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Fiber Optics Come To Rural Washington 72

Posted by timothy from the or-some-inconveniently-large-747s dept.
MoiTominator writes: "Here in rural eastern Washington, broadband is hard to come by. The Public Utility District of Grant County has just completed a project to roll out 7000 miles of fiber to connect business and homes to broadband services like voice, video, and internet access. All for $40 a month! Maybe I don't have to move to Seattle now." The list of service providers lists even lower prices, too.
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Fiber Optics Come To Rural Washington More

Fiber Optics Come To Rural Washington

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  • Bellevue, the large, prosperous, and SUV-filled suburb of Seattle, remains a haven of modem access! Most of Bellevue, including Chez Glomph, has no DSL, no Cable internet. It's a cruel mixture of history, density, and thoughtless local government, who allowed AT&T to put in cable internet "as soon as possible". Wow, that's a stringent deadline!

    Telocity, actually went so far as to wire my house (the technician here said the line was good to 416kbps), then decided that Bellevue sucked. Yeah, any place with some rich guy named Gates is a bit handicapped.... (Medina, WA being a de facto part of Bellevue).

  • You can see that while libertarians on Slashdot are emulating good honest Republicans like Timothy McVeigh in print, the evil government has gone and given fiber optic to the people. I wonder why the wonderful free market system didn't get there first. Government actions such as this one, or the public works power generation in LA, deprive corporations of their right to gouge people for essential services and contribute the proceeds to the Republican party. Why, look how the government went and invented the Intenet and it is now free! The horror!

    Note for Republicans: Libertarianism != Liberal, Libertairan = Ayn-Randian-nutjobs, Liberal = belief in democracy
  • True dat.

    -B
  • I grew up in eastern WA, and living over here in Seattle for the past 3 years, I definatly enjoy my visits back home... I can actually DRIVE my car over there... it takes 10 minutes to travel 15 miles, compared to the 45 it takes to go the same distance here. Western WA is out of room and over priced.

    Who would have ever thought Connell would have DSL!?!? Strange but true, the town of a little over 2500 has 128up and 384 down.
  • Man, you are so jealous. I bet you're dark green with envy right now, aren't you? C'mon, fess up.

    --Xantho

  • We don't even have cable TV here in this part of the state (ok, this part of my county - the ridges kinda cut us off), and the best dialup Internet I can get is 26.4K because of bad phone lines. It's extremely irritating, and I'd be happy just to get a 33.6 connection, much less DSL, cable, or *gasp* fiber...

    Now that Napster is dead I have no access to music, because Gnutella and the other alternative networks don't function decently for people without high bandwidth.

    Count your blessings, so to speak. (Be glad you aren't me.) I've never seen more than 10 seconds of streaming video in my life.

  • Awhile ago, I read some stuff about a new broadband startup deciding on Grant County as a test market. There was some kind of funny technology that made doing this very cheap, and they wanted to test the technology out of the way of competition. Anyone else see it? (Was this in MIT Tech Magazine?)

    It will be very interesting to see how the coming of broadband will affect one of the most conservative places outside the South. This is the palouse mentioned at the end of Cryptonomicon, where technology is still not widely understood. The biggest city in Eastern Washington still doesn't have fluoridated water!

    Now Eastern Washington is competing directly with agriculture in China. China will probably win, due to the lower cost of labor, better irrigation water supply and higher government subsidies (the Chinese government funds farms at about 10% of the farm's output, while the US, a WTO member, is limited to 5%). But perhaps an influx of broadband can make Eastern Washington a viable place for tech companies to locate. One or two startups would pobably revitalize the entire region's economy.

  • In almost any city in Canada, one can get either cable or ADSL for $40 CAN. That's about $26 USD. Actually, we have legislation in place that puts a cap on the price of high speed access at $50 ($33 USD). Cable, DSL, satellite, whatever. $50 max, and almost always $40 or less due to the competitive market. It's all good.
  • I'll second that! I live in Waldorf, MD, less than 20 miles from the DC border; no high speed access at all. Weird, because that area is getting a lot of mid-30s couples that want to move away from the metro proper.

    I'm moving to Alexandria later this month; I'm already signed up to have Roadrunner installed as soon as possible after move-in.

    --RJ
  • OK here we go:

    #1. We forced the people of the west side to keep thier sex offenders on their side of the state.

    #2. The Washington State Penitentiary is just north of town, not a federal prison. And frankly, I think it deters crime to see where you have to go. Not that you can actually see the prison from most parts of town.

    #3. I think congressional term limits are a bad idea to begin with. We already have term limits, they are called elections. If someone is doing a bad job, they get voted out. Oh, and if you show me one politician who hasn't "changed his mind" about something, I'll eat him.

    But since you are obviously an authority on the Walla Walla valley, I'll concede to your better judgement as to whether or not this is a good area to live in. After all, all I do is appreciate our low crime, zero pollution, no traffic, robust economy, and excellent breadth of broadband options.

    Today's high temperature: 66F

    -Sokie
  • Here are two wireless internet startups based in SE Washington:

    http://www.highspeed.com/ [highspeed.com]

    http://www.pocketinet.com/ [pocketinet.com]

    Highspeed already serves several markets throughout the Western USA. Pocketinet is still local but I think they have bigger aspirations. :)

    -Sokie
  • Too true. Presque Isle, Maine has cable modem service. The most rural cable modem deployment in the world, I'm told. They probably have webcams for watching potatoes grow and stuff.

    Seriously though, it's been good for the economy up there. As of recently, Burrell's Transcripts offices are there now, obtaining service via one of the higher business class offerings of cable modems.

  • It's probably not far off here in the US as well. I work for a cable isp and we'll actually be testing a new product for 100Mbps service by the end of the year. According to the company who developed this stuff, it's really just a matter of replacing some of the field hardware with some (relatively) inexpensive stuff that allows it to use the 1+Ghz spectrum where it will consume way more than your normal 6Mhz channel width worth of bandwidth for both up and downstream. On one hand, it's not as susceptible to noise/ingress problems the way the current return path is, but you still have to have a clean plant or a lot of amplifiers to get this new stuff to run well.
  • I know a guy who is working for Artesian Direct [artesiandirect.com], the company providing all the speciality equipment for this project. He says after Grant county is hooked up, Douglas county is up next. They have everything ready to go, now it is just a matter of hooking it all up.
    --
  • Who is Keyser Soze?
  • Is this the next Northpoint?

    Sounds like an incredibly expensive venture. Massive amounts of bandwidth to the home will necessitate a massive pipe to the internet.

    $40/month sounds a wee bit too cheap, unless it is being heavily subsidized.........
  • Rural? I've got friends living in rural Wahkiakum County in Washington. Rural? Well, that's not very specific... except for the single incorporated town, Cathlamet, the whole county's rural. And they've got ZERO stoplights in their county (although there is 1 flashing red light).

    BTW, it's also the least populous county in the state.

    Broadband? Heck, they don't even have a local ISP.

    Wal*Mart? McDonalds? Try a 45 minute drive to the next county.
  • You're lucky he didn't sue you under the ECPA.

    If you knew anything about the ECPA of 1986 you would know that "system operators" are allowed to read any email they like that happens to cross their system. The illegal part is when it gets to dissemination.

  • I live in Grand County. Mose Lake to be exact. Moses Lake is the biggest city in the county and it's not exactly a big city!

    Anyways, I think they have this service rolled out to 1 home and 2 businesses. The upstream and downstream have been capped at miserably low rates.

    I don't have a lot of hope for the future unless things turn wireless. Most of the houses in Grant County are seperated by farm land and there's just no economical way to run fibre out to everyone.

  • It's actually better than that. The city didn't want to short change local ISPs, so they decided not to be an ISP themselves, but rather lease the lines dirt cheep. They couldn't come up with a way to differentiate between me and a large company, so they decided to provide an IP and DNS for $15 a month, with disadvantages to try and discourage individuals from circumventing ISPs. No news, email, tech support, but if you have the slightest idea what you are doing, you can apt-get at over 350kps for dirt cheep!
  • Like pretty much all other ISP's, it's probably not within your means to re-sell their services. If they set everything up right, and because you guys aren't "Amish," they likely have equipment to tell whether you are doing this or not...
  • Tell me about it! You know, MAE-EAST runs right through Reston/Chantilly... And I'm stuck here in East Chantilly with COX RoadRunner as my only high speed option, and it takes ***17*** hops to get to MAE-EAST. Can you say ridiculous? c a r y w i e d e m a n n -at- y a h o o -dot- n o
  • Because you have so much bandwidth for such a cheap price it might be worth buying a shed in BF, WA and filling it up with servers. When better-than-T1 bandwidth costs $50/month, your site doesn't need much revenue to survive. There is no explicit prohibition on running servers, and why would there be? It's dedicated bandwith, not a pipe you have to share with your neighbors a la my cable modem. All of the sudden, running a website that gets even moderate amounts of traffic might be getting very cheap. (Mmm, multiprocessor Athlon boards are out and will soon sink to prices even I can afford...)

    Now if only this would happen in a country whose ISPs aren't on the leashes of the RIAA/MPAA. I'm thinking of fiber-hosted opennap servers, etc.

  • Hey---Mod this up ;)

    It might or might not be a troll, but its fscking hilarious!

  • It might be expensive in Canada, but its the going rate down here :)
  • I live in Redmond (near Microsoft) with no DSL/Cable and I am planning to move to Seattle.
  • My family lives in Moses Lake as well, but not within the proper city limits. This means that, although the fiber runs tantalizingly close, my parents are still stuck with sharing a 56kbps dialup connection between 2 computers; not quite the ideal situation, by any means. (I, on the other hand, have nice 100 mbps connectivity thanks to my school, but I digress...)

    When the service reaches throughout Grant County, however, Seattle truly will have reason to be envious.

    Side note, on actual speeds expected for end users: 200-650kbps, this info from a GCPUD employee.

  • If you are looking for broadband inet access in Eastern WA, Spokane has it.

    I would beg to differ. As a resident of the Spokane suburbs, I can say that unless you live in the center of downtown you are either too far from a CO for DSL, your neighborhood isn't wired for it, and you certainly can't get cable (I don't know if cable is available anywhere in Spokane, certainly not in the rural areas). This is great news; I think it will be competing with a new technology to deliver broadband over powerlines though.

  • Road Runner should be out there by Dulles. The Road Runner HQ is in Herndon (of course, there are still parts of herndon that can't get it). But the area you're talking about is covered I think.
  • I really wish I had some mod points. Bravo!
  • OMG, we got slashdotted! :) Okay, as a resident of this wonderful county, and somebody who's considered posting this before (I didn't because my 56k modem only can connect at 24k or less due to really crappy phone lines out here), I'll point out the big deals with the Fiber service that we're getting (for those who don't want to take the time to navigate the slow ass site that the gcpud has right now (they can hook up fiber to homes, but can't hook it up to thier own servers, go figure). The links to the homes will actually be gigabit links, shared off a community hub (a nice cisco gigabit switch basically. From there, there are specially designed meters that service as both the standard electric meter, and the fiber optic hub (10/100 Switch with Gigabit uplink). The actual purpose of the fiber besides keeping meter readers from covering approximately 7000 square miles of county land to get every meter, is to actually provide a real telecommunication infastructure to an area where not every home has a standard phone line. Included purposes (content providers are being worked out right now) is to be able to provide: Always on 100MBit/sec Internet Digital Cable over fiber, both standard and HDTV streams, with pay-per-view, and abilities to pause live tv (ultimate tv without microsoft (yay)). IP Phones, for expanded local telephone coverage and much cheaper long distance. The money is being facilitated mostly by the GCPUD, as we have for many years, using hydro-electric power, been making extra money and storing it up. The other half is by the consumer (a $300 install fee), and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15, with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same. Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined. As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned. The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing. Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here. Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that. This actually leaves me with two wonderful questions for the slashdot crowd to answer. 1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used). What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully. 2) Since where I live is 4 years off, and I don't have the luxury of things like Cable modems, DSL, or the like, would it be prudent to make an investment in 2-way satalite internet for the time being, even though in 4 years, I won't need it anymore. Tell me what you think MaverickUW
  • Seems like someone's got the model backwards. Last-mile transport for $40? ISP service (including customer service, billing, Internet egress at broadband rates, mail accounts, etc.) as low as $7? You can't even find outsourced customer service for less than $2.50/mo. per sub

    The beauty is that the ISP's that are offering currently on the fiber (Yes, it is already up and running in limited test areas), are already Internet Service Providers to everything from Wireless internet to ISDN and dial-up access. They themselves are only paying $40/month (though during test period it's free) to have the fiber lit to their buildings, and don't need to make any great investment in equipment. Basically, they'll also be able to use the fiber as opposed to dedicated T-1 lines to reach the outside world, thus saving costs. Those that are already in business, all but one offers internet access over the fiber for $9 for the first Gigabit of bandwidth, and $4 for each additional Gigabit of bandwidth.

    OK; obviously someone is confused. Basic rate phone for $10? Try closer to $20, then add all your taxes and charges and it's closer to $35+. No *LEC would touch you for $7/mo, even if the last mile was free. They'd probably look for no less than $12-$15 given these conditions, and still have to tack on the taxes and other fees.

    Another beauty of the fiber. We're skipping standard telephone and telecommunications companies. Most of the taxes imposed on that is currently for the use of the telephone lines. Can't be charged if you're skipping them. Actually, deals have already been inked out for the telephone services at around $10 a month (you really have to check out the Website [gcpud.org] to get a clearer understanding of how this is set up. And the $40 per month is closer to a administrative fee or something like that which you said. And as you know, right now, we pay dearly to buy the fiber optic line and the gigabit routers and everything that are going into this project.

    And you think they'll let a region of broadband residential customers dump into their network? Free IP egress for broadband ISPs only running DNS? If they did, your telecom companies would have litigation fired in no time. Maybe I'm misreading this, but where does a federal gov power entity get off buying an OC3 or more of resale bandwidth, even if they do resell it (a cost I didn't see mentioned)?

    Point 1: NoahNet, is already set up, and is designed for use with the power grids. Point 2. Grant County PUD, the ones buying the fiber for our area, is owned and operated by the people of Grant County. We've been saving up and we're paying for this fiber ourselves. Like stated before, current ISP's are already ISP's in the first place, and are adding fiber service to their list of services. Washington State already passed laws allowing Public Utilities to provide telecommunications solutions to the people.

    I don't know... the whole thing does sound rather collectivist and redistributionist. Stealing money from other people's pockets in far away states (taxpayers and ratepayers funding that Federal power program, for example) to get cheap Internet access? Pay your own way, thank you!

    Again, we aren't stealing other people's money, as we are financing our own fiber. It helps when you have public utilities that use hydro-electric dams for power and don't have to worry about buying lots of energy on the open market. We've been saving for years, and are finally doing something with our money.

    As for my question on setting up an ISP, I wasn't meaning as a big company, more of just providing the services for my neighbors around where I live.

    MaverickUW

  • Funny story related to this... my father-in-law used MSN dial-up for $4.95/month. When cable came to town, he was like, "ehhh, I don't need extra speed. It's another $15/month! What do I need it for?" I talked him into it, and of course there's no going back. I thought it was funny that he didn't know how good he had it here.


    --

  • My city, Alameda, CA, is doing this as well:

    http://electricity.ci.alameda.ca.us/telecom/index. html [alameda.ca.us]

    For the link wary: http://electricity.ci.alameda.ca.us/telecom/index. html

    This is apparently becoming a very popular and, in some cases, cost effective way to get high speed internet access to areas served by the muni's.
  • Just remove your cookies at boot. Confuses the hell outta them. That is unless you run Linux. If you run Linux, then there's no reason to reboot and you'll have to do with a crontab.
  • Yeah, right. Until they get enough people on it and tell you they are increasing the cost and providing you with better content (heh, they they are making the internet content better?!).
  • I am someone who lives there (Eastern WA) and thats part of the problem: often "Eastern WA" is said to mean "East of the Cascades" but thats not how it's zoned geographically and not how it's really recognized technically. It's dumb, and it's how it was used in this story.
  • I live several miles from downtown and have 45dB line quality, and use DSL. Several people I also know live as far as Nine Mile Falls and have AT&T@Home Cable inet access (CompUSA even has demo setups of it, and try to hook you into buying it). As for your lack of access, thats a bummer -- but I think it's quite a bit more widespread than you think. [ It's also really weird to see people from Spokane come out of nowhere in /. :) ]
  • Uh, as a resident I think it's a bit fuzzy whether or not Grant County should even be considered "Eastern" WA. More like "Middle WA" or "Barely Eastern WA". If you are looking for broadband inet access in Eastern WA, Spokane has it. Anyway, Spokane is the only major city in Eastern WA anyway. The whole area and everything east of here to Montana and Southeast of here down to Utah is considered the most socially disconnected place in the U.S. What really boggles me is what it is about this sparse, boring, uneventful story that qualifies it as "news worthy" for /.
  • Move to Olympia. :-) We get great DSL here. It's a much more pleasant town than Seattle and environs, anyway. (I say this after commuting up there every day for six months.)

    Unless you live in the boondocks here, you're good to go for DSL. If you do live in the boondocks, you should still be able to get cable.

    ------------

  • Let me know when they know what Rural really is.
    If they can hook up Omak, Tonasket, Manson, Brewster, Okanogan, Mallot, or Bum fuck egypt, Then I will be impressed.
    Grant county isn't all that rural. Omak, the town I live in, could be considerd rural. It's the largest county in the entire state of Washington, we have _two_ stop lights total. One at the main intersection and one at the highway near "Wal*Mart" and "McDonalds"
    Three internet service providers, one of them which is just reselling anothers bandwidth. You're choices as a resident are, Modem, or Wireless. Wireless is 40$ a month for 64Kb/s, 100& a month for 128Kb/s. Along with 400$ + worth of hardware.
    The phonelines around here are so terrible it's, well, pitiful. Though they expect to have fiber optic lines laid by October of this year, oh woopy doo. I'd like to know when they figure out how to turn them On and have the benefits trickle down to a consumer level.

    (No, I'm not bitter)
  • Y'all ever been to Walla Walla, (south eastern Washington) we have more wireless ISP's than you can shake a possum's tail at (three for a town of 40,000). And a software development studio owned by Havas Interactive, (the people who own Blizzard and Sierra). And one of those newfangled interweb cafes. People here care. Or at least they will when they realize that you can buy hog feed online [progressivefarmer.com].
  • I used to live in St. John near Pullman, and when the St. John telephone company started offering dialup accounts to the local residents, almost everybody in town with a computer wanted one. It's really great for people in Eastern Washington, some who literally live in the middle of nowhere (I lived on a plot of about 500 acres of family farmland) find that the internet is a godsend for information. Broadband access would make the internet more enjoyable for everyone. Oh, and by the way, most of the people I've met in Eastern Washington are some of the smartest, most down to earth and enjoyable that I think I'll ever meet.
  • Im sittin here wit my 56k modem still looking for Blue Ridge Communications to provide me with the broadband connection thats been comming next month for the last 2 years. Dont complain about being out in the middle of nowhere.
  • That was a rhetorical question, as in,

    What's a rhetorical question?
  • At first I was all excited, I thought you meant the suburbs of Washington, DC.

    Can you believe I live in the shadow of Dulles Airport, not more than 10 miles from America Online's "Campus", but we can't get DSL? All the politicians around here love to talk about the 'Dulles Technology Corridor', etc... the need for more roads and so on; If we could just get decent residential access, at least 75 people at my company could telecommute more than half the time.
  • Are we going to get a new article to discuss every time some new swath of land is graced with broadband access? Why?
  • This would be very expensive by itself, but it is being put in place by the Public Utility District, which already has a decent amount of capital to work with. The various substations have all been connected with fiber already to various backbones, this is one way they are putting the excess bandwidth to use.

    At least this is what their representatives have told me in the past.
  • in tacoma WA a few years ago, we had a problem with at&t. they said "sorry, we're looking at broadband in maybe 4 years. if that."

    so tacoma power took it into their own hands. they built a big fat internet pipe, and created Click! network to sell broadband to the city. at&t and us west (now qwest) took notice. click is fast cable; they don't really sell directly, but license out to small local isps (to promote small business). the best thing about it? tech support is LOCAL. i'm talking about calling Fred Tech, and asking him directly. he's friendly, not burned out, and answers the phone.

    once click was taken for serious, at&t and us worst quickly offered cable and dsl, respectively. its quite nice to have so much local competition.

    if local gov't is serious about getting broadband, and increasing competition, they might do well to follow tacoma's lead.

    check clicknetwork.com [clicknetwork.com] for more info.
  • Figures. Eastern Washington state has broadband while western Fairfax County, a part of Washington, D. C. metropolitan area does not. Have fun.
  • > Just wait for this low priced service to rise 10-50% over the next few years. @Home had cheap roll out price, but now it cost $51.00 a month here in > Oregon.

    Do you get to vote for @Home's mgmt? We get to elect the Public Utility District commissioners. I'm paying less than 3 cents per KWh right now.

  • As a (former) native of eastern WA, I can tell you this much... Billy-Bob and Susie-Jean McMullet don't give a rat's (cow's?) ass about this new-fangled "In-ter-net." It's nice to see a little sprinkling of technology stagger its way across the Cascades... however, I still anticipate eastern WA will remain a cultural and intellectual black hole for quite some time. Next up: new automotive technology that eliminates the need for gigantic 4x4s from 1980!

    Just a rant from a college student who ran across to the west side of WA as fast as his car could carry him. :)

  • Who is Keyser Soze?

    The bad guy from the movie "The Usual Suspects". Very good movie. I'm too lazy to look it up on imdb.com [imdb.com] and see if that's really how you spell his name.

  • When broadband comes up the Methow valley to Winthrop and Twisp, I'll move up there, telecommute, and never look back.

  • Keyser Soze loves his money...

  • Wow. (Score:2)

    by FFFish ( 7567 )
    This is pretty impressive.

    It means that parts of America are just beginning to get to the point where parts of Canada were five years ago.

    In the telecom business, that's pretty significant. American telephony is usually a decade behind the Canadians!

    Seriously, this is really good news. If it works well, it'll be deployed in other areas. DSL could become ubiquitous! Prices would drop, and all the neat shit that we've been promised forever and a day might actually start to happen!


    --
  • as God intended them

    Are you sure you aren't mistaken? God specifically wrote that he wanted an IP on every tree, every toad, yea verily, every stone shall have an IP.

    Your god must be a false god. A god who doesn't have a good fiber connection isn't a very good god, don't you think?

  • A shitload of bandwidth won't do you any good if the provider it connects to doesn't have decent lines to their interconnect/peering partners. That's expensive as hell and hard to support on just $40ish/month.

    The cable net service I got is capable of 38mbps down and 10mbps up which is a shitload of bandwidth without the need for running fiber, plus it supports a hundred or so of digital tv signals...

    Do I get all that bandwidth? Hell no, cause they can't support it all further upstream. Instead I get to deal with....

    • 1.5mbps capped downstream
    • 128kbps capped upstream
    • Running servers is prohibited, including game servers (uses bandwidth when you're not around I guess)
    • They are planning on putting caps on usenet downloads of about 1GB/day.

    Now, trust me, as someone stuck in modem hell until this became available this month, I am one happy muthafucker and am not complaining. My point is, what good is fiber into the house? If you get it, it'll probably be TOSed, QOSed, and capped until it's not that big of a deal...

  • and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15,

    Seems like someone's got the model backwards. Last-mile transport for $40? ISP service (including customer service, billing, Internet egress at broadband rates, mail accounts, etc.) as low as $7? You can't even find outsourced customer service for less than $2.50/mo. per sub.

    Isn't fiber optic nearly free? (Kidding, though from reading all those futurists blathering about DWDM and how it'll make fiber nearly infinite, the resultant cost per subscriber nearly = $0). Why then $40 for that free fiber, unless it's for administrative costs (not surprising when offered by a quasi-governmental entity). You're being fooled, tho, when the folks are quoting you $7-$15 for the "rest of the stuff".

    with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same.

    OK; obviously someone is confused. Basic rate phone for $10? Try closer to $20, then add all your taxes and charges and it's closer to $35+.

    No *LEC would touch you for $7/mo, even if the last mile was free. They'd probably look for no less than $12-$15 given these conditions, and still have to tack on the taxes and other fees.

    Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined.

    More like $150 combined.

    As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned.

    And you think they'll let a region of broadband residential customers dump into their network? Free IP egress for broadband ISPs only running DNS? If they did, your telecom companies would have litigation fired in no time.

    Maybe I'm misreading this, but where does a federal gov power entity get off buying an OC3 or more of resale bandwidth, even if they do resell it (a cost I didn't see mentioned)?

    The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing.

    As Level3's horribly poor stock price can tell you, there's a lot more to a network than optical transport stuck in the ground.

    Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here.

    What's the complaint? Socialized medicine in the U.K. means waiting 5 years for knee surgery. Better get used to those lines if you're demanding others pay for your access.

    Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that.

    I don't know... the whole thing does sound rather collectivist and redistributionist. Stealing money from other people's pockets in far away states (taxpayers and ratepayers funding that Federal power program, for example) to get cheap Internet access? Pay your own way, thank you!

    1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used).

    Initial answer: ROTFL

    Serious answer: I see this question on /. periodically and can't figure out why the telecom business gets this while we don't see the "I want to run a power/railroad/airline/whatever business from my basement" posts here too. What do you know about engineering commercial WANs? Backoffice ISP operations? Telecom billing? Regulatory issues?

    Your comment about "just needing to offer DNS" provides good perspective on how you shouldn't be doing this. What about customer service? Billing? Collections? Where's your traffic going to terminate? Insurance?

    Incidentally, you mention usage-based billing (other local ISPs charging by GB used). How many national ISPs do you see doing this? Are you prepared to shell out several hundred $K (minimum) to buy the software, systems and such to handle this accounting from Netflow or whatever your source? Does your market even support it? (usage-based for resi?)

    What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully.

    Buy an ISP that does it successfully:-)

    Sorry for being direct, but after seeing enough people get fleeced by ISP vendors out there looking for targets like you, I'd encourage you to use your money for better purposes.

    I saw enough people put second mortgages on their homes to buy Ascend Pipelines back in the mid-90s, thinking that was their key to riches (Step 1. Buy Pipeline Max. Step 2. ? Step 3. Make big money!), only to be thrown out when the house was taken away and the cars repo'ed.

    *scoove*
  • Since I hopefully gave you enough reasons why not to consider your ISP project, and there are probably still people that would go ahead and jump the cliff anyways, let me pass along a few recommendations gained from first-hand lessons:

    - Get a good team: Technical knowledge is valuable enough to get you a job working for someone else. Underestimate the business side and die poor. Your team should have commando-type persons (able to wear many hats, think, plan, implement, document, support, etc.) of backgrounds including angel-funding (you're going to need a lot more $$$ than you think), finance, marketing, product development, telecom operations, network support, etc. Configuring a BSD box or a Cisco router is one of about 20+ mandatory competencies you've got to have.

    - Write a business plan: You may think you're wasting time that you could be using to implement, but absent a plan, you most likely will never see any outside investment and will certainly die a quick death. You can bet your competitor will have one.

    - Get into the angel circuit: Start pitching that plan and evangelize your business. Whoever your CEO-type is had better plan on staying out of the tech and being full-time in front of investors, media, etc.

    - Plan on a quick exit or death: Your national competitors have very deep pockets and can bleed you quickly. They can raise the capital thru public markets, bonds, etc. to buy that unreachable $2 million hardware upgrade that'll take 5 years to recover, causing your customers to flee to them for better product/service. Your only hope is to capture initial customers and plan on selling for (hopefully) a nice multiple. Forget about becoming the next Worldcom... you're more likely to die from being eaten alive by a pack of starving squirrels.

    Incidentally, mention to a prospective angel investor that you plan on running the company until you retire, building it to a major national powerhouse, and handing control to your kids to run is a surefire way to get blacklisted in the circuit. These people want to get a return on their investment in no more than a year or two in most cases, so unless you're going the same direction, they'll certainly avoid your deal.

    - Get people that have done this before (successfully). There's nothing in this business like experience.

    - (Last but certainly not least) Build a personal financial buffer that'll allow you to be unemployed for 3+ months. Odds are in this business that it'll happen to you.

    *scoove*

  • I used to be totally pro-DSL for those reasons, but unfortunately my new house can only get 128kb DSL. So I went cable modem.

    I really have to give credit where credit is due... Cox cable here in the Palos Verdes Peninsula in California rocks. Not only do I seem to be getting great consistent bandwidth, but they also assign you a static IP (!). No problems setting up my mail server with my domains. Apparently they are part of the new breed of cable design that can easily subdivide local loops if they start to get too saturated.

    Oh yeah... $19.95/month. Can't beat this deal with a stick, considering I used to pay $100/month for static IP 384kb DSL at my old house.


    --

  • All those fiber optic lines and the site _still_ gets slashdotted©
  • Very well put.

    Somehow you manage to be funny where TLA doesn't.

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • They had to run new cables for some other project a couple years ago and decided to lay fiber down at the same time as well. This allows the company, Ashland Fiber Network [ashlandfiber.net], to give everyone in town amazing digital cable TV and cable internet access. Since they are just local and aren't as concerned with profit and taking over the world as someone like AT&T or Time-Warner is, you can pay around $30 a month for cable access, and the TV is cheaper as well. The network is also open for local ISP's who sell you service, not the town.

    Ashland also provides their own power so they don't have to worry as much about blackouts this summer (we are 10 miles north of California), and everyone is wired. They are also working on a plan now to have wireless internet access through the whole city within a couple years so you can go downtown to the park with your laptop and still be working. The town is just under 20,000, and is home to a college (Southern Oregon University), but it has everything you could want in a town for internet access. It could use a decent computer store, though.

  • Also in Michigan (Score:3)

    by Brian Stretch ( 5304 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @04:21PM (#161812)
    This story [mlive.com] was in today's newspaper. Rural govenments here in Michigan have been getting fed up waiting for the usual suspects to provide high-speed service. I can see this working in such small towns. Hopefully they'll get it right.

  • Maybe you will get support???? (Score:3)

    by www.sorehands.com ( 142825 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @04:45PM (#161813) Homepage
    So, you will get support like on RoadRunner?

    After sitting on hold for 40 minutes.
    "Please remove TCP/IP, then re-install it." Why? "because we found it always solves the problem -- I guaranty it!". Will you bet $1000 on it? "I can't do that."But it works fine on my LAN. "Oh, your computer is hooked up to LAN hardware, we can't support it." But your cablemodem is LAN hardware. "No, it's a modem.

    "We will have a technician come to you in 4 days between 8am and 1 pm. If it's your problem, you will be charged."CLICK

  • broadband deployment (Score:3)

    by Phocker_ ( 459054 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @04:01PM (#161814)
    It seems if you want to have a excessive amounts of bandwidth you have to live in the middle of nowhere...

  • Prices are _not_ $40 a month or lower (Score:4)

    by sportal ( 145003 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @03:32PM (#161815)
    You have to pay two charges a month for this Internet service. There is a $40/month PUD Access Fee and a $9-$25/Month ISP charge, making the actual monthly charges $49-$65/month.

  • The Deal with the Fiber (redone) (Score:4)

    by MaverickUW ( 177871 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @07:34PM (#161816)
    OMG, we got slashdotted! :) Okay, as a resident of this wonderful county, and somebody who's considered posting this before (I didn't because my 56k modem only can connect at 24k or less due to really crappy phone lines out here), I'll point out the big deals with the Fiber service that we're getting (for those who don't want to take the time to navigate the slow ass site that the gcpud has right now (they can hook up fiber to homes, but can't hook it up to thier own servers, go figure).

    The links to the homes will actually be gigabit links, shared off a community hub (a nice cisco gigabit switch basically. From there, there are specially designed meters that service as both the standard electric meter, and the fiber optic hub (10/100 Switch with Gigabit uplink).

    The actual purpose of the fiber besides keeping meter readers from covering approximately 7000 square miles of county land to get every meter, is to actually provide a real telecommunication infastructure to an area where not every home has a standard phone line. Included purposes (content providers are being worked out right now) is to be able to provide:

    Always on 100MBit/sec Internet

    Digital Cable over fiber, both standard and HDTV streams, with pay-per-view, and abilities to pause live tv (ultimate tv without microsoft (yay)).

    IP Phones, for expanded local telephone coverage and much cheaper long distance.

    The money is being facilitated mostly by the GCPUD, as we have for many years, using hydro-electric power, been making extra money and storing it up. The other half is by the consumer (a $300 install fee), and of course the $40 a month just to light the fiber. Internet access by most companies will be between $7-15, with phone service for another $10, and cable for about the same. Meaning cable, broadband internet, and phone service for $75 combined.

    As for the uplink, our county has several connections to Bonneville Power's NoahNet, which is federally owned. The Pud is basically leasing out the excess capacity of these lines they are installing.

    Also, the project isn't proposed to be finished by 2005, much to the dismay of many people out here. Unlike other people's claims, we do know what technology is, we aren't Amish or anything like that.

    This actually leaves me with two wonderful questions for the slashdot crowd to answer.

    1) What would be the best way to set myself up as an ISP on this fiber connection, since people would mainly just be needing the DNS services (local ISP's are going to charge by the gigabit of bandwidth used). What setups would you recommend, (I already intend to use BSD) and what all would I need to do it successfully.

    2) Since where I live is 4 years off, and I don't have the luxury of things like Cable modems, DSL, or the like, would it be prudent to make an investment in 2-way satalite internet for the time being, even though in 4 years, I won't need it anymore. Tell me what you think

    MaverickUW

    PS, sorry about the last copy, preview button wasn't working cause of stupid internet access

  • not quite ready (Score:4)

    by hallsa ( 444611 ) on Sunday June 10, 2001 @03:37PM (#161817) Homepage
    As I come from Moses Lake, the largest city in Grant County, I have been excited about this project since hearing of it last summer at the County Fair while visiting home.

    But it is only fair to note that while this project has great potential for residents, it has not been installed in very many areas yet. The initial projections say it will take about 4 more years before the entire county has service.

    Also for prices, those are just for the individual services, the fee for the connection itself is extra, but also will eventually provide other services including television services and such. The PUD also benefits from having easy access to meter readings, one of their large motivators in the project

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