On Tue, Nov 25, 2008 at 1:09 PM, Gary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The city of Ashland did something similar several years ago (AFN) with > help from locals agreeing to a food a services sales tax plus a small > property tax to help cover expenses. It quickly spun out of financial > manageability but I haven't read up on it in a couple of years to hear > whether they saved it or not. Anyone here in the know? > ashlandfiber.net still has a website...
I went down to meet with the Ashland folks. They are indeed alive and well. They approached things differently than what we're talking about here, with the city essentially building a cable network (using fiber for the backhaul). They have not leveraged the assets of local data centers and ISPs who have bandwidth of their own (likely because neither exists in a substantial fashion in Ashland) so they essentially provide the entire service, even though individual ISPs sell the service and provide billing, first-tier tech support and add-ons such as email for their customers. The model we've been discussing would have only the infrastructure publicly or community owned, with local (or national) ISPs providing all the bandwidth, customer service and other services to their customers. There is no reason, in Portland, to create COs or new data centers to terminate the fiber, as we have substantial choice in carrier neutral facilities where ISPs could service customers with a simple cross connect. You would of course, need some body that oversaw the maintenance of the infrastructure and handled cross connects with the ISPs, but otherwise, once your fiber was installed, you'd work directly with whatever service provider(s) you chose. -- Michael Weinberg President Personal Telco Project, Inc. A 501(c)(3) Non-Profit --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ The Personal Telco Project - http://www.personaltelco.net/ Donate to PTP: http://www.personaltelco.net/donate Archives: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.network.wireless.portland.general/ Etiquette: http://www.personaltelco.net/index.cgi/MailingListEtiquette List information: http://lists.personaltelco.net To post to this group, send email to ptp-general@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
