Google Fiber Is Officially Making Its Way To Portland 153
An anonymous reader writes This week the Portland City Council has approved a franchise agreement with Google to bring its fiber service to Portland. "As a result of the unanimous vote, Google will be subject to a five percent 'franchise fee' on its video revenues. It won't have to pay a three percent 'PEG' fee that Portland otherwise charges rival Comcast, but it will offer free Internet service for Portland residents for a $300, one-time fee. It'll also provide free Internet service to some to-be-determined nonprofits, in addition to providing a total of three free Wi-Fi networks in various parts of the city."
WHICH PORTLAND (Score:3, Informative)
Oregon, in case you're interested.
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When there are multiple cities of the same name in different states, it would be a good idea to mention the state, its only a couple of bytes extra in the text after all
Of course there are other Portland s in otheer countries too.
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Portland, Maine, is relatively well known.
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That works when you've got one big, well-known city and one little random town (for example, Atlanta, GA vs. Atlanta, TX). However, there's also a relatively significant Portland in Maine so in that case it helps to specify.
Re:WHICH PORTLAND (Score:5, Interesting)
However, there's also a relatively significant Portland in Maine so in that case it helps to specify.
We've heard about the one out there in Maine, but most of us here in PDX think it's more myth and legend than an actual town. ;)
( Fun trivia bit: the one here in Oregon was actually named for the one in Maine. The founders of our fair city had a coin toss to determine who named the town, and the winner was from Maine. If he had lost, I'd be typing this from Boston, Oregon.)
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( The founders of our fair city had a coin toss to determine who named the town, and the winner was from Maine. If he had lost, I'd be typing this from Boston, Oregon.)
Not only that, but as the city would have been the lesser known of the two, the editors would have specified Oregon in the title, and this entire line of conversation would have never happened (nor would I have learned about the coin toss... thanks!).
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Maine has relevance?
I'm not sure Bert and Ernie would agree with that.
Re:WHICH PORTLAND (Score:5, Funny)
Well, of course. Maine is still not allowed on the internet. It's unfair, but it's the only way to make sure that Stephen King never has access to a blog.
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Yeah. The official alternate pronunciation is "Oreegun".
I really cannot understand the confusion of Portland OR with Portland ME. One has Portlandia, the Wildwood, and the setting for the Grimm stories. The other has... uh, lobster.
shame it's not a typo (Score:1)
's/rt//' and I'm happy...
--- a Pole
Hipsters' high speed to match their high with weed (Score:3)
Film at eleven!
its it's (Score:2)
Google Fiber Is Officially Making It's Way To Portland? Its incredible!
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This is London calling. We're all *amazed* at this development... it can't be long before even sunny Philadelphia is blessed with this product.
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I'm a professional writer with over 20 years experience and a Masters in English, and even I still fuck that up from time to time (along with there/their/they're and you're/your). It's not that I don't know the difference; it's that my hands type faster than my brain. And no one has perfect proofreading. In fact, one of my best novellas has a basic subject/verb agreement mistake in it that made it through several layers of editors and ended up in print.
Government shakedown (Score:4, Interesting)
It's amazing that these governments still get away with this stuff. If you don't have several choices for internet providers in your location, maybe it's because no one wants to pay a "franchise fee" and a "PEG fee" and give away free service to your city government officials' friends. Or maybe it's because your local city council hasn't "approved" it.
Re:Government shakedown (Score:5, Informative)
Outside of Airline Tickets we have no laws requiring prices for goods and services to includes taxes and fees. Comcast's prices are always exclusive of taxes and fees. They simply tack on franchise fees to the bill as a pass through to the consumer.
What does cost real money is right of way leases. In most places the vast majority of utility poles are owned by the local power and phone providers. They demand a price per month per pole. That ads up when it's thousands or tens of thousands of utility poles. Going below ground is no cheaper. That involves right of way easements for both public and private property, in addition to repair of roads and sod. Assuming that the land holder even wants to deal with you.
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The city owns assets that Google needs to use: right-of-ways, utility poles, building space, electricity, etc. They should just allow access to Google and any other company that wants to use it without compensation?
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Would you rather have more choices for internet providers or more money in your city's treasury? I'll take more choices for internet providers. Because I'm not on the city payroll.
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They aren't paying a PEG fee because they aren't a cable TV provider. PEG stands for "public, education, and government" and is what pays for the information channels on the cable that deal with public access, schools, and government.
Since both of those fees are passed directly on to the consumer, it is ludic
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We wont' have any choice without infrastructure.
It's a nominal fee for service from the city.
It's not,like it's moved to Ireland and sat on. IT's actual used for something local.
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Local governments rarely own many utilities poles. They are usually owned by the incumbent telco and the electrical providers. Cable companies pay a good chunk of change to the telcos and power companies, though who knows if that's included in the basic rate or the franchise fee.
Cities often own right of ways for main boulevards and a good chunk of the so-called franchise fee is comprised of those right of way fees. Though a good chunk of fee really just offsets the ongoing maintenance the city is on the
Re:Government shakedown (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who manages a PEG channel -- I agree, the fees can be excessive, and they're just passed right through to the consumer, so it's effectively just a tax on those who buy fixed line video services.
However, they should be equal across all providers, so to not hit them all with it equally means that you're favoring one over another, and as these agreements typically span 10-15 years, odds are there's one out there that has it.
As for the free service -- our town doesn't force them to connect up any non-profits, only government buildings. It's possible that other towns do that, but again, this would just mean that you're favoring a given group over another. I'd much prefer to see free (even if low speed) wifi covering our downtown area than picking and choosing which non-profits get special access.
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However, they should be equal across all providers, so to not hit them all with it equally means that you're favoring one over another, and as these agreements typically span 10-15 years, odds are there's one out there that has it.
PEG fees apply to cable TV providers because PEG channels are on the cable TV. Google fiber isn't cable TV, it's Internet. You might have an argument for Internet infrastructure providers to pay a fee to support PEG web services, but that's not part of the existing franchise structure and so would be something new specifically to ding Google (and their customers). If you apply it to Google, then to be fair you'd have to apply it to the internet side of Comcast, too.
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If GOogle FIbre was PEG, you would be right but they are not so no fee.
And no they aren't excessive.
Re:Government shakedown (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sorry, what are you outraged about? No one is giving free service to "city government officials' friends". And having my local city council approve a city wide rollout of a new service is kinda what a city council is FOR. When something affects an entire city, yeah, I want it to go through the city council.
As for the fees, I've started a small business. There were fees. I registered, did some paperwork, what about it? There SHOULD be a registry of businesses, with paperwork on who started them. That's a value to me, and to the city. The fees were negligable. I live in Portland. If you can't afford the tiny little paperwrork fees, your business sucks.
You sound like someone who hates government, just because. I quite like that there's someone out there with an actual strategic plan, managing services and paying attention. There's incredible valued added in that. My business is quite helped by decent roads, electrical lines(I wouldn't be able to operate my machines with spotty service), etc etc etc. It's been my experience that people that are pissed at government just take for granted all that they GET from having a stable system in place to run our society. That it IS taken for granted is, to me, a sign of it's success.
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Franchise fee and PEG fee (which was waived) are 8% total. That's hardly negligible. And free service for "some" non-profits? How is it legitimate to tell a business they must give freebies to "some" people (surely not friends of city officials) in order to do business?
Fewer government-imposed barriers and artificial costs should mean more choices for internet service. More choices would be good.
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They didn't "tell" the business to give freebies to non-profits. Google comes in and proposes this, and then likely uses it as a negotiating point to get the PEG fees waived, since they are basically absorbing those costs directly through the services provided.
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That's not really much different. In general, governments shouldn't be negotiating for free service for "some".
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How about because of equal protection before the law? The government should be negotiating on behalf of all the people it represents.
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Are you really that simple? really?
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Constitutional issues often come down to simple principles.
Equal protection is simple, but hugely important.
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"The most common type of tax-exempt nonprofit organization falls under category 501(c)(3), whereby a nonprofit organization is exempt from federal income tax if its activities have the following purposes: charitable, religious, educational, scientific, literary, testing for public safety, fostering amateur sports competition, or preventing cruelty to children or animals. "
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That's nice of you to do, but I don't think there should be tax advantages for doing nice things.
And while there are good non-profits, there are also bad non-profits that do nothing for society. Why should someone benefit from going around giving religious education? I think that's really stupid. Hopefully religious work will lose tax exempt status soon as more people turn against it.
And why should this special treatment be limited to non-profits? Presumably you're not a non-profit, you're an individual/sma
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Exactly. Change it to "100 non-profits chosen at random from a list of all non-profits listed in the city" and the corruption problem is mostly solved -- though you still have rate-payers implicitly subsidizing service for random non-profits for some unknown reason.
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Oh God... No.
I help with the hardware grants program at Free Geek. I've seen and interacted with just about every non profit there IS in Portland, and handed over computer gear to most of them. There are some non profits that do AMAZING work. Free Geek is one of them. There are a LOT of non profits that do... Stuff.
If we're going to hand out kick as internet connections, I want them going to the Non Profit organizations that do a lot of immediate good work. I love the Portland Fruit Tree project. They a
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People who hate big government don't hate it because of power lines, roads, and the post office. They hate it because government grabs more power, which it uses to grab more money, and on and on in a vicious cycle. This concentration of power attracts the worst kind of sociopaths, which just make things worse because all they want to do is obtain more power for themselves. Then, the social engineering starts, and you have people carrying out grand experiments with no care for the results. Cultures die li
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Standing by for Seattle butthurt whines (Score:2)
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I hardly think ONE socialist on the city council counts as the whole city voting for socialism... And frankly, she's done a lot of good things for the city. Also, that higher min wage isn't really that insane... It's actually right around what it would be if minimum wage had kept up with inflation through the years. That's kind of the point.
What will you do when Seattle rolls along just fine, it's economy does fine, no jobs are lost, and the extra money in the economy helps it grow? Are you prepared to th
$300 = free? (Score:3)
Re:$300 = free? (Score:5, Informative)
OK. They are really stretching the word "free" here. Free = $300 + greedily scooping up your data with this service now or in the future? No, that's far from free.
Compared to the anal probing from Comcast et. al.? Yeah, it's free.
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Get a $10 per month VM and run a SOCKS proxy over SSH. Let them "greedily scoop up" a bunch of encrypted bits :-D
HAHAHA, captcha is "robbed"
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Re:$300 = free? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is a falsehood to separate the costs when you have no option then their equipment to get the service. They in inextricably linked. So no, not free.
It's a great price for the service, I can't wait for it to get done, and I think it's long over due for this level of competition.
But you statement is a falsehood based on years of market conditioning.
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Or simply the ambiguity of the language. If I can get water from my own well I'd probably say I have "free water" even if I once paid someone $300 to dig the well because the marginal cost of another bucket is zero. If there was one or several bids or I did it with $300 worth of my own labor, doesn't really matter. I don't really see a problem with Google saying a $300 one-time fee for "free Internet" service forever after. Certainly if you've already sunk the cost and is selling the house, then it's perfec
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With the well analogy, you could also dig your own well, or trade effort; So your neighbor helps you an in exchange you help them.
You have many options.
Sine with this case you have no other options, saying free is marketing BS.
On the plus side, the are very upfront about it and don't try to hide it.
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In one way, being that the customer is getting charged below costs, you could say Google is paying them. It does require perverting normal logic a bit.
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... please point out where they scoop up your data....
It's right here in the name ---> "Google".
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Sounds like someone's a bit jealous. :) Here in KC, you typically have to pay an install fee for Internet and then pay a monthly fee for the service. With Google Fiber, you buy the equipment and get the service free.
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They are really stretching the word "free" here. Free = $300 + greedily scooping up your data with this service now or in the future?
As opposed to the Comcast service I'm stuck with, which had a $150 setup fee (that I eventually got them to waive, after a month) and a $150 a month recurring charge, and data caps, and anti-net-neutrality lobbying, and I can't run a home server (so something like a Synology disk station directory sync daemon is technically against their TOS), and you can bet they're devouring my data like it was coke off a hooker's ass.
If I could pay Google $150 extra to not deal with Comcast and their attendant misery, I'
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Except Comcast already greedily scoops up your data, but then they insert ads and throttle traffic. With Comcast's approx $60 a month for service, Google's would pay for itself within half a year. Call me crazy, but for some reason I'd prefer my data being treated fairly + not paying out the ass.
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Yup. Comcast is evil and I hate them with all that I am, but at least they are too inept to data mine like Google. I'll stick with Comcast here in Portland, don't need Google having 100% of my traffic to 'classify'. Imagine the value to DoubleClick (Google)'s customers for traffic they have full control over. Don't even need to guess at who I am based on cookies and browser signatures. No thanks.
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Surprise (Score:2)
Google Fiber Is Officially Making Its Way To Portland
They'll be pleased and surprised in Dorset by this.
Will comcast play hardball with CSN Northwest? (Score:2)
Or will google just over pay for that channel that has big lack of availability do to comcasts high price for it.
everyone's response (Score:1)
- Sincerely,
Everyone
300 dollrs is not free (Score:2)
it's a great deal, you can pay via payments or up front, but can we stop with that 'pay us money, and get 'free' service?
I'm really looking at you Amazon and your pay 99 a year and get free shipping.
Again, Great deal, cheap price, good speeds for that price, ...not free.
It just occurred to me I should find out is it's one time fee per customer, or per address.
Speaking as a Portland resident (Score:3)
Speaking as a Portland resident.... EEEEEEEEeeeeee! I hope this goes through. This has been done in other cities. Should I be rounding up my neighbors now so we can all say "right here!" together when they offer it? Anyone have the scoop on these "fiber rallies" that the article speaks of? Anyone have any idea how many neighbors I'd need to be effective?
P.S. Fuck Comcast.
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I just hope that in the near future they bring it across the river to Vancouver, WA.
I just wish it would come to the real Vancouver...
Franchise agreements (Score:1)
"the Portland City Council has approved a franchise agreement with Google"
We Slashdotters are all opposed to franchise agreements, right? Why not just "let them build it" without a "franchise agreement"? No agreement necessary, just build the infrastructure.
Not Official (Score:1)
Google has not selected Portland, OR. This article discusses a law that was passed to entice Google to come to Oregon.
"Google is not expected to make any final decisions about whether Portland will get Fiber until year's end, but having a cable franchise deal in place helps pave the way."
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pretty sure samzenpus and timothy are functionally illiterate, maybe generally mentally handicapped.
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I'm pretty sure they aren't functional.
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Mod parent up. What do we have editors for, otherwise?
As a non-native speaker of English it instantly stands out to me, distracting me and slowing me down. Since so many more people read these headlines than write them, it does pay to spend that little bit of extra attention to make sure you're not making a fool of yourself to every discerning reader.
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As a non-native speaker of English it instantly stands out to me, distracting me and slowing me down.
As a native speaker of English, it does the same for me too.
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Am I the only one who thought this might be an announcement about Portland, ME? Or any one of the 25 places called Portland in the US alone? I guess they must have already fixed the headline, they've started fixing these things as they get reported (apparently they actually do care about looking like buffoons).
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I'm sure you're not. I haven't looked at the article, but my guess would be Oregon. Kind of like how if it said New York, I would not assume they were talking about the city in Texas.
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OK, so Portland Oregon is almost 10x larger than Portland Maine. The more you know...
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There are many places named Portland, but only one Portland - you know, the one that has a TV show named after it.
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I'd say that the "Portland" is the one in Maine that has a city in Oregon named after it. In fact ISTR that the Oregon folks lost a United Way bet to us a couple of decades ago in which they promised to change their name if they lost. Still waiting for that.
(Waiting for the folks on the English island that has all the cement to jump in...)
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The stake where 100 pound of lobster and 100 pounds of salmon.
The name thing was completely made up by reporters.
The name thing was completely made up by reporters.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_Harbour
-I'm just sayin'
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Am I the only one who thought this might be an announcement about Portland, ME?
Probably. Even in New England, people think of Oregon before Maine.
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Did they change it already?
As of 11:56AM New York time (16-June) it is saying "Google Fiber Is Officially Making Its Way To Portland" and lacks the apostrophe.
Therefore, at least as of now, it is using the correct form of its. Without the apostrophe it means the possessive, with the apostrophe it means "it is"
So did they take the apostrophe out?
Or are you making an incredible blunder?
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If you have a contract with guaranteed time with a local, you keep that contract of pay early termination fees.
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Stephouse employees will be 50 times as productive (Score:2)
> was there any thought to the local jobs created and maintained,
Those employees at Stephouse, the independent ISP, currently maintain a network that delivers up to 20 Mbps. If those employees instead help build and maintain Google's local gigabit equipment, that means they provide 50 times as much bandwidth in the same 8 hour workday. A person who provides your house with a 1,000 Mb connection provides more value than the same person providing a 20 Mbps connection, so they can get paid more.
Some emplo
also $75/month each = more hiring (Score:4, Interesting)
Also, each customer getting the independent service at 20 Mbps will save $75 / month if they switch to Google. That's an extra $75 / month per household ($10 million total) that residents can now spend at other local businesses. $10 million more in sales means that those other businesses will be hiring about 100 more people.
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Thats 75 a month customer should be putting in the bank.
Any ways, 10 million spread out over all the services provide will mean exactly no more jobs.
Sure, if all the people went to star bucks, you would have an increase, but that's not how it happens.
And you number assume no one in Portland,Or. would want the 1Gb speed; which is laughable becasue Portland loves there high speeds.
You also don't seem to take into account the fact that the basic 'free' plan doesn't include TV. the 75 dollars from local provide
no, here's their pricing page (Score:2)
You're making up "facts" to support your preconceived conclusuons. As I told you in GP, the local independent provider in Portland is Steakhouse. Here's their pricing page:
http://www.stephouse.net/resid... [stephouse.net]
You'll notice they don't offer television service. You just made that up, to pretend that the facts match up with the conclusions that Stephen Colbert told you to believe.
Your conclusions are as sound as the completely fictional facts you've based them on.
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In unrelated news, Comast increases its Cable TV service prices by an average of $75/month in the Porland area.
hopefully. Hulu, Amazon, Netflix (Score:2)
That would be good for everyone but Comcast. With high speed fiber for free, there's little reason not to dump cable switch to Hulu, Amazon, or Netflix. If Comcast wanted to guarantee that they lost the entire Portland market, they could raise prices, rather than reducing prices as has happened elsewhere in similar situations.
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the free service is great for small personal use, but you would be really hard pressed to run a business on it.
That said, jobs aren't a 1 to 1 switch. IF there are 10 ISP employing 10 people, Google will probably only requires 20 employees fr he whole area.
It' will be a job loss. The 'IT create more jobs then it eliminates' starting going negative at the end of the 90s.
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Phoenix is pretty small, I think they'd wire Medford first. (Are we still naming cities without qualifying what state they're in? :) )
With Google Fiber though, would a huge, sprawly city like Phoenix be a wise choice compared to more compact places like KC and PDX?
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Portland, ME needs to become weirder to get publicity. Yeah, that's it!
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Yeah but they've got lobsters. That's got to count for something.
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They made a whole movie about this one, on the Alabama border. But the franchise was for... sin! The Phenix City Story [tcm.com]
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How about Austin first, since, you know, they announced us years ago and haven't rolled it out yet?