The other day I offered a free beer to the first Seattle elected official to enthusiastically come out in support of pitching a proposal to participate in Google’s experimental fiber network. Well, Mayor Mike McGinn was the first to answer the call.
Seattle will actively seek to partner with Google in creation of a fiber network here. The city itself has many assets to bring to the partnership, including an extensive existing fiber network of over 500 miles connecting every school, college and major government building in the city. In Seattle, 88% of residents have home computers, 84% have Internet access and 74% already have Internet access faster than dial-up. Seattle is a high tech city, with many technology firms both large and small, and a culture of entrepreneurism and innovation.
Fiber-to-the-premise networks will serve as an engine for business and economic development. Seattle would be an excellent place to construct such a network because we already have a high tech industry and population.
I don’t know how much of a chance we’ll have at winning a spot in the project, but at the very least it will help focus the city’s collective mind on what we need to do to provide our residents and businesses with first-rate, high-speed broadband infrastructure… something many of our neighborhoods sadly lack.
Living only a couple blocks from a major Qwest switch, I reliably enjoy better than 5Mbps downstream via DSL, but that makes me one of the fortunate ones, and while new WiMax service from Clear is (spottily) filling the gap in some neighborhoods, there are many Seattle households that are lucky to sustain 1.5Mbps, regardless of the provider.
But 1Gbps… hell, I’d happily settle for the 20Mbps my sister in suburban Philadelphia is getting from Verizon’s FIOS service.
If Seattle wants to remain a high-tech leader, we need to build the ultra-high-speed broadband infrastructure necessary to nurture and sustain our lead. And if Mayor McGinn wants to drop by Drinking Liberally sometime to discuss his broadband plans, the beer’s on me.
What’s the broadband coverage like in King County’s suburbs?
Hard to tell how Google is going to pick, but Seattle would be funny. In Microsoft’s “backyard” Google is the one to provide high speed data? It would be kind of a fun dig at Microsoft. We’ll see.
There is another agenda here. Comcast is currently in a dispute over its attempt to buy NBC. In effect this wold create a near monopply over distributionb and content.
The clear alternative is Inet based information BUT that runs into Comcast again.
By working with Google, the city would be striking a blow for competition .. something the Repricans ought to be doing!
City Light & Broadband is not all that peppy a moniker, but call it what you will it’s what we should have started ten years back. We cam still catch up with Tacoma. Get that done Mr Mayor, and I’ll buy a pitcher of your favorite IPA.
@4 If Republicans ever got control of city hall the first thing they’d do is privatize City Light. Conservatives have hated public power for 100 years.
Maybe Enron can run City Light. Because without fail, philosophically, EVERYTHING private corporations do is better. ER…wait…wasn’t there something about them in the news a while back? Or we can get another cable company instead of Comcast, how about Adelphia. Wait…something about that too..hmm.
See, that there is an example of vision and leadership by a politician from Seattle. Good job Mayor Mike.
@5
TPU (Tacoma) and City Light rock.
@1 Verizon’s the phone and DSL provider in a lot of outlying areas. Their network isn’t half bad, but if anything goes wrong, their customer service is unspeakably horrid.
That being said, we’ve had DSL through Qwest with a CLEC on the backend for ten years. This was partly because when we signed up Qwest had switched their back-end for residential accounts to MSN, with no static IP addresses and a prohibition on customers running their own servers. The provider I chose was OzNet, locally operated out of the Westin Building. They were subsequently bought out by an Arizona-based company called The River, which then merged with Nationwide Internet…which in turn was bought out by a mom-and-pop operation in Virginia that somehow came into a significant amount of money. All through this, there’s never been a rate change, and the connection’s been darn good–but when the occasional outage occurs it’s impossible to get in touch with anyone–we just have to wait and hope that service gets restored. I’ve been looking at alternatives, but where Qwest once maintained a list of over 100 CLEC’s, now there are only about a dozen. At the same time, almost everyone I know gets their home Internet connection from Comcast, which to say the least, has a vested interest in preventing its Internet service from cutting into the massive amount of money it makes from cable TV.
Goldy – I’m actually amazed you made it through that entire post without bashing Microsoft
@1 Roger Rabbit
Very recently moved up into Shoreline around 195th and I just recently signed up for Comcast’s 22/6 service. 22 Mbps down 6 up. I tested it as soon as I got it. Speeds are variable and dependent on where and what servers you are talking to. But after running a large variety of speed tests from different providers I found that the download speeds ranged from 6-7 Mbps all the way up to 53 Mbps. The best connections being regional and to Portland.
Service is $49 a month.
Also, I was interested in Verizon FIOS but apparently they don’t offer it in my part of Shoreline. And in Seattle proper they are not chartered from what I understand.
I am learning that broadband is actually a bit better in the suburbs than in the city.
speedtest clocks me at 5.97 down, 1.01 up on Clear.I switched from comcast about 6 months ago and get better service with fewer interruptions for less $. Fuck comcast.
From Seattle24x7:
There is a PDF link to the full report in the article
http://www.seattle24x7.com/blo.....t-highway/
Prior attempts at this were ahead of the technology, for example: Chevron set up a pilot project in Texas about 15 years ago to wire up some of its facilities and a small Texas town. Texas wired up many of its rural libraries at about the same time.
Brookline Mass developed a mesh network a few years ago.
All along the way the duonopoly of Comcast and the telco in a giver place have paid off politicos to shut out muni networks.
At some point this should be looked at like a utility. There is zero incentive for Comcast to rewire or provide modern service speed, the move to grab content providers has as much to do with their competition as it does with connectivity having the duopoly broken.
Greg Nickels created and hired the Technology Officer for Seattle, buy him a beer, Goldy. McGinn is in position to make the RFI because of Nickel’s work.
Btw, we do own our pols to hang wire on, but the library should be involved with the information management side, the defend your right to information freedom and privacy.