Re: Muni Fiber and Politics

[Owen DeLong <owen () delong com>]

On Jul 21, 2014, at 18:25 , Miles Fidelman <mfidelman () meetinghouse net> wrote:

> 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

No to mention a wonderful Shakespeare festival, a number of very nice restaurants with good food and a pretty neat 
downtown to explore.

Need to get back up there... It's been a few years, but it's a lovely place to visit.

Owen