There goes the Seattle Times editorial board just making shit up again:
As efforts to develop publicly owned networks have failed, competition between multiple providers seems the best way to improve service.
Um, what effort to develop publicly owned networks? We’ve had no effort here in Seattle. There was an effort in Tacoma, and that’s been up and running and providing reliable service for years. And recent municipal broadband networks using more advanced technologies have proven even more successful—for example, the affordable gigabit Internet the residents of Chattanooga now enjoy.
But while there has certainly been chatter about developing a municipal broadband network here in Seattle, and there have been a couple of studies over the years, there has been no actual effort to build one. None. Zero. Zilch. So please, stop lying to your readers, Seattle Times, in defense your inflexible pro-corporate/anti-government ideology.
Oh, we’ve had plans, blue ribbon studies, and even pricing without laying down a foot of network to the neighborhoods for this project.
http://blogs.seattletimes.com/.....an-google/
Seattle spent nearly a decade studying ways to bring ultrafast broadband to everyone in the city, using the city-owned network as a foundation. But that plan was abandoned last year by Mayor Mike McGinn. Instead, he decided to parcel out portions of the city network to private companies, an approach that basically ends any chance of Seattle developing a citywide, municipal broadband network.
The mayor’s office is a factor in the battle. It’s promoting Gigabit Squared as if it’s the only game in town. “We’re one step closer to bringing gigabit speed broadband to Seattle,” McGinn said in Gigabit Squared’s press release today.
I would love some competition to Comcast and Clear.
There are a number of factors in play here. One of them is what our across-the-street neighbor (who’s a civil engineer and deals with the city quite a bit) refers to as “Seattleitis”–our collective predisposition to study issues to death instead of actually…well, doing anything.
As far as Tacoma is concerned, their “Wired City” project got done pretty early on, before the big providers identified “public” Internet access projects as a threat and started putting some major butts into bribing…er, “lobbying” against them.
I’m not sure “Seattleitis” is confined to Seattle. Here where I live, we have SanFranciscoitis and Oaklanditis competing with each other (and apparently with Seattle) for how long, how minutely, and how ineffectively various things can be studied before the impetus and/or funding draws a final breath. At the moment, there are rumblings of a half-dozen projects being studied, or being mooted as suitable for study, or being tested for public opinion before a study is authorized, and (since I’m 70) I can confidently predict I won’t be around to see any of the results.
But that’s just my observation; I see it all around, and hear about it from friends all across the country. It seems to be a result of the same sort of thinking as “What is not permitted is forbidden.”
fuck comcast. ANYTHING BUT COMCAST……
We’re waiting for Nessa Stein to install it for us, but she seems a little preoccupied right now, maybe she’ll have time after Thursday night…
If rural areas in Eastern Washington like Moses Lake can have Gigabit fiber provided by their local public utility (at a profit and at no cost to electric-only customers) there is no reason Seattle should not be able to do so as well.
The city owns the utility poles, it owns the right of way, it has access to capital, just bloody well do it.