Comments

1
We've been trying to build this network for well over a decade. The time is now to finish the job and give everyone access to high speed broadband and start acting like our city wants to be relevant in the year 2015. The idea that we'd argue against this, as if some multinational corporation is going to save us from something we could easily do better and cheaper is laughable. The people who think we should drag our feet on this want to cost the city more time and more money in the past for their own personal greed of having some kind of a world view where city government doesn't do anything. The internet is a utility. Anyone who disagrees doesn't actually live in the year 2015. Gigabit today, gigabit tomorrow, gigabit forever. It needs to be the new standard. If we honestly care about keeping us all connected.
2
Before the City rushes into this, I want to know what the other providers are doing. We got the City to remove its prohibition on utility boxes, so CenturyLink is busy rolling out fiber in several neighborhoods, including my underserved neighborhood of Beacon Hill. Wave has a gig product they can deliver over coax. Condointernet is busy wiring up multi-family housing. I'm sure Comcast is not sitting idly by.

The City wouldn't be developing its network in a vacuum. They would have to compete, or else buy out the competition (the way City Light did to Puget Power 65 years ago). Let's look at the whole picture before getting too excited about municipal broadband.
3
Looks great but you certainly don't need a gig connection for quality symmetrical video conversations. A solid 25M connection will do that fine as long as the peering points aren't congested. Maybe focus on remote surgery etc. and other applications that actually require a high bandwidth connection.
4
Ansel, What is Grant County, WA, PUD's take rate? They do this.

5
Comcast is a fucking joke, proof that corporate kleptocracy runs this banana republic. The Seattle mayor in his current and previous public nuisance roles took money from those criminals. A really cheap whore, at that.
6
I'd sign up for a utility I owned (public) in an heart beat.
7
You need to report on the Click! network in Tacoma. How much did they spend? How much do poor people who just wanna turn on their lights have to subsidize cable TV viewers? Will they have spent a fortune on an obsolete technology? Oh, and report on that exciting new development authorized by the State Legislature: the Television Reception Improvement District (RCW 36.95). Now there's where you want to take on a lot of debt to be repaid over 40 or so years by local taxpayers.
8
Initiative.
9
I don't see anything happening on this until after the election.
Murray, another one term mayor.
10
They have deployed, and are expanding, fiber down in the backwater of Mason County, all through their PUD. Some of it is limited to 100mbps, but gigabit is on the way as they finish the infrastructure. They just had a big meeting to see how much interest there was and to put your name in and it was full of people who wanted it, young and old. Makes Seattle look pretty backwards.
11
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand that if we own it we are all going to pay less for it than we would with any private company, just like what happened with City Light. Private corporations are motivated only by maximizing their own profit. Wouldn't you rather see that profit in the taxpayer's coffer and in jobs created locally rather than at some headquarters in some other city?
12
Not at all happy that while I was working this morning on my PC I got jacked by another fucking Comcast outage. Fortunately I have LTE, but for some of the work I do it is impossible to get certain things done on my LTE equipped phone and a tablet. Seattle needs Muni Broadband, and Ed Murray and the City Council duopoly suckups can go to hell if they won't get on board.
13
Yes, @2, CLink will give you gigabyte speeds in some neighborhoods, someday and charge you and arm and a leg for it with a big load of crappy service on top.
14
@11: Why isn't this common knowledge when it's common sense?!?

Seattle, want another great public utility instead of Comcast? Yet another reason to VOTE SAWANT.
15
Except that Sawant has been pretty mum about public broadband until maybe a month or two ago... it took a while for Goldy to teach her how to handle the issue.

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