Tag: "axcess ontario"

Last-Mile FTTH Via Nonprofit Networks in New York State

Posted July 2, 2015 by Lisa Gonzalez

Western New York residents are welcoming the presence of a new Internet service provider, Empire Access, competing directly with Time Warner Cable and Verizon. Besides satisfied customers, no data caps, and no usage-based billing, Empire is different from the incumbents in another way - it uses nonprofit network infrastructure to deliver services.

StopTheCap writes that Empire Access utilizes the Southern Tier Network (STN) to connect to communities in Steuben, Chemung, and Schuyler Counties in its southern service area. STN's 235-mile backbone was deployed when fiber-optic manufacturer Corning contributed $10 million to build the network and the three counties contributed the remaining $2.2 million. Construction on the open access network was finished in the spring of 2014.

Axcess Ontario provides the fiber route in the northern region of the Empire Access service area. The network is also a non-profit model and similarly developed to serve business, community anchor institutions, and ISPs. The organization began 10 years ago with the establishment of the nonprofit. The Ontario County Office of Economic Development /Industrial Development Agency provided startup costs to deploy the $7.5 million middle-mile open access dark fiber network. Axcess Ontario is also over 200 miles long.

For now, the locally-owned company that began in 1896 with one telephone and grew from there, is taking a different approach then its much larger competitors. From StopTheCap:

Empire targets compact villages with a relatively affluent populations where no other fiber overbuilder is providing service. It doesn’t follow Google’s “fiberhood” approach where neighborhoods compete to be wired. Instead, it provides service across an entire village and then gradually expands to nearby towns from there.

In some towns, where Empire has a franchise agreement, it offers cable TV in addition to Internet access. Empire customers have access to gigabit FTTH service as...

Axcess Ontario Middle Mile Network Wins Award

Posted June 12, 2011 by Christopher Mitchell

CIO Magazine is the third organization in less than a year to recognize the importance of Ontario County's broadband investment in itself. CIO received a "CIO 100" award to go with recognition from Computerworld and the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Axcess Ontario is an open access middle mile network built without any federal loans or grants. They wanted to invest in themselves and have succeeded. The network serves multiple private sector telecom firms, including Verizon Wireless - a fact that should be recognized in an age when some would have us believe the public sector should never be involved in this essential infrastructure.

Axcess Ontario Officially Complete

Posted January 3, 2011 by Christopher Mitchell

Ontario County was working on a publicly owned solution to Middle Mile long before the broadband stimulus approach made it popular. And now, before most of the stimulus money has been disbursed, they have completed an expanded version of their initial plan.

To date, Axcess Ontario has signed master agreements with eight telecom and broadband companies, including Verizon Wireless and national broadband provider tw telecom. Axcess Ontario is in continual discussions with other service providers, and is working aggressively on its next goal of luring a fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) service provider to Ontario County. With the fiber ring complete, businesses and municipalities now have access to faster and less expensive broadband, as well as bandwidth equal to global broadband leaders. Businesses can gain access to the ring simply by contacting any of the eight service providers that work with Axcess Ontario. Residents do not yet have access to faster and less expensive broadband, but they will once a FTTH service provider is secured. Axcess Ontario has been working to lure a FTTH provider for more than a year, including submitting an application on behalf of Ontario County, NY, to Google's "Fiber for Communities" ultrafast broadband project earlier this year. More than 1,100 communities nationwide responded to that project, and Google just announced last week that it was postponing its selection of winning communities to early 2011.

We will be interested to see if they can lure a FTTH provider -- though middle mile can lower the operating costs of providing such a service, the capital costs are not significantly changed. And with the robust middle mile already connecting community anchor institutions, a new FTTH provider cannot count on those high-revenue customers. We have seen this previously in Alberta, Canada. Axcess Ontario is an example of a good public-private partnership - as noted in Telecompetitor:

Axcess Ontario credits much of its $2 million cost savings to a lease agreement with Ontario Telephone Co., an incumbent local carrier.
...

Nonprofit Fiber Helps Businesses in New York's Finger Lakes Region

Posted November 13, 2010 by Christopher Mitchell

A non-profit brainchild of the Ontario County local government in New York, Axcess Ontario, has built a fiber-optic ring in what used to be a broadband desert. A local business recently wrote about their experience with the network:

We recently determined that our bandwidth was insufficient due to our growth and we went about the process of bringing in additional bandwidth. We contacted a local company, Finger Lakes Technologies Group and were pleasantly surprised to discover that the ring was now totally accessible to our location and after a few simple conversations, we committed to the installation of a local link to the new fiber optic network that was now approaching maturity.

In short, this is yet another non-profit putting community needs first and building the infrastructure we need.

Ontario County Open Access Middle Mile Network In the News

Posted June 14, 2010 by Christopher Mitchell

Stop the Cap! has the authored the most recent of several articles examining a unique middle mile broadband approach in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Their title summarizes the motivation: Ontario County, NY: We Need Fiber So Badly, We Just Did It Ourselves. That story includes a video clip of a recent CNBC Power Lunch 2 minute piece about the Axcess Ontario initiative (complete with the factual error that "no provider offers 100Mbps;" in fact, several community broadband networks offer 100Mbps and Chattanooga has moved beyond with a 150Mbps offering).

Ontario County has a population of some 100,000. To stay relevant in the modern era, they determined the County had to do something to improve broadband availability, so they created a nonprofit called Axcess Ontario, an initiative sufficiently impressive for the County's CIO to receive an award - State Public Sector CIO of the Year.

In creating Axcess Ontario (originally named Finger Lakes Regional Telecommunications Development Corp), the County wanted to be locally self-reliant and did not seek funding from the federal government:

Unlike numerous similar attempts in other parts of the country, Ontario County funded its network without dollars from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Those who created Axcess Ontario were insistent the project shouldn't rely on the availability of outside funding, according to Edward Hemminger, CIO of Ontario County.

The network's startup costs were $7.5 million, which the municipality generated through the Ontario County Office of Economic Development/Industrial Development Agency. The organization is a quasi-government agency created by the state to generate economic activity. Businesses pay the agency for various services, the revenue from which pays for initiatives like Axcess Ontario.

In order to mollify the private sector, the county...