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Comments
Current napkin estimates are around half that. And it could be even less. Hope the report due in April includes cost estimates.
The wire or fiber that connects devices in my home to the rest of the Internet is my connection to the outside world. It is how I communicate with nearly anyone outside of my immediate vicinity. I want to know under precisely what circumstances the details of my communications will be shared by my ISP with third parties and under what circumstances my connection to the outside world will be severed. When policy violations are made, I want the head of the ISP to be called before my representatives in City Council to explain herself or himself. None of that will ever happen if my ISP is a private business.
Why the continued hypocrisy? You made this bed. You intentionally took this course. Why the sudden 180?
If we woke up tomorrow morning with everything in place, I have no doubt the city could do it and do it quite well - have the utilities handle the front office stuff and have the IBEW folks do the field stuff, and have a bunch of geeks do whatever it is geeks do to make the interwebs happen.
But the implementation is what would suck.
http://money.cnn.com/2015/01/29/news/com…
Gigabit Seattle was a project by Gigabit Squared. Gigabit Squared had their founder/ceo resign and has had disasters in other cities.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Gigab…
"Similar problems plagued the organization's equally over-hyped efforts in Chicago, resulting in the resignation of at least one high-level Gigabit Squared executive. Now Seattle has moved forward with a lawsuit against GigaBit Squared, during which it has been revealed that the company no longer technically even exists:
quote:The lawsuit indicates that Gigabit Squared has dissolved and is no longer a company. Co-founder and President Mark Ansboury resigned from the company in January amid the controversy over the failed deal with Seattle. The city is seeking $52,250 in unpaid bills for research and reports city employees put together, plus related legal fees.
Gigabit Squared made one payment of $2,500 in November 2013 on the original balance of $54,750, but has not made further payments. The city billed Gigabit Squared in July 2013."
And some people wonder why Google Fiber won't come to Seattle.
I think the deal was likely killed by announcing rather low pricing before they'd actually secured financing, but I'm sure McGinn was helping thrust that out there since muni broadband was a part of his first election and he was running again.
The implosion due to lack of money to roll it out was announced in Dec 2013, before Murray took office, and it could have been announced earlier if not for certain optics.
Then again, this is Seattle, where we'll do crazy stuff like collect money for a monorail before we have a real figure on total project costs.
http://www.geekwire.com/2013/gig/
Funding for Gigabit Seattle fiber Internet project was in question from the start
by Todd Bishop & Taylor Soper on December 11, 2013
This week, preparing to leave office after coming up short in his re-election bid, McGinn said in an interview with GeekWire that the Gigabit Seattle project has been delayed due to financing problems, and acknowledged that he’s concerned it ultimately might not come to fruition.
So what happened? Interviews this week with people familiar with the project make it clear that the financing was left largely up in the air, even as Gigabit Squared’s Mark Ansboury touted Seattle as one of the first cities to take part in the company’s $200 million broadband program.
In reality, that funding was not money in the bank, but rather a plan by the company to raise money for fiber projects across the country.
“When you dug into what Ansboury was saying, there wasn’t any money there, and there wasn’t any clear path to the money other than this general notion that if you got enough people moving in the same direction, money would show up,” said veteran broadband industry consultant Steve Blum, president of Tellus Venture Associates, who has cast a critical eye on the Gigabit Seattle plan in a series of posts on his blog.
If you think the monorail or Gigabit Seattle were boondoggles of high price/low performance, what do you think of the 10 years over time and millions of dollars overbudget Link system? The UW line was supposed to be finished in 2006, yet by then they hadn't even designed the length yet. An entire second round of funding was dedicated to the project after the first round disappeared.
You're holding Gigabit Seattle to a level of scrutiny that is beyond what most projects are held to here. Which is fine, as long as you hold all infrastructure projects to the same level of scrutiny. You don't seem to be doing that, though. If you did, you'd know there were bigger fish to fry in that regard.
BTW, Tellus Venture Associates is a California based broadband infrastructure firm. Of course they'd attack Gigabit Squared. They were competitors at the time. TVA wants Seattle money, so of course they're going to attack their competition on their blog. The amazing thing is that anyone actually read and believed their spin.
Fine, you're always right. I'm sure McGinn was so intimidated by what Murray would do to the project that McGinn announced the project was being halted in December, a month before Murray took office.
Maybe the founder of Gigabit Squared resigned because he feared what Ed Murray would do to the project. And the banks didn't fund it because they heard Murray hated it.
I like how you ignore some of the important facts at hand. Murray is the one suing Gigabit Squared, not McGinn. Your McGinn hate is not only showing, but showing your lack of objectivity in this matter.
The founder of Gigabit Squared resigned because Seattle pulling out doomed their venture capital. You do understand how businesses work, yes?
Who said the banks didn't fund it? The Geekwire piece, half of which just quotes TVA drivel?
Are you even familiar with the events being discussed in this thread?
Go figure.
When The Washington Post, Ars Technica, and even Mynorthwest.com all say the same thing regarding Murray, Comcast, and killing Gigabit Seattle, it forces one to wonder how you didn't see this message. Were you intentionally not looking or something?
"McGinn pulled the plug on the project because Murray made it clear he'd abort it."
"Damn that Murray!"
"Why? McGinn was the one who killed the project. It wasn't going to work."
"Well... well... Murray would have killed it if McGinn didn't!"
"..."
I'm gagging and gasping for city-utility-provided gigabit Internet, however I'd say that the ONLY way this is ever going to happen is to implement FTTN (Fiber to the neighborhood) which then transitions to one of the new super-high-speed Gigabit Wi-Fi technologies now on the horizon.
The City of Seattle is NEVER going to get behind digging up every single neighborhood street and yard to get FTTP - the chaos involved duplicating the existing physical cable/phone/power-line infrastructure just does not make sense.
If you run a business in seattle and need fast internet, give me a call. I can get you hooked up with the service you need without all the hassle.
http://www.caissontechnologies.com