the cooperative; and seeking funding for a technical study of how and whether they could connect to a middle mile source. To hire an expert will cost $30,000 to $50,000, Pilot said.Stay up to date via the Camino Fiber Network website.