"We Adhere to Net Neutrality"
Excellent words from The EPB President & CEO Harold DePriest in regards to the new EPB program Fiber to the Home. If you're not familiar with Network Neutrality, hit the link.
The EPB hosted a lunch today presenting Fiber to the Home (FTTH) to various technology types. In addition to the EPB's position on network neutrality, strict laws dividing the City of Chattanooga (which "owns" the EPB) from the EPB's customers will apply both to its traditional electricity subscribers and new residential telecom subscribers. This is good news.
Further, Mr. DePriest stated that while the EPB will be offering numerous services over the new fiber lines (such as telephone & television services) they will not throttle internet traffic based upon type. Having a 10gb connection per 2K subscribers gives you a lot of bandwidth to play with.
Finally, it's really remarkable that the upload and download bandwidth of the new fiber-optic connections will not differ from one another. This means tons of bandwidth to push videos or large media files (which we do at Coptix all the time) with no degradation of service upload or download. Right now if we upload a large file, our download speeds drop to a crawl (thanks Comcast).
So, here's to a huge leap forward for Chattanooga. I hope the City Council gives the EPB their approval soon; given St. Elmo's proximity to the downtown we should have service fairly quickly!
Chattanooga News | By Josiah Roe | 10:46 AM
Comments
Not so fast. It sounds like a fantastic idea, and technically it is. But legally... Your local baby bell is going to have a thing or two to say about this.
Municipalities grant local monopolies to telecom companies in exchange for those companies agreeing to provide service to all residences within their jurisdiction. As such, those telecoms tend to object strenuously when those same municipalities start invading on their turf by offering competing services at government subsidy prices. Other attempts at municipal broadband, either with BPL or wireless have been met with both litigation and massive lobbying on the state level. The telecoms tend to win here.
I really hope things work out for Chattanooga, as this is a completely viable and technically obvious step. But Verizon is going to be officially Not Happy, and they've sued about this before.
Posted by: ryan at September 15, 2007 11:03 PM
I think you mean "litigiously" as opposed to "legally" :)
My hope is that it's going to pass the City Council easily. Comcast has been turning the screws in on a few councilpersons, but I don't think they'll budge. Will be interesting to see if the telecoms do anything though.
Posted by: Josiah at September 16, 2007 6:18 PM
