Re: Muni Fiber and Politics

[Miles Fidelman <mfidelman () meetinghouse net>]

goemon () 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

--
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.
In practice, there is.   .... Yogi Berra