Archive for October, 2006
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
WiMax Far From Ready
Reports from the latest WiMax World convention prove what most of us already knew: WiMax is a half-baked technology and nobody knows how long to leave it in the oven. Plenty of hucksters gave their pie-in-the-sky vision of high-speed wireless Internet wherever you go, but there's no finished products to back up the claims and [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Saturday, October 14th, 2006
US Broadband Penetration Still Lags
Japan, Korea, and now Denmark have higher rates of broadband penetration than the US with Japan starting to ramp up an ambitious fiber-to-the-premisis network to stay competitive. While the US share of the world broadband market increased to 36%, we'll be hurting for speed unless we all get onto the FTTP Express. Verizon has been [...]
No Comments » - Posted in News by Jesse
Thursday, October 12th, 2006
Legislative Action: My Proposal to the Utah Technology Commission
I'm just starting on my journey to get the legislature to hear about the restrictions on UTOPIA, but there is already good progress. I've submitted some brief comments as a synopsis of why we need UTOPIA and why it is critical for us to expand it to unincorporated areas. Below are the comments I have [...]
1 Comment » - Posted in Communications, Legislation by Jesse
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
Setting the Wheels in Motion
I've decided to step things up a notch and really get the ball rolling on changing the state law prohibiting counties from participating in UTOPIA. Yesterday, I got a notice that the Utah Technology Commission will be meeting on October 19th at 8AM. This seemed like the proper venue to air my concerns about [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Communications, Legislation by Jesse
Wednesday, October 11th, 2006
American Fork Outsourcing Fiber Network
American Fork, which has been operating its own independent municipal broadband service since 2002, has agreed to lease and sell portions of its beleaugered AFConnect service to PacketFront Inc. The city will retain ownership of the fiber network but will place operations in the hands of the Swedish company with stipulations that they maintain the [...]
No Comments » - Posted in News by Jesse
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
FTC Report Shows Many Benefits to Muni Broadband
Among the benefits are increased competition, lower prices, and higher efficiency. The only con it can come up with is a weak sauce possibility that municipalities would engage in anti-competitive behavior. That's amusing considering how long cable and telephone companies have been abusing their monopoly status. The article also cites that HR 5252 would have [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Cheers, Legislation, News by Jesse
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
San Jose’s “Free” WiFi Bogged Down in Access Concerns
A forum on San Joe's new WiFi system resulted in a lot of concerns over privacy, ID theft, rural access, and underserved residents. The bottom line is that WiFi is bringing up more issues than it solves. WiFi is never really secure (even WPA2 keys can be cracked relatively easily), you can't throw the signals [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Jeers, News by Jesse
Tuesday, October 10th, 2006
Fiber Being Installed in Small Indiana Town
The small town of Crawfordsville, IN will be knee-deep in fiber by 2007. The municipal electric company is installing the FTTP project which will be live by early next year. From the sounds of things, this project is going to be a single-carrier network, but it should provide some decent competition for the cable and [...]
No Comments » - Posted in Cheers, News by Jesse
Saturday, October 7th, 2006
North Carolina Town Mulls Municipal Fiber
The town of Wilson, N.C. is currently mulling doing its own municipal fiber project. It has already built 30 miles of the network to link together city agencies and the city-owned utilities and sees the promise in a high-speed network throughout the town. Their major roadblock is that state law prohibits government from competing with [...]
No Comments » - Posted in News by Jesse
Friday, October 6th, 2006
Home Fiber Installations Top One Million
Fiber to the home (FTTH) is now in over one million homes nationwide with an estimated six million that could be hooked up, the so-called "last mile" issue. Something significant is that while Utah only makes up 0.7% of the national population, it accounts for about 4.1% of the installed base for fiber, almost all [...]
