A meeting of the Internet Society of New York (ISOC-NY), Building Tomorrrow’s Broadband, three speakers presented alternative methods for building the broadband that America needs.
Allied Fiber
Hunter Newby, CEO of Allied Fiber, was invited back to ISOC (he presented an introduction to Allied Fiber to ISOC in August). I heard Newby present Allied Fiber at The Broadband Expo in Dallas, which I covered for WISPA.
“We’re a landlord, not a carrier,” Newby said. Allied fiber is not a CLEC. It’s not even a C-Corp. It’s an LLC. The company has an agreement to utilize the rights of way of several railroads, along which it will run fiber. There will be a drop off point every 60 miles along the route. The first build will be a triangle connecting Ashburn, Va., New York, and Chicago. Within New Jersey, the fiber will run by some areas that are very popular for financial industry data centers.
“Server-based environments with high end applications that are very latency sensitive require dark fiber,” Newby said.
The eventual goal is to connect the places in the USA where fiber arrives from overseas. “The subsea landing points hold the earth’s continents together,” Newby said.
Newby has a career background in open networks, having worked for Telx for many years, where he helped build 60 Hudson Street.
ION: The Independent Optical Network
Joe Calzone, vice president of Albany, N.Y.-based ION, a group that brings 12 rural ILECs (RLECs) together. ION won $39 million in a round one middle mile BTOP broadband stimulus grant.
The group was founded by 12 RLECs who each contributed seed capital. It is independently operated and carrier neutral. “We’re Switzerland,” Calzone said.
The network covers most of New York state and the grant will allow it to bring service to areas of the state that have a significant amount of people in them but that are considered tier 3 and tier 4 markets.
Quebec Connect
Louis Houle, general manager of Quebec Connect and also president of ISOC-Quebec, discussed the issues that groups face in building community broadband.
“We are transferring knoweldge. We teach people how to run a network, at least how to handle customer service.”
“Our network is mostly Wi-Fi, with some fiber. We provide a public service. We want the network to be open.”
He said that local governments may mistrust even nonprofits. “The mayor often does not understand the interent and is not comfortable signing an agreement when they don’t know how it works and how much it should cost.”
Given the population density of Quebec versus that of New York, Houle said that you should divide by 40 for the cost of equivalent projects. He said that Quebec Connect currently has about 5 to 10 projects underway, each costing about $25,000.
Conclusion
“We all face the same issues,” Newby said. “It’s like physics. The internet is the same wherever you go.”
Towns want broadband because it brings business.
“The same thing happened 150 years ago. 151 Front Street in Toronto is a carrier hotel now. It was also the first telegraph station in Toronto. Things are where they are now because that’s where they were then.”
“The railroad brought businesses to the train stations, and cities without train stations declined. The highway system brought businesses to the exits, and cities without highway access declines. Business goes to the ports. The internet is the central nervous system of today’s communications network.”
(For Part II of this report, see: ISOC-NY: Building Tomorrow’s Broadband, Part II: The Issues The Networks Face)
Tags: broadband
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