As the talk of municipal broadband grows louder in Seattle, city leaders are gathering to learn more about what deploying at a fiber network may entail. On May 13th, the Seattle Energy Committee and leaders from citizen group Upgrade Seattle met to discuss the needs, challenges, and possibilities. Chris joined them via Skype to provide general information and answer questions. He was in Atlanta at the time of the meeting. Video of the entire meeting is now available via the Seattle Channel and embedded below.
King5 also covered the meeting (video below).
“We’re starting from a different place in terms of the infrastructure,” said Karen Toering with Upgrade Seattle. “The city already has in place hundreds of miles of dark fiber that we’re not even using right now that were already laid in the years previous to now.”
Upgrade Seattle sees that dark fiber as the key to competition which will lead to better consumer prices and service from private providers.
Businesses are also interested in reliability, argues Upgrade Seattle. Devin Glaser told the committee:
“It’s important to have double redundancies – to have two wires connecting everything – so one accidental cut doesn’t take out the entire grid,” Glaser said. “So anything we have at the city level would value our productivity rather than their profits.”
You can watch the discussion below. The conversation on a municipal fiber network lasts about about an hour. Chris begins his presentation around 11:00 into the video. As a warning, there is a significant amount of profane language at the beginning of the video from one of the public commentors.
This article is apart of MuniNetworks. The original piece can be found here
