After years of delays, Palo Alto's city council voted 5-1 in favor of building an FTTH system in their city. This has been in the works since 1999 and even had a small test system with a limited number of participants at one point. Dynamic City, the consulting company that… Continue reading
In the final hours of the legislative session last night, the House chose to take no action on SB209 leading to its defeat and the prevention of statewide franchise agreements. You can bet, though, that this bill will probably be proposed again, potentially in a special session to be call… Continue reading
It seems that San Francisco is re-thinking the idea of a partnership with Google and Earthlink to provide the city with a WiFi network. The city has cited that while WiFi is quick and cheap, it's not truly competitive with a fiber-optic network and signals might not penetrate buildings in… Continue reading
Senate Bill 209 has passed committee and will be going before the whole of the Senate for a vote. This bill would allow state-wide franchising of telecommunications services and would destroy universal access. During a breakfast sponsored by the Utah Technology Council this morning, Both House Speaker Greg Curtis and… Continue reading
A poll by Utah Valley Magazine is in, and MSTAR, one of the providers on both UTOPIA and iProvo, beat our Qwest for second-best Internet provider in Utah County. They also came very close to edging out Comcast for first place. This is significant since MSTAR only has service in… Continue reading
The tiny town of Jackson, TN (pop: 60,000) has become a new hub for tech companies after rolling out its own municipal fiber project. These companies are doing everything from remote data backups to software hosting using the high-speed network built by the city's power agency. With these kinds of… Continue reading
Time Warner showed it wasn't afraid to flex some muscle at a recent public hearing in Wilson, NC concerning their planned deployment of a fiber optic network. Predictably, they pulled out the tired "taxpayer money" and "competing with private enterprise" lines like so many broken records. The city rightly demonstrated… Continue reading
As much as Verizon likes to hype its FIOS service, it seems to be very non-committal as to who exactly it's going to serve. It recently spun off its landline operations in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine to Fairpoint Communications, a company with no plans to continue the FTTH network… Continue reading
A study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance argues that public ownership of telecommunications infrastructure is a major boon to taxpayers and municipalities. Among the benefits are increased competition, improved local revenues, lower end-user prices, true Net Neutrality, universal access, and economic development. It seems the only losers are the… Continue reading
Don't count on Qwest to roll out universal fiber services anytime soon. Qwest has decided to take its time with FTTH projects, preferring to only roll them out to popular master planned developments as opposed to wide-spread deployment. Given that they've only recently solicited bids for a major fiber project,… Continue reading