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?"

Grassroute!

Reflects the grass roots movement and that you're routing traffic down fibre (grass is a fibre!)

Obligatory

Grassroots Open Access To Serve East-Central Vermont

Easy.

What would you name a community-owned, cutting-edge, G-PON fiber-optic network covering every remote corner of two-dozen contiguous towns?"

Heaven.

Obligatory

In Alberta, we call that the SuperNet.

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

In Sweden

I don't know if it works similair, but here in Ã-rebro/Kumla it's called "StadsnÃt":
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.

Re:In Sweden

I hate you.

Need a roomate? :D

Re:In Sweden

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

Isn't it obvious?

I would say CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet [compuglobalhypermega.net], but it's already taken.

How about CutCo, EdgeCom or Interslice?

I've got a good title

How about this:

Vermont's Eastern/Rural Independently Zoned Open Network

I'm sure the name has never been used.

Wireless (mobile) networking?

14.4k dial-up, wow... how about mobile broadband? Hey even GPRS is faster than this!
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?

Re:Wireless (mobile) networking?

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.

CommUNITY Network

CommUNITY Network sounds nice, gets the point across, etc.

Fiberoads

Fiberoads, take me home
To the place I belong
East-Central Vermont, mountain momma
Take me home, Fiberoads

rethink public ownership

If you go with public ownership, you're going to run into the same problems many community wifi projects have run into. Interference from telcos at the state and federal government level. They will be all over you, and you will end up wasting funds fending off legal challenges, and lobbying the state government to not pass legislation that would destroy your project.

Instead I suggest the cooperative model that has worked for rural electric providers for over fifty years. A cooperative is a corporation that is owned by its customers. Using a cooperative organization will keep the government out, which I think will be essential to your organization's survival.

Good luck!

This is Vermont

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

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:This is Vermont

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].

Too Good...

I'd call it the 2G2BT network. (Too Good To Be True.)

You don't really think that the incumbent telcos are going to let you survive to complete this, do you?

First pick the acronym

Pick the acronym first. Then decide what it stands for. Use a 'V', it is Vermont after all. Let's say you go with "VLAN". Vermont Local Access Network. That was easy. Or "VICAR". Vermont Internet and Commodity Access Route. Another easy one. "RAVE". Rural Access for Vermont Enlightenment. See how easy it is? Just remember: Acronym first. Meaning second.

Pick a dumb name

I would call it IntarWeb, or Interbutts, or some other dumb slang word for the internet, and then go around and sue the pants off everyone that uses it online. This way has three advantages:
1 - you have a lot of built-in name recognition
2 - you have an extra revenue stream from suing idiots
3 - you will force said idiots to stop using at least one dumb slang term, the whole world benefits!

H_O_P_E_D

"Home and Office Porn Efficiently Delivered"

Metamunicipal

Name it Metamunicipal: Get your fiber here.

--
Toro

Re:

What, you want it to suck mightily?
Granted, it might be the only former MicroSoft product whose name you could use without getting sued...

Re:Hrmmm news?

Slashvertisement it may be, but it shows just how far some people in the U.S. have to go to get even semi-high-speed networks where they live despite the countless dollars in subsidies given to the telcos for improving network access across the country. Obviously AT&T, Verizon et al. have done so much with the help of subsidies that financiers are trampling each other like gold miners to get in on the Vermont market.

Re:I'd call it...

You might be right. The city of Alameda tried it with traditional cable [sfgate.com] and failed miserably. It has a bond payment due soon and revenue won't even cover the interest [multichannel.com].

Lowell, Michigan also tried and gave up in 2007 [wzzm13.com] when it realized that the cost of upgrading the system to modern standards would far exceed the value.

Running a telecom service in an underserved area is more expensive and complex than many people think. Often, the area is underserved for a reason.

That said, maybe fiber will work. Or maybe it's worth it as a social value to the community, even if it's pricey. Fingers crossed for you.