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Boulder moves to fund citywide fiber buildout through debt
- leesalminen 8y agoNeighboring Longmont has had municipal internet for years with success. Everyone I know is pretty happy with it. Glad to see Boulder is joining the party. Although I don’t live in Boulder (anymore), my office is there. I’ll be glad to stop paying Comcast for terrible quality service.
- kyrra 8y agoLongmont (which is ~12 miles north of Boulder) got municiple broadband a while back. https://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m/longmont-power-communications/broadband-service https://www.longmontcolorado.gov/departments/departments-e-m... This also follows Fort Collins from 7 months ago: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-cable-lobby-misinformation-campaign-against-muni-broadband/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/voters-reject-ca... Note that Longmont took a couple attempts I believe to get it passed (it failed in 2009 and 2011, then passed in 2013)
- awful_waffle 8y agoFormer Longmont resident/NextLight customer here. I can't understate how fantastic the broadband service is out there. Usually my speeds clocked in around the 700-900mbps range (both up/down), and at its slowest, maybe 300mbps. No port blocking, so I could host my own web/game servers. The one time they performed maintenance, they notified customers a week in advance and scheduled the 15-minute down time to be around 3am. Since I was a 'charter' customer, my bill was a flat $50/mo, though I'm pretty certain that new customers don't pay much more than that. I truly believe if more people understood what _good_ internet is like, there would be a MUCH stronger push for communal broadband services.
- driverdan 8y agoIt doesn't have to be communal. I had Google Fiber. It cost more but was also great.
- jbuzbee 8y agoI'm in Centennial CO. We also voted in municipal fiber broadband a while back. My neighborhood is slated to get 1GB symmetric from Ting for $89 https://ting.com/internet/town/centennial https://ting.com/internet/town/centennial
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoWhat type of software engineering jobs are available in that area?
- tschellenbach 8y agoTons, salaries are growing quickly as well. Comparable to NYC and higher than almost anywhere in the US. Just not at the SF levels yet.
- crikli 8y agoPretty much anything you can imagine from front-end web to embedded circuits. Thing to keep in mind with Boulder is that it suffers from the same building restriction effects as SF, combined with explosive population growth, so you're going to pay out the nose for every square foot of living space. As long as you build that fact into your salary negotations Boulder is going to be awesome with a quality of life eons better than the coasts IMO. I live in Colorado Springs for family reasons but would happily live in Boulder if things were a bit different.
- JustSomeNobody 8y agoGood to know. I literally do everything from HW comms to web UI to push all that data to the cloud. HW comms and protocols are where I'm best. Happy where I'm at but always looking just in case. Been to Colorado Springs. It is a nice area.
- daguu 8y agoQualcomm has about 300 people in north Boulder.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoLots of web stuff, some big security players, a lot of government and academic research (NOAA/NIST/CU etc) data sciencey type jobs too.
- thelastidiot 8y agoOnce in a while a story about another city getting fiber, while it's fantastic (without knowing much about the cost), progress is slow and even in the heart of the Bay Area, we are pathetically lagging. https://fiber.google.com/newcities/ https://fiber.google.com/newcities/ is looking sparse and honestly worrisome. It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented.
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> It's amazing how much the US is behind implementing another solution they invented America is vast. My opinion is local FTTH networks will eventually be interconnected wirelessly, either point-to-point or by bouncing off LEO satellites. Sometimes, letting infrastructure roll out organically is the sounder solution.
- thelastidiot 8y agoI understand vast. I am not expecting Montana to get full coverage by the end of the decade. But San Jose, California? Hello?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago> But San Jose, California? Hello? It routinely blows me away that my Manhattan internet is faster and cheaper than that at my parents' in Cupertino. I suspect common local political dysfunction underwrites the differences in housing supply, public transportation and internet quality.
- berbec 8y agoOnly in the right parts of Manhattan. I live on 78th street between 1st & York (0th) avenues. I am in a one square block fiber dead zone. :(
- dpark 8y agoManhattan is far denser than Cupertino. It’s easier to justify the investment there. But yeah, I was surprised to learn that my options in Mountain View were shitty, expensive cable or shitty, slightly less expensive DSL.
- tschellenbach 8y agoI moved from Amsterdam to Boulder, CO. The tech ecosystem is amazing here. It's crazy how many tech companies are in a tiny city with ~100k people. You just walk down the street and it's Nest, Google, Github, JumpCloud, SolidFire, Logrhythm, VictorOps and hundreds of smaller startups. Great ecosystem. People are friendly and welcoming. It's amazing, except the internet. It's expensive, unreliable, and slowwwww.
- bytematic 8y agoI was going to say it sounds similar to madison but that is half the population! Would you say it is oversaturated with tech?
- planteen 8y agoI think the difference between the two is that Madison is further from Milwaukee. It looks to be around 80 miles between Madison and Milwaukee. Denver and Boulder are much closer, about 30 miles.
- almiron10 8y agoCalling it a tiny city is a bit of a stretch considering the sprawl along the entire front range (South Denver to Fort Collins). You're suddenly at 3+ million.
- planteen 8y agoYep. Having worked in Boulder for 4 years, my observation is that the number of people who actually live in town are the minority. In-college interns or new college grads tend to live in town. There is a smattering of more senior engineers in Boulder as well. But it seems most people commute in from Longmont, Erie, Louisville, Superior, Lafayette, Broomfield, Denver, or Ft. Collins. I worked with a guy who commuted from Colorado Springs (!) daily. I have no idea how he stayed sane.
- leesalminen 8y ago
- JumpCrisscross 8y agoBoulder has a population of about 110,000 people [1]. Given "the estimated cost of the entire network is around $140 million" [2], the per-capita cost of this network comes to $1,300. I pay $80 a month for my 300 / 20 service. In 16 months, I would be able to pay for my share of this network. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boulder,_Colorado [2] http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-support-high-boulder-moves-fund-citywide-fiber?source=mostpopular http://www.dailycamera.com/news/boulder/ci_31941127/public-s...
- ada1981 8y agoProbably should be paid for relative to annual income, but yeah, seems like a reasonable expense. Once it’s paid off, what is the maintience cost? Will the city simply offer it as a competing service? Make it free for everyone and then tax?
- rayiner 8y agoThe math is bleaker than that (see my other post, calculating $7,000 per subscribing household). Also, out of the $80 you pay, most of it gets eaten up by operational costs. Charter's EBITDA is about 35% of revenues. So even if the city pays no taxes., it'll take 250 months to pay back your share of the network.
- ttul 8y agoThis is precisely the kind of long term investment that cities should make.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- morley 8y agoI agree with you, but governments will ask: is it better to back an expensive technology, or a cheaper one like wireless? Is it the government's responsibility to provide the state-of-the-art. or the minimum viable? I'd prefer it if us Americans would believe in the former, but unfortunately I think our culture expects the government to do the latter (or nothing at all).
- rayiner 8y agoSome back of the napkin math. $140 million for 40,000 households in Boulder = $3,500 per household. If 50% of people subscribe (typical for municipal broadband), that's $7,000 per subscribing household, or higher than Charter's market cap per subscriber. A quarter of the population of the city is below the poverty line. If the intent is to offer them subsidized broadband, let's assume we get no capital recovery from those households. That brings the cost to $4,666 per household, or $9,300 per subscribing household. This is high, but not out of the ballpark. Verizon spent about $3,500 on average for each paying subscriber for FiOS. Chattanooga's system was about $5,500 per household.
- yock 8y agoWhich makes for a pretty compelling reason as to why Charter hasn't done it themselves.
- dahart 8y agoThat, or maybe $140M is a gross over estimate, or is referring to more than what’s discussed in the article? I’m tending toward that; it can’t possibly cost anywhere near $10k per subscriber to build out fiber normally, even in small cities, can it? Seems like if it was normally that expensive, there wouldn’t be fiber anywhere. What’s so different in Boulder? I’d speculate that CenturyLink paid less than $1k to run fiber to my house, even if I include my share of their neighborhood & citywide costs.
- crunchlibrarian 8y agoCosts in Boulder are quite a bit higher than other cities because we have very little to no topsoil in areas, you hit bedrock (which is often granite) immediately, and you need to drill or blast that out for most underground construction. At least that was the line Google fed us when we got rejected for their fiber, who knows.
- dahart 8y agoThat could explain it. My fiber comes in from an above-ground wire strung on poles. They’re proposing to bury the lines, at high cost?
- tunap 8y agoI sure hope they don't need to open up roads(lane closures) to pull the fiber. Traffic is already agonizing, closures would make the commuting nightmare even worse for cars, buses & bikes alike.
- kinsomo 8y agoHopefully they're laying conduit with new road construction. I read somewhere that there are proposals to mandate that (can't remember if it was state or federal level). Edit: seems like it's both: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/nationwide-fiber-proposed-law-could-add-broadband-to-road-projects/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/natio... https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/fed-up-us-cities-try-to-build-better-broadband/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/fed-u... https://www.csg.org/pubs/capitolideas/enews/cs41_1.aspx https://www.csg.org/pubs/capitolideas/enews/cs41_1.aspx https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/50leg/2r/bills/sb1402s.htm https://www.azleg.gov/legtext/50leg/2r/bills/sb1402s.htm
- namibj 8y agoAFAIK in Germany you are required to allow others to lay stuff in the hole if you dig the street up. So if fiber is not placed in there, that means no one is willing to pay for just the fiber, which is only a little part of the cost of doing full FTTH. Oh well, if the distance was more than the 5 or so meters recently in the neighborhood, I might have considered just placing an empty pipe with fan-out/splice boxes at the ends into the hole. But for just 5m it's hardly worth the effort.
- makerofspoons 8y agoI went to school at the University of Colorado Boulder. Something this article doesn't mention is that the city already has over 100 miles of fiber laid that isn't currently being lit up: http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-Fiber-Optic-Network.html http://www.govtech.com/dc/articles/Boulder-Colo-To-Light-Up-.... There were several groups of students looking to build companies to utilize this existing infrastructure, as well as business interests outside the city, but it just never went anywhere. I hope that it will see use soon, I was very envious of my friends that would commute in from nearby Longmont that could use their awesome municipal ISP.
- psalminen 8y agoThis is exactly what I was thinking about while reading the article. Funny they didn't mention it.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- Cshelton 8y agoObligatory Sko' Buffs!
- 49bc 8y agoThis is the case in many, many major cities. When discussing this type of rollout, it’s almost always talking about last-mile, which is the most expensive to rollout and maintain.
- AlphaSite 8y ago100 miles of fiver isn’t really that much is it? Maybe in absolute terms but when you have runs to each house that’s probably less than a couple hundred homes
- 15155 8y agoBoulder isn't very large.
- exabrial 8y agoI works really like one of these projects to trial a 'practical' last mile, like something like cat6 for the last 100m. In KC, I live in a 4 story apt, and frequently stopped to talk to the installers when Google fiber was pulling everything into the building. It really is Fiber to a jack in your unit, but the last 5ft is still copper Ethernet. I figure they could have saved themselves a bundle of $ if they ran copper inside the building. The consumer wouldn't notice and it's a lot more practical.
- kiallmacinnes 8y agoI don't think they would have saved a bundle at all. I've no references to back this up, however - I would guess the dominant cost of installing cable (fiber or cat6 or coax) is not the cable itself, but the permits and staff hours etc required to do it. Installing fiber is more future proof, resulting in - potentially - less costs down the line.
- briffle 8y agoFor all but the smallest apartment buildings, this is not a good idea. Ethernet has a 100m limit. By the time you go up a wall, back down it, zig and zag around things in the ceiling, etc, you can quickly hit that limit. Then you can start getting errors such as packet loss, crosstalk, etc. Yes, it depends on the size and layout of your building (maybe your building has a comms cabinet on each floor, or wing, etc) but its better to have one set of training for all your installers, rather than have every one be different.
- planteen 8y agoI did technician work as a side job during college. It seemed like most dorms had data closets every floor/every other floor. Some buildings only had them in the attic and basement, but they were also usually limited to 4 levels. Are most large apartment buildings similar?
- kiallmacinnes 8y agoDoes it really matter if there are comms closets nearby though? It wouldn't surprise me if fiber optic cable was cheaper than cat6 to buy in bulk (Copper is expensive, and the process to manufacture the copper cables is more complex), and if you're doing fiber to the building anyway, you still end up with a media converter - so there is likely no significant cost saving there either. It may actually be higher cost to have a centralised (within the building) media converter - ports need to be provisioned for the max possible customers up front. The class of hardware will likely be different too - matching enterprise style datacenter hardware, instead of the cheap and easy to replace stuff they send to customers...
- yawz 8y agoI work in downtown Boulder in a tech startup. The tech and startup scene is amazing for a city the size of Boulder. After Longmont and Fort Collins, finally Boulder will be getting the municipal broadband as well. Nice!!!
- fetus8 8y agoI'd just like to point out that Fort Collins voted in municipal fiber, but it has yet to be implemented as Comcast and I assume other telecoms have been pushing back and delaying the roll out. We had to re-vote on it last year to approve more money for the project.
- cschneid 8y agoI live in Fort Collins - bonds are being sold, and everything is going forward. In theory, the first customers should be on Mid to late next year.
- zer0faith 8y agoConsidering all the mergers that are going down I hope that eventually more cities follow this model.
- d--b 8y agoThe bigger picture is Boulder is attracting startups. Having fiber broadband is a plus to that attraction. So a better broadband means a better economy: more activity, more jobs, more people, more taxes... The cost of that infrastructure makes total sense.
- yahyaheee 8y agoyeah I think they are less concerned with the cost/practicality and more focused on image. With Google increasing its presence this is just another move to paint us as a startup hub. I'm all about it
- keeganjw 8y agoI have municipal telecom where I live in Vermont and it waaaaay faster and cheaper than the competition. It makes Comcast look like a joke. Hopefully, Boulder will have a similar outcome.
- Liquix 8y agoBurlington Telecom for the win!
- adultSwim 8y agoMunicipal control of infrastructure +1
- orthecreedence 8y agoAgreed, and not just for fast internet. This is the path to true, competition-enforced net neutrality. It would be so much better to have municipal infrastructure than to have digital rights ping-ponging in the federal government forever.
- Proven 8y agoPublic investment: what no business can profit from, pass on to gov and pay for it (or rather never pay) with public debt. Shameless.
- bwb 8y agoI am in boulder and can't wait, comcast fucking sucks, they just raised my rates from $79 to ~$120 with no warning, i hate them so much...
- therealdrag0 8y agoIt wasn't because you started on a promotion deal and the deal ran out?
- bagacrap 8y agoThe article mentions that ~5% of residences don't have internet, but I would wager the majority of those do have smartphones and can easily access the internet via cell data, coffee shops, public outdoor wifi, etc. Is it really that much of a travesty if it's hard to stream movies on your couch?
- therealtomsmith 8y agoNow all your information can go through government-ran hubs!
- therealdrag0 8y agoI've had Verizon FiOS fiber and it was just as bad as when I had terrible Comcast. Now I have Comcast in a different neighborhood and it's great. Personally, availability/stability is WAY more important than bandwidth. I don't know what I'd do with over 200mbps. But in some of the places I lived, during peak hours, the internet would just stop working. That was very frustrating.