ROBERT ULLMAN
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800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
800 Maynard Ave S, Suite 200, Seattle, WA 98134
What we need is an entire broadband network, where every house is automatically connected with a basic level of service. The potential for delivery of services and new innovation/business models would be huge were we to have a large networked population at high speed. While this cost would be substantial, the potential benefit to the region and to the City could be huge.
Let's think beyond simple pay-for-service, and start thinking about his like our roads. What good would our road system have been we built it out but then only allowed expected a few to pay for and use it. Think of all of the opportunities that would have been lost, businesses that could never have been started.
Broadband to every home would revolutionize the City. The problem is that most people now associate "broadband" with what Comcast provides, and it's night and day.
http://crosscut.com/2011/06/09/seattle-c…
That said, I think it's not a "man on the moon" level of a dream for a city utility to build out to the neighborhood and for individuals to pay a connect fee larger than what McGinn's administration proposed.
One place to start would be to get the list of potential customers from GigaBit. I've spoken with many tech-types who would happily pay for a gigabit connection, helping subsidize a city-wide network.
And FWIW what I've read elsewhere suggests Gigabit pulled the plug on itself, Murray having nothing to do with it.
When Gigabit Squared's sales guy came to a North Beacon Hill Council Meeting last year, it totally felt like he was the monorail salesman in that classic episode of the Simpsons.
http://www.ohio.com/news/local/bob-dyer-…
And YES...of course they'd have to be a monorail salesman on this issue, because NOBODY has sold a vision of what a high-speed, city-wide network could mean to Seattle. Very few people have the vision yet, and this article leads me to believe that Goldy doesn't quite get it.
This is NOT about defeating Comcast. This is not about faster movies. There's a deeper issue at play.
McGinn realized the scope of that vision, but then he understood how much energy it would take to sell that vision to Seattle, and punted. Gigabit was simply a nod to do something.
No company can do this for Seattle, just as it would be ludicrous to rely on a single company to build out our road network. And pilot projects really miss the point too, just as the SLUT doesn't do much of anything to promote well-built transit, and may even harm the idea of it.
1) The city regulates Comcast and CenturyLink differently. Yeah, some of this is federal, but really... all Comcast has to do is file for a permit to roll out new equipment while CenturyLink has to go through the nightmare that is SDOT Director's Rule 2-2009 (each equipment box in public right of way requires the abutting homeowner to say yes, plus 60% of homeowners in a 100' radius to say yes... abstainers count as no, so this is almost impossible to overcome). For four years, both UPTUN and CenturyLink has asked the city to change the rules so we can start getting some competition to the cable providers in our neighborhoods. We've documented all of that here: http://embed.verite.co/timeline/?source=…
So... of course most people have big-evil Comcast (or WAVE) and don't have any other choice. Competition's a good thing, right?
2) Just my opinion, but it feels like the city was delaying making any changes to see if Gigabit Squared would pan out. Seems kinda hokey to provide a special advantage to your pet project, while blocking competition.
So, where do we go next? On Muni-broadband, it's absolutely important to have this discussion. It's essential that we discuss broadband, openly and transparently, and talk through the issues here. Unfortunately for me, I don't think spending the $400+ million dollars and having to wait a few more years is a great deal for the taxpayers/consumers of this city. We've waited for over 4 years already for the city to start improving things, and to be frank, they've only gotten in the way. I'm tired of having no-viable alternatives in the neighborhood. Let's fix the regulations first as a short-term solution and start investigating a long-term solution.
Essentially for a minimal monthly cost - a few dollars for maintenance/admin - a state of the art wifi access point would be installed on each block with cheap ($30) wifi mesh repeaters made available for individual subscribers for street side window mounting and signal retransmission. With today's 802.11ac and soon to come .ad wifi tech, gigabit per second speeds are possible. As needs be at a cost of about $100 a sub, households could be directly wired to the block access point with conventional copper.
The problem was the ego's of the politician required a massive cadillac fiber build costing the $700M, providing an at the time state of the art system inferior in all respects to today's wifi infrastructure described above. Because of the cost nothing was done.
The network described would cost little more than the conventional smart meter network, and could proceed neighborhoods at a time without any significant financial commitment or operation risk.
The problem of the politicians ego still remains however.
City Light's so-called "smart meters," which measure electrical usage at an invasive level of detail ("those spikes there and there are when she gets home from work and turns on the tube") and surely qualify as surveillance equipment under the ordinance Seattle City Council passed in March of 2013. That ordinance required city departments that have or intend to acquire such equipment to submit for approval their protocols for use. For equipment that departments already had, protocols were due--by law--in late April of last year. But after months passed without any further mention of the protocols and I requested any such protocols last October, Council took three months to search, found a total of four documents, and are still holding them, pending a mysterious legal review.
If City Light continue on their path of ramming these meters down our throats with apparent disregard for the privacy issues those devices raise, I'm not so sure I want them to have the ability to monitor the bulk of our electronic communications.
That's highly misleading. I chatted in detail with a CenturyLink representative a few months ago and learned that their monthly transfer cap (250 GB, if I rememeber correctly) meant that if I used the fastest service they offer where I live at full bore, I'd hit the limit in 46 hours. I push around 100 GB daily through a Tor node I run on a VPS I rent. If I pay for 40 mbps service, I intend to use 40 megabits per second, with open wireless for my neighbors and passers-by and a hefty donation to the Tor network.
Also, it's not broadband.
I can envision a system where the hardware (the fiber) is owned by the city but the services, e.g. the ISPs like Comcast, century link, wave, pay a fee to use the city's fiber.
The city itself doesn't have to be an ISP, although it could be. If it does, I think it should be treated as a business unit that must be sustainable on its own - not funded by tax payers. An exception might be a tax to compensate for basic service to low income residents, as exists for telephones.
The problem is getting from the main fiber lines to buildings / homes. It's pretty asinine trying to get through the city's requirements to accomplish that.
Comcast's is up for renewal this year. Perhaps we should push to sunset their exclusivity clause so we can open things up to competition between Comcast and Wave?
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-…
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/small-…
I am admittedly biased. An acquaintance of mine went through quite an ordeal when PG&E pushed these onto customers in Oakland a couple years ago.
This used to be FREE WIFI in the u-distrct and it was a great idea...until no one kept funding it...
Having the near monopoly of Comcast and CenturyLink is marginally better than having the full monopoly of government control. When I got sick of Comcast, I switched to CenturyLink and saved a few bucks in the process. What happens when the government raises rates and we have no one to turn to. Why, if the government can barely run a website, would we turn over control of the entire internet?
What we need is a better product and a better distributor not less avenues. When internet speeds in Korea are 300-450MB/s and Google Fiber touting 1GB/s speeds, letting these companies destroy Comcast is the better approach. We're already seeing Comcast lose its grip on customers thanks to Netflix, Hulu, and other providers. The same will happen for the internet.
Turning over the reigns of the world's most important method of communication to the government is the worst possible scenario, especially when there are so many other companies doing it so much better.
You do realize that "the government" is not just one entity, don't you?
I still believe there is a large difference between municipal/state government and the United States government. And I think we have a better shot at preventing the City of Seattle from willingly turning over our private information to the feds than preventing, say, Comcast from doing so.
http://stopsmartmeters.org.uk/dr-dietric…
What I would like to see is the poor having the exact same level of access to information as the affluent. Does it already exist? I don't know. This is especially important if individuals might be earning a degree online at home or while sitting underneath a tree. I see HUGE potential for all sorts of custom learning modules.
Of course, after the entire population has doubled his/her brain size from learning --- come the jobs? Where will they be? Consciousness expansion? Beats the SLOG out of me! Maybe we will discover that there are more geniuses in our own community than we thought.
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
Seems dumb to name three competing private companies and in the same sentence label them monopolistic.
I remember way, way back in 1995 when they were talking about making internet service free to everyone in rural California. Gee, what happened?
Oh I remember. De-regulation.
The time is ripe for some feasible alternatives. Murray and the Council have another opportunity to remove a barrier with the Comcast renewal this year. Nickles had the same opportunity, and was scared off by threats of Unfair Competition. THAT is the reason this never moved forward. But since the City of Edmonds won their muni BB lawsuit against Comcast, that fear is now moot for all practical purposes.
I personally don't see WiFi as the answer, unless it is in line of sight. Even then nothing beats fiber to the home. The possibilites that existed in 2007 were very limited in comparison to today.
The city already has OC3 and higher fiber backbones running in all directions. It has more than enough dark fiber on what already exists. McGinn attempted to sell that off, that is now open to being discarded, as the city has learned over and over again that public-private partnerships don't work to the advantage of the citzens, or the city. The discussion was always about that "last mile" to the home. There are more options and less bullshit to contend with in 2014.
If not city light, create another department, and run it like the utility it is. This is doable, and feasible, it only takes the will to do it.
This type of model is a compromise, but compared to the past is not a sellout, and will actually produce something people can use and afford.
Parts of Seattle can get super fast internet gigabit speeds through condointernet.com which is owned by wave and wave has been upgrading and can offer higher speeds than Comcast a 110mbps as of January.
Wave is a local company based Kirkland though I hate Kirkland. Buy local right
On data allotments, they are annoying, but most people don't go over them. And they are not enforced in Seattle or any former broadside area at this time. This will change probably change and the guy who commented earlier transferring 100 mbps an hour or day?? Is going to have a hailstorm.
As for competition. It would lower bills prices are 5-10 $ less in San Francisco, I would say,on average. There is crazy competition as many as 3 cable companies it an address but they have the same speeds so?? There is some overlapping in areas in Seattle with wave and Comcast, parts of queen Anne and capital hill around Seattle U. But most of Washington Oregon and California there is only 1 cable company for any address and dsl sucks. Sorry
My 10 cents
I *LOVE* the idea of a municipal entity managing the fundamental infrastructure from the datacenter to the home. What I don't love is the idea of trading one monopoly for another. Seattle should provide the physical connection from the home to the datacenter, and then let *all* ISPs use (and compete on) that same physical infrastructure to provide the Internet connection, email, billing, and support to the customers.
This is a public/private model that actually plays to the strengths of all parties. The city can get low-cost long-term financing for the fiber buildout, and the private ISP businesses can compete on an even basis with service, speed, pricing, features, etc.
This is the model that Clinton's 1996 telecom reform act tried to create on the phone companies networks, but Bush's FCC and the Supreme Court dropped the ball and let AT&T & Verizon off the hook and keep billions in tax subsidies. Seattle can do it better and show the nation that this model works.
Seattle City Light has been too successful at delivering reliable electric power at low cost for 108 years to make this public/private thing an easy sell. All we'd have to show for letting private ISPs in the game is a cheapo option of shitty service for the poorest customers. Seattle City Light gives top notch service to everybody, rich and poor, and that is a universal social good.
A wholly municipal system decreases the social divide; a tiered system exacerbates it.
It'll get better with gentrification. Not much need for high speed internet in the MySpace community.
This is sh*t white people like and now they are moving into the CD and Beacon Hill en masse they 'suddenly' discover this problem and want gub'ment high speed internet access to help 'the poors' down the street. The same poors are displacing.
But go ahead, imagine the MySpace community needs 100 Mbps service to somehow spur the economy for them.
The issue with competition isn't regulation, it's a private model mandating quick quarterly returns. Look at states (Texas & California, for example) where they kicked cities out of franchising and have state-level "one size fits all" agreements (much like how phone service is handled here). Those states did see some penetration by AT&T and Verizon, but both of those companies have scaled back their wired broadband build outs due to investor pressure.
The technology's they want to use are just too slow. We need to have service that competes with asian and european cities - even Comcast's best service doesn't come close.
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
FUCK YOU COMCAST
Cites that wired themselves and also became the ISPs cant offer the service dirt cheap until bonds are paid off.
This is not just about providing faster service. It's also about expanding access to those who currently can't afford it.
When you are the one footing the bill to run Clear Curve Fiber all throughout the city, sure you're going to cherry pick profitable neighborhoods first (just as Verizon did with FiOS, just as Gigabit Squared tried), you need to recoup the staggering costs of running wire. But when the fiber is already installed by the city into every apartment and home and the ISP simply signs a lease agreement to access it, there is no cherry picking period!
Comcast offers cheap Internet Service, you just have to be poor to get it. Its not going to be a super fast 20 or 50mb connection, but something much slower and more affordable to low income residents. This requirement was part of the Comcast/NBC merger. So no need for a city subsidized service, when Comcast can offer this. Also the city can always require ISPs offer low speed, low cost service as a condition to leasing the fiber.
FYI, the 2007 study estimated a municipal broadband network could break even at 24 percent market penetration of retail service, but at 30 percent penetration for wholesale service. The only way it really makes to wholesale access is if these ISPs substantially increase market penetration.
Im sorry, but the market will have 100% penetration because Seattle will build the network to every home, every business in the city. Were not asking companies like Comcast to build this network, the city does and if it only penetrates 30% of the market, then that's the fault of the city.
Once completed, the city can then lease it out to 3rd party ISPs who then provide the service and because you'll all 5-8 different companies (not including Comcast, Clink and Wave) competing, the price will drop and everyone wins.
The difference is non-profit vs. profit. And service is not profit based, but break even.
Click Network in Tacoma is not a good example. Costs are not much if any different than just going with one of the oligopolies. One of the goals here is affordability and being able to break even, maintainence included. Look at the Chattenooga, TN model.
Goldy is on the right track. The 2007 report he refers to should be read and understood before people make assumptions. It is actually more feasible in 2014 than it was in 2007. This is a good time to stir up that pot again.
Even if the city just owned the pipe, this could be better than the current situation. Remember, Comcast and Century link only put the cable up, they rely on the city's pole infrastructure to put that cable on it.
The technology is called broadband over power lines (BPL) and has been developed and tested by several power companies throughout the US over the last 10 years. One need only to plug in a BPL wireless modem into any outlet and you have instant access to the internet.
I believe that the only reason that this has not been implemented already is that Comcast and Centurylink know that they would have to cut their prices in order to compete. Also, for-profit power companies aren't sure they can make enough money implementing this.
However, a private municipal company like PSE could implement this by providing the existing infrastructue (throughput pipeline) for any of the internet service providers who want to lease bandwidth through their pipeline (even Comcast and Centurylink if they were willing to pay for it).
This would open up tremendous competition for high-speed internet services throughout all of Washington State (city and Rural areas as well, since everyone already has pre-wired electric wires in their homes and businesses.
Anyone who claims that there may be too much interference generated for short wave radio operators or otherwise, is still living in the 20th century and shouldn't be taken seriously. Any engineering problem can be solved (and most likely already has.)
The technology is called broadband over power lines (BPL) and has been developed and tested by several power companies throughout the US over the last 10 years. One need only to plug in a BPL wireless modem into any outlet and you have instant access to the internet.
I believe that the only reason that this has not been implemented already is that Comcast and Centurylink know that they would have to cut their prices in order to compete. Also, for-profit power companies aren't sure they can make enough money implementing this.
However, a private municipal company like PSE could implement this by providing the existing infrastructue (throughput pipeline) for any of the internet service providers who want to lease bandwidth through their pipeline (even Comcast and Centurylink if they were willing to pay for it).
This would open up tremendous competition for high-speed internet services throughout all of Washington State (city and Rural areas as well, since everyone already has pre-wired electric wires in their homes and businesses.
Anyone who claims that there may be too much interference generated for short wave radio operators or otherwise, is still living in the 20th century and shouldn't be taken seriously. Any engineering problem can be solved (and most likely already has.)
I don't understand the whole discussion of needing another solution. You've already got freaking wires right there.
Alternatively, slip a SIM in there and work out a deal with a cellular provider.
Aside from that, no home user needs those kinds of speeds anyway. 50-100 mbps service that *actually delivers* speeds in that range are sufficient for just about any home user's needs unless they are doing something out of the ordinary, in which case they should be paying extra as that puts quite a strain on the network. Even multiple family members streaming HD movies at the same time wouldn't come anywhere near 100 mbps.
Also, Comcast has the technology to deliver much faster service anyway; they have fiber to the node already, with coax used in the last mile in a loop that could deliver many times more speed. There is no incentive for them to offer it, so they offer what they do for the prices they do. Without sufficient competition, there is no reason for them to offer better.
CenturyLink is upgrading their network in some places, too, offering their own Gigabit network in some places (as they're doing here in Portland). They could also offer more advanced DSL pretty easily with fiber to the node, but again, no reason to.
Business ISPs have EoC (Ethernet over Copper), which provides high, reliable speeds over two dry copper pairs that are already in every home and business, and if one wanted to, it could be adapted for home use relatively inexpensively if a company wanted to roll it out.
The only way for this to work well is for a loca municipality to build out the fiber infrastructure, Fiber To The Home if you must (way overkill), and allow independent ISPs to provide the backhaul Internet access as mentioned already. That's the best way to ensure fair competition and leverage the investment. They won't be able to provide the best service themselves, and you would be stuck with another monopoly. Between tax dollars, bonds, perhaps grants and maybe some private investment, they would only build out the fiber last mile and tie it in to the existing dark fiber assets (that every major city has tons of anyway). Charge all of the independent ISPs the same rate to utilize it using dense wave division multiplexing, regardless of subscriber count. This would also bring back the ability of local indy ISPs to compete again.
One more thing. This whole thing about low income Internet access. No household NEEDS super fast Internet to have economic benefits from the Internet. The subsidized rates provided already by Comcast are plenty sufficient for job searching, online learning, running a home business perhaps, etc. this whole thing about being left behind by not getting super fast Internet is BS. It's just like those who say they NEED cable and fancy Smartphones and all this, while saying they can't afford food or gas / bus money. Get back to reality. In the old days, we didn't have cable unless we could AFFORD it. And in a pinch, there's always the library to get online, or a cheap used laptop at a friend's house or free public Wifi. The whole thing is BS. low income people will NOT benefit economically from gigabit internet, and legitimate home internet use will never exceed 100 mbps (in 2015 anyway) in nearly every case, unless you are sharing your internet with neighbors, running servers or trading torrents, all against all ISPs' Terms of Service and not a necessity. If you use that much data constantly, you will (and should) be billed extra for it. Don't think that "unlimited" actually means unlimited - it NEVER does, and it shouldn't.