I just thought I'd let you know--I went to the Provo city council
meeting last night to discuss the sale of iProvo to Broadweave
Networks.
There's been some recent financial trouble with the iProvo network--and
they're looking to sell it for roughly $4,000,000. As you might
know--there has been some very different opinions as to the mayor's
quick decision to sell the fiber optic lines into the private sector.
Most people who are politically active are in favor of this sale, but
not in the way it's being sold.
Oh, and to let you know--Mstar told city council that they would make
them a better offer than Broadweave. I stood before them right before
the Mstar representative and said, "Whether you keep the network or not,
I believe that the financial troubles of the iProvo network are caused
by a failure of ISPs to give a minimum level of service to their
customers. There have been times where they will throttle a person's
uplink speed down to 200kbps on certain protocols--when a fiber optic
line is capable of so much more. Broadweave has not earned my
trust--and I have no reason to subscribe to lines owned by them. I have
other friends who have moved to coaxial cable because of this failure to
provide adequate service.
"There needs to be a legal minimum requirement set on bandwidth, both
uplink and downlink for all ports, packets, and protocols."
The council asked me what I thought a reasonable minimum bandwidth
would be. I told them a 2mbps is more than a reasonable minimum on a
fiber optic line--but that it would have to increase over time as the
technologies improve. I also told them that it is not unreasonable to
provide, at this time, 50mbps over a fiber optic line.
I got a bit of an applause--which was quickly silenced because it was
against city-council procedures.
I would've said more about how distributed networking is the way of the
future, but each person was limited to 3 minutes.
Where do you stand on this issue?
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