Name For a Community-Owned Fiber Network? 253
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?"
Grassroute! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd call it... (Score:1, Interesting)
I'd call it.. (Score:2, Interesting)
It envelopes everything and everyone. The Fiber Optic Gateway.
Wireless (mobile) networking? (Score:5, Interesting)
And when setting up a community network, I'm also quite sure there are reasonably fast and much cheaper wireless solutions. Not necessarily WiFi (but with strategially placed directional antennas that should do quite well too), but maybe even packet radio like solutions?
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.
Or what about wireless connections for the backbone, and only wire the last bits to the homes, assuming clusters of homes that you want to connect?
CommUNITY Network (Score:5, Interesting)
How about COFFEE (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Wireless (mobile) networking? (Score:1, Interesting)
East Central Vermont is right about here [google.com], in White River Junction, one of about 3-4 population centers in Vermont. Much bigger than where I live, and we haven't used dial-up here since about 10 years ago.
In Sweden (Score:4, Interesting)
http://www.stadsnat.se/ [stadsnat.se]
Simply "Urban network".
The prices are right atleast, I think you can get 10 mbps for 99 sek = 10.5 euro / 16.65 us dollar.
You pretty much have the name already (Score:2, Interesting)