Name For a Community-Owned Fiber Network?

CleverMonkey writes "I'm a town representative to a newly created municipal group creating a new type of telco. This group has formed to build and operate a FTTH network, and provide both triple-play services and access to other providers, to over 20 mostly rural towns in East-Central Vermont. The project is novel because of the size of the network (a cable pass down every road within 600 square miles), the low-density of the area served, and the public-ownership/private-financing model that is being used. Some of the towns included in this group currently have nothing beyond 14.4 dial-up on a good day. This project began as a grassroots effort in a couple of towns and the name they chose was ECFiber — East-Central Fiber — or sometimes the East-Central Vermont Community Network. We hope that this network will grow beyond one corner of this state, and we would like a name that is both descriptive and flexible. What would you name a community-owned, cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network covering every remote corner of two-dozen contiguous towns?"

Obligatory

[mrbcs]

In Alberta, we call that the SuperNet.

http://albertasupernet.ca/ [albertasupernet.ca]

Re:Wireless (mobile) networking?

[tomhudson]

Why laying cables in this wireless age in the first place? Cables are expensive to roll out and very hard to upgrade, especially when you are talking about low-density rural areas.

Fibre isn't affected by rf interference, sunspots, etc.

Fibre supports much higher speeds, w/o the problems of one person hogging all the bandwidth on an available channel.

It's now really easy to lay even in built-up areas [liteaccess.com]

It's CHEAP!!! [controlcable.com] 12 strands @ $1.30 /foot works out to 11 cents a foot/strand. Even if you only service 12 people with 1000' of the stuff, that works out to $130/person.

This is Vermont

[FranTaylor]

Perhaps in California or Florida your argument might make sense, but this is Vermont we are talking about here. I grew up in that part of the country. There is an enormous sense of community spirit that cuts across town and even state (why isn't Hanover in on this?) boundaries. These are very small communities we are talking about here, so this basically IS a cooperative. You can see it in the way they share school systems, mutual aid for fire and ambulance support, snow removal, and the like. The towns already own their own infrastructure for water and sewer, and in some cases they own their own electrical power infrastructure. They do things for themselves and they don't need the feds or Verizon to tell them what to do. Owning and running their own computer network is not a stretch at all.

Re:This is Vermont

[Telvin_3d]

the GP is not saying that the community is not capable of this. Or that these people somehow need the government or major telcos help to be able to pull it off.

The GP is saying that the telcos, through lobbying and lawsuits and other means, are entirely likely to do all they can to CRUSH this effort. They have a history of similar actions. A suggestion was made that being a cooperative might help provide some protection in the legal sense. It wasn't some sort of backhanded way of saying that the communities involved weren't capable of cooperating on their own.

Re:Wireless (mobile) networking?

[nonades]

You sir, do not apparently know how Vermont works. We have these things called "Mountains", they block these "signals" you speak of. In most places we're lucky to get cell phone reception (I live in a dead zone a touch south of Rutland).

Re:Wireless (mobile) networking?

[surgen]

As a Vermonter I agree that 14.4 is out of touch, we have 56k here.

Re:In Sweden

[aliquis]

I don't have stadnat, I still have Bredbandsbolaget.

100 mbps down / 10 mbps up for 320 sek / month.

Was 10/10 since feb 2000 or was that 2002? for 200 sek. But then they raised it to 320 sek and offered 100/100 as an alternative for 895 sek or whatever it was with a cap at 300 GB or something and additional payments for each additional 100 GB. Now they don't offer 100/100 longer but 100 down and 10 up for everyone instead.
But personally I think 320 sek are quite expensive, especially since I don't download much stuff and IRC are dead nowadays which was why I needed it anyway.

But then again with cable you only get 256 kbps for 99 sek, so that suck. I hate the guy/team/company/university/whatever which invented xDSL, and especially ADSL. Crappy Internet onnections to everyone!! Hurray!

They should have got fiber to everyone, kill the old copper telephone network, not built any new air broadcasting antennas for digital TV and just run it all over fiber to everyone. DVB looks like shit to begin with, sure it's "sharp", but there are artifacts all over the place.

And now someone will complain that the Internet aren't good for broadcasting, well, then fix that!

Fiber to everyone in Sweden was affordable at around 50 billion sek, stupid politicans which didn't took the plunge.

I have no idea where you live, maybe you could have had fiber in all homes in the USA instead of war in Iraq? ;D

Re:This is Vermont

[thpr]

While I would generally agree with you, in this particular case, that path has been paved already. The state legislature already took action to make such networks legal. The doubt disappeared when Burlington was tied up in court. The telcos & cable companies lost.

You can read the case study [newrules.org], or just go find out more [burlingtontelecom.net].

Re:Grassroute!

[Lachlan Hunt]

I generally pronounce route as "root" when used as a noun, but as "rowt" when used as a verb. Thus, in the case of a router, it's pronounced "rowter" because that's what it does: it routes the packets through the network.

However, in the case of "Grassroute", it would be pronounced "-root" because it's a noun.