JFDI rural FTTH connects its first users.

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Read more! Some things just make you cheer!

As some of you may know, I went out to the USA in January 2010 to meet projects who were doing FTTH in innovative ways, as well as in rural areas. I was privileged and honoured to be invited by Geoff Daily and Tim Nulty to the community FTTH event in Salt Lake City, hosted by Todd Marriott of Utopia, and to meet many of the people who have helped me fight for rural FTTH. Some of those people changed my life, becoming true friends in the process.

This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com




I discovered you could buy multi-city flights which worked out far cheaper than direct flights, and was lucky enough to visit the Deep South, as well as the frozen north. That decision may be key to other choices which are now open to rural communities in the UK - more on that another time.

Actually, it was far warmer in Utah, Chicago and Denver than the UK at that point! Minus 17 when I left Cumbria. Snow and ice at Heathrow meant the first flight was cancelled with only hours to go and I had to purchase American Airline flights as British Airways did the British thing and ran scared of the snow. It was hovering around zero in the north of America! Warm and toasty ;)

Tim Nulty and I had exchanged many, many emails by this point and I couldn't wait to meet him. His project with ECFiber had become a goal: not just to visit, but to emulate. And Utopia has been on my 'must visit' list since it launched. Todd was a simply incredible host, even if he was convinced he would never get me out of that broadband bus!

The emails recently, after a lengthy 2 years where I have learnt far more about American politics, funding, municipal bonds and much more than I ever expected to, are the icing on the cake. They JFDI!! Well done ECfiber.

ECFiber Goes Live!

SOUTH ROYALTON – Having completed its beta testing, and with the Phase I project nearly complete, ECFiber began connecting its first customers today. Eight customers have been beta-testing the system for the past two weeks, getting sustained 5Mbps symmetrical service.

The Barnard General Store, one of the beta sites, has been offering the experience to customers via WI-FI, and has been finding folks on their doorstep at all hours, trying out the system.

“It’s been amazing,” says Kim Furlong, one of the store’s proprietors. “Because so much more of what we do is online, it is truly a joy to reap the reward of high-speed internet. Dial-up, and even satellite, is such a time-robber. Fiber is very different – you can be more efficient, and that is exciting. At the same time, I have some trepidation. People are going to relocate here more permanently because of what is available, and that is probably going to change the fabric of the community.”

According to Project Coordinator Leslie Nulty, 15 new accounts were opened within the first 24 hours after the doorstep delivery of information packets. Barnard Academy, another beta site, is also very excited about the service. They are planning an open house and community celebration of ECFiber’s arrival in mid-October.

Barnard was chosen for the Phase I project because of its proximity to the central office and its large number of unserved users. Pre-registrations topped 90% before the project started. Phase II, to build out the rest of the town of Barnard, is in the planning stages, with an informational meeting set for Thursday night at 7PM at the Barnard Town Hall.

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ECFiber is a group of 23 towns working to build a community-owned, subscriber-funded Fiber-to-the-Home network to provide phone, television, and ultra-high-speed internet services to 100% of the homes and businesses in the member towns.

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The problems faced by the project have been strikingly similar to UK project problems. Promises of the Subsidy (BDUK etc in the UK) funding led many to believe in pots of gold at the end of rainbows. Far too many think that established telcos will provide, even when faced with overwhelming evidence that such has not been the case in the last decade (read: 50+ years in America and Britain where the original telecom networks were often initiated, just as other utilities such as electricity and water, by the communities themselves).

Untold hours of passionate volunteers' lives have been wasted with the promise of public funding, just as they are now in the UK. Until finally, one day, you wake up and say: Let's JFDI! (That was one of the best emails I have had from Tim and Leslie!)

But ECFiber didn't go for an interim FiWi solution. We did talk about this at length in 2009/2010, but the figures simply do not stack up. This determination from the word go to deliver FTTH is more than just laudable - it is sustainable too. Especially for those communities that ECFiber connects. There is no need now to find yet more funding, somewhere down the road, to build a FTTH network to remote and far flung properties.

Watch this space for more news of US-UK collaboration and a colloquium in mid-September that you simply cannot afford to miss........
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Why we must settle for nothing less than FTTH....

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Read more! I am struggling a tad with a story yesterday that implies that "superfast broadband" is 'up to 6Mbps' from now on. Have we lost it??? Other countries are doing 1000Mbps (yes, count the zeros) and we think 6Mbps will make us a leading broadband nation?
This blog post can be read at 5tth.blogspot.com



Meanwhile, thanks to Twitter, I finally have permission to reproduce a quite extraordinary post from across the Atlantic (I presume) from @lamapper on the Broadband Cumbria site

If you are not following Barry Forde (my first ever keynote speaker, in Leyburn, possibly before many people here had even heard the term "broadband" and long before I knew many of those who are now broadband centre stage!), then do so. Now!

Do not support a BT Infinity campaign or let your County Council spend your/our money until you know the options. Barry is outlining the choices and the world is responding..........

@lamapper says:
Great article, with great explanation that . . .

“they (BT)refuse to supply dark fibre to third parties”

. . . that is the problem in a nut shell in every country in the world today.

Japan solved this by deregulating NTT, thus in 2000 Japanese consumers received 100Mb/100Mb for $55 per month…Thanks to the de-regulated Fiber by 2006, they could swap out their Fiber Modems and could get 1 Gbps/1Gbps for $52 per month. The price going down as more and more subscribers come on board in spite of the exponential increase in a customer’s bandwidth is a very STRONG indication that the Japanese economic market for Internet access is working.

Many of us understand that you can multiplex a single fiber cable and increase the bandwidth from 1X to 1024X, this has been true since the early 2000s. And when a company runs Fiber, they do not just run a single strand…that would be a waste of time and money…they just leave the extra Fibre dark.

Here in the USA, the current non Fiber providers – read Cable, DSL, Telco… (and the non synchronous Fiber providers like Verizon who only offers 50Mb/5Mb) are quick to deny the reality that consumers need high levels of bandwidth and that ONLY Fiber To The Home (FTTH) will do the job over the long haul.

Any solution that does not put Fiber in the home of the consumer is at best a waste of time and money, and at worst a Ponzi scheme perpetuating the bandwidth scarcity myth that most providers rely on for their failed tiered pricing plans.

Consumers in the USA are no longer waiting for the telco – cable – wireline – wireless provider oligopoly to provide Fiber any longer. Consumers are beginning to wake up and have noted that their (providers) actions since 1990 have shown their true colors. That they have no intention of providing Fiber To The Home unless forced to do so. This is in spite of receiving in excess of $900 Billion SPECIFICALLY for Fiber from American Tax payers (money + taxes + fees) since the 1990s. They have had three decades, over 30 years to provide Americans with Fiber. They have failed. In fact it is reported they spend in excess of $1.5 Million per WEEK lobbing elected politicians to avoid fulfilling their 1990 era promise of Fiber…for which they were amply paid I might add.

Heck Chattanooga finished their FTTH build-(approx 2,500 businesses and over 20,000 residences) out 7 years ahead of schedule with an infusion of cash of barely over $100,000. EPB finished in 3 years instead of the planned 10 years. As of December 2010 they are finished with the initial Fiber build out and are already looking at expanding their offering thanks to the huge demand for the service by their citizens. It should be noticed that the incumbent provider had been fighting against EPB and Chattanooga since the 1990s to prevent this reality. Thankfully they failed.

In spite of these un American and anti-competitive providers a few American communities have provided FTTH to their citizens. In every case they have been fought tooth and nail by the incumbent provider whether telco or cable. In spite of the up hill battle, almost 30 communities have SYNCHRONOUS FTTH Internet in the USA. When Google announces their 5 Go Big With a Gig communities there will barely be over 30 communities in the USA that are providing true and honest Internet service to consumers, citizens and residents.

This map shows the locations of SYNCHRONOUS FTTH US communities/cities: http://sn.im/1axal4

It is interesting to note that Utopia in Utah provides FTTH via User Owned Fiber. Home owners pay $1,500.00 and their community provides another $1,500.00 via bonds for this purpose. The home-owner’s real estate increases in value thanks to this User Owned Fiber.

Most of my friends are planning to move to one of the 30 or so communities on the map in order to secure FTTH Internet for themselves and their posterity. We have waited 30 years, we will NOT wait another 5 years. Thankfully we do not have too.

Over time as more and more home buyers insist on FTTH as their number 1 consideration when purchasing a new/used home, communities will have no choice but to either force their providers to provide Fiber or kick them out of their communities. Those communities with FTTH offerings are recovering faster economically than others as businesses too are relocating bringing jobs with them. Makes these communities a better long term investment in all areas, especially Real Estate.

What BT and their ilk should worry about more is the loss of TRUST that their inaction, bad business practices and customer no service methods have caused among their consumer base. After multiple decades of abusing their customers TRUST, why would you even want to do business with them, ever. My friends and I do NOT and we are instilling this legacy in our children as well. The great things about our kids, they are more Internet savvy than many of their parents, they get it.

Let em choke on their non FTTH, non synchronous, non net neutral inferior Internet offerings.

A couple of the FTTH communities thanks to synchronous bandwidth are allowing their customers to run their own personal cloud, file and email servers from their homes….long overdue and about time!

Even 10Mb/10Mb at between $25 to $50 per month is much, much better than a promise of “up to” anything, throttled back to less than 100Kbps/30Kbps, the Cable provider reality in the USA today.

In Japan, NTT, thanks to owning the Fiber once again found themselves in the dominant position in spite of De-regulation, I suppose consumers in both England and the USA are going to have to get a little bit more upset at the incumbent provider’s customer-no-service and insist on FTTH or they will never get it! Our combined telco/cable Internet history shows this truth to be self evident.

Here in America, we are relocating and moving for FTTH, problem solved.

Funny how synchronous Fibre bandwidth solves the net neutrality issues as well, once the bandwidth scarcity myth is put to death, there is no longer as large an incentive to censor, restrict and limit, why waste time and money on software and/or hardware if its simply not needed?

The Future can be BRIGHT, but only with FTTH, nothing less!
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#fibrefriday

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(Image copyright Lindsey Annison)
To try and bring together all those in the fibre sphere globally, today we started #fibrefriday on Twitter.

So, if you are involved in FTTH, anywhere in the world, add yourself to the list on Twitter by adding #fibrefriday to your Tweet. Then we can all share experiences, news, solve problems, and those of you with FTTH can brag about what you can do now that the rest of us haven't even heard of yet!

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Marketing FTTH to the end user - that's you!

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Read more! Recently, I received a personal response from Vivien Reding to my letter about the need to market FTTH honestly and accurately in the coming months and years. It seems that there will now be a working group set up to discuss precisely this issue in Brussels because we are already seeing misleading of the public, MPs, media etc by the telcos/ISPs. This is creating confusion amongst not just consumers, before the UK and others in the EU have even got going with next generation broadband. It needs to be stopped.

And before you switch off and think this does not apply to you, remember one thing: we are ALL consumers. Whatever your day job, hobby, involvement in FTTH or NGA, you too are an end user.

Before and during my trip to the US, we discussed the need for shared resources about marketing fibre (amongst many other aspects of FTTH!). This is now an ongoing project, which I hope that many will get involved in. Selling FTTH and true broadband connectivity is a universal issue with solutions which may only require small tweaks to meet market conditions and consumer needs in different countries.

However, working out how to best apply best practice and lessons learnt to your network, community, region or country can be difficult if you can't discover what others have found out. And found out the hard way, judging by some of the tales I have heard over the past few months!

Travelling around the world and visiting all the networks to discover first hand is of course bordering on impossible (though I am very tempted, and willing to try if anyone wishes to sponsor me!). This is, of course, where the internet comes in, putting us all in touch with other like-minded souls in the first instance. However, I have to say that meeting people in the flesh, so to speak, is unbeatable and once again want to thank everyone across the States who showed me such unbelievable hospitality.

I digress...Interestingly, many of the talks in the US revolved around the lessons learnt by pioneers and how to share this knowledge. Not just in and from the US but across the planet. And the importance of co-operation by all to work in a sustainable, non-profit fashion for the best interests of the consumer and community rather than for shareholders.

Obviously, this means that any such 'helpful' groups need to be non-profit with a clear eye on paying those engaged in doing, rather than relying on the delaying of volunteer fatigue but we are all quite clear that this is a "best network of people", not some new quangos or businesses set up to meet private aspirations. The clear indications are that the will is there to deliver all of this for the communities who are involved in setting up their projects now. Wherever you may find yourself in the world.

The plan is to set up a fiber/fibre marketing social networking group to share best practice, lessons learnt and collateral which community networks can use to best effect, without having to re-invent the wheel and to make the most of what undoubtedly are always going to be tight budgets.

This is now an ongoing project which should be launched shortly.

Anyone who has any info/time/resources/etc they would like to contribute to the project, please contact me on ldotannisonatgmaildotcom and I will forward it to the others involved in setting up this social network which will, I have no doubt, bring together and help out many community and grassroots projects over the coming months.



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