So, we'd be paying to use our own publicly owned fiber optic network? Brilliant!

@1 Kinda like now how you pay Comcast to use our publicly-owned utility poles. Dark fiber alone is worth about as much as poles with no wires.

I'm so excited for Gigabit Seattle I may stay in my current rental house longer than planned :D

Pretty cool stuff! I'm glad McGinn's original plan, the bid to get Google Fiber, failed. Google forces municipalities to give up all regulatory power. That we maintain some control over this Gigabit stuff is a huge advantage. Here's some great stuff from the Harper's blog by Whitney Terrell, who did a fantastic cover story on Google Fiber a bit ago. http://harpers.org/blog/2013/03/network-…

Damn damn damn! I'm 4 blocks outside of the coverage zone.

@1 The city is leasing its dark fiber to Gigabit. Gigabit is building fiber to the home.

The alternative is to leave the fiber dark, and continue to pay top dollar for crappy service to Comcast and CenturyLink.

Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit. I had no idea that my neighborhood was in the expected coverage zone. Yay!

That's very good news.

Good news.

Still too expensive, compared to First World nations pricing.

Dang it sucks to be in a backwater like the US.

I think I am just inside a coverage area. I am elated!

Argh. Their Columbia City definition is not Columbia City....

oh you heartless fuckers...one block off!

Are you kidding me? One week before I move out of Northgate, right on the edge of their service area?

The internet gods giveth, the internet gods taketh away.

Being stuck in the jerkwater known as Leschi, our only options were Wave, CenturyLink, or ClearWire, all of them shitty. Well, technically I still have my old Megapath employee connection, but that's over CenturyLink copper. And now I'm going to be able to get speeds comparable to an ISP or Seoul, SK? wahooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

6 blocks away from nw Seattle. I am at the last straw with Comcast.

If Gigabit is so wonderful, why do they not respond to email inquiries?

Their original promise was that service was to begin this fall, but now they are saying it will instead be first quarter 2014. Why the delay?

And just now much is Gigabit paying the City to use taxpayers' dark fiber? Inquiring minds want to know.

There's a lot more to this story than the rah-rah over speed. Start digging, news media.

I'm waiting for Clear to flip the switch to Wimax II. They already get 50Mbps with WiBro in South Korea.

Oh god, I got the biggest boner reading this.

Please mark NSFW.

I've been waiting for this for a long, long time as someone stranded in the Central Cable TV Hinterlands. I'm just a touch sad that my house is considered Beacon Hill rather than Central Area.

And for you all complaining about just being out of zone, go to the Gigabit Squared web page and sign up as a potential subscriber. The boundaries aren't set in stone.

Can we force them to operate as common carriers? Take the fee, shovel the bits, and ignore the patterns? If I run a Tor exit node will they stand by DMCA safe harbor provisions and tell the MPAA scammers to take a hike? When NSA comes knocking, will they say, "come back with a warrant"?

Its still total vaporware; if it actually gets off the ground and succeeds in the long run, I'll be amazed.

I am across the street from the covered area!!!! Across the street!! WTF!!

The network is only as fast as the slowest link. The city might have a gigabit feeder network, and for a price its crony contractor will give subscribers access to it, but that's only a small part of the speed the user sees.

In the end, it's not about raw speed. It's about what you do. Once you leave the metropolitan area, your packets go through a series of routers until they hit a particular server that hosts the website you use. There are typically all kinds of bottlenecks along the way. Gigabit broadband doesn't mean much if you use it to access a server that takes five seconds to respond to your request, and then sends the information back at less than a megabit per second, as is more often the case than people realize.

And those prices for high-speed access are the same as, or more than, what Comcast charges. And it's not city wide. There's much, much less to this than McGinn and his butt-buddies are saying.

Example: When I make a request to the Stranger's website, there are all kinds of delays. It works much slower than my Internet connection does.