carrier neutral

Content tagged with "carrier neutral"

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Central Ohio Community Investing in 100 Gig Fiber Network for City Connections, Economic Development

Hilliard, Ohio (pop. 36,000), is moving forward with plans to deploy a carrier neutral dark fiber network after city council approved funds for the project last month. The 25-mile fiber network will connect government buildings and businesses in the Columbus suburb and will be capable of speeds up to 100 Gigabits per second, reports Columbus Business First. Officials hope that improving Hilliard’s broadband infrastructure will help the community attract and retain businesses, encourage local economic development, and reduce municipal connectivity costs.

Deployment Details

During the first phase of the project, Hilliard will run fiber to municipal buildings and local businesses. The carrier neutral network will connect to the Metro Data Center in nearby Dublin, Ohio (home to DubLINK), giving the city government and businesses access to a wide selection of providers, who will have the ability to lease fiber from the city. In the future, the network could expand to serve other entities, such as local schools. The city does not plan to connect residents.

The total cost of the network’s initial phase is $3.17 million; to fund the fiber rollout, Hilliard City Council set aside $2.9 million in January as part of the city’s capital improvements budget. This included a $1.25 million loan from the Franklin County Infrastructure Bank, which has also invested in two similar projects, including Grove City. Hilliard Economic Development Director David Meadows said that the remainder of the funding comes from a conduit and traffic signal project that was approved in the city’s 2018 budget.

Economic Benefits for the City

Steamboat Springs Adds Backbone To Assets

Early last year, the city of Steamboat Springs in Colorado took advantage of an opportunity to expand from an earlier public infrastructure investment. A state grant has allowed them to connect five community anchor institutions for better connectivity and cost savings.

Partners In Progress

In 2016, the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) awarded the community $748,000 toward the cost of a fiber backbone across the length of the city. In order to complete funding for the $2.22 million project, the city and its other partners, the Steamboat Springs School District, Routt County, Colorado Mountain College, Yampa Valley Electric Association (YVEA), and Yampa Valley Medical District contributed matching funding.

Five community anchor institutions (CAIs) are now connected to the backbone, including the local U.S. Forest Service and Colorado Parks and Wildlife offices, the YVEA offices, and the school district building. The school district is also housing the communities publicly owned Carrier Neutral Location (CNL), which the city created in 2014.

The CNL Started It All

The CNL is a space owned by a neutral party - in this case the Steambot Springs School District city of Steamboat Springs - where broadband providers can connect to each other. Middle mile and last mile providers can connect to each other in these “meet-me rooms.” The partners in Steamboat Springs are saving because they’re paying less for bandwidth and, because the school district is hosting the meet-me room, there is no need to pay for a separate facility. In Steamboat Springs, Northwest Colorado Broadband connects with Mammoth Networks.

Community leaders hope the presence of the CNL and the fiber backbone will attract last mile providers to invest in Steamboat Springs so residents and businesses can obtain better connectivity in the future

Fibre Centre: Carrier Neutral Connectivity In New Brunswick

The Fibre Centre began linking Boston and Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, in April 2015 with dark fiber. The network neutral 25,000 square foot is a network-neutral data center and meet-me-room where physical networks can connect. The project “offers a route around the big-city carrier hotels” and its visionaries hope to reproduce it in other communities.

Hub City Updated

In 2000, a now defunct company invested $960 million to lay a giant fiber-optic cable between the Canadian Maritimes and Europe. When the company went bankrupt, Hibernia acquired the fiber, which runs under the community of Moncton. There is also a second similar cable running in the city of about 72,000 people, which put Moncton in a good location for a colocation facility. The community obtained the nickname “Hub City” back when railroads where the main form of transportation, but the nickname still applies.

The city helped establish the Fibre Centre within Moncton as a way to contribute to economic development and improve services for the city. One of the owners of the facility, Hunter Newby, has visited us for the Community Broadband Bits podcast episodes 111 and 104. Newby has been involved in other carrier neutral projects and hopes to reproduce this model in other communities.

Ryan Sorrey, Director of Information Systems for Moncton described some of the benefits to the city:

“Our partnership with the Fibre Centre has provided our organization with several advantages, including enhanced reliability, access to higher speed network(s), and opportunity for increased connectivity between municipalities for greater collaboration, and the benefit of more direct connections to major cloud providers.”

 

Economic Development

Montgomery Sees Job Gains in Alabama After Establishing Internet Exchange - Community Broadband Bits Episode 195

In a partnership with the Department of Defense, the city of Montgomery has created Alabama's first Internet Exchange. This week, project manager for Montgomery Cyber Connection, Ben Venable, joins us to discuss this project and the gains the community is already seeing from it. The effort is a true partnership between General Steven Kwast at Maxwell Air Force Base, the city and county of Montgomery, and others like Wide Open West, the nation's 9th largest cable company. WOW!'s network architect brought not only important technical knowledge, but a major ISP that recognized the benefits of local interconnection. 

We discuss how the project began, why it is important, expected (and already achieved) benefits, and how other communities might consider creating their own Internet Exchange. Additional background on the story from WSFA and GovTech

This show is 26 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed

Transcript below. 

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.

Thanks to Kathleen Martin for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Player vs. Player."

Steamboat Springs Gets a Grant for Fiber for the Future

Last we checked in with Steamboat Springs they had just finished a connectivity project. Now the community is taking another step to improve local connectivity in this northwest Colorado ski resort town.

The goal is to connect large community anchor institutions throughout town with a fiber backbone which could become the basis for a larger network. Several community anchor institutions have pooled their resources and pledged $748,000 while also securing a matching grant to install 9 miles of fiber across the small town of 12,000. Funding is in place, but the agreement between the institutions must be finalized before sending out an official request for proposals to find a company to install the fiber.

Matching Grants & Community Connectivity

The Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) intends to match the community’s contributions towards the project. DOLA will provide $748,000 in grant money for the fiber backbone. According to Routt County Manager Tom Sullivan in Steamboat Today, the fiber design will have splice points to allow private providers to provide last-mile connectivity to residents’ homes and businesses from the fiber backbone.

So far, the large institutions pitching in for the 9 miles of fiber are: Routt County’s public safety complex, Yampa Valley Electric Association, the city of Steamboat Springs Mountain Fire Station, Yampa Valley Medical Center, Colorado Mountain College, and the Steamboat Springs School District. Several of these institutions had previously collaborated with the Northwest Colorado Broadband group and the Steamboat Springs Chamber Resort Association on the community's first connectivity project.

The Carrier Neutral Location

Carrier Neutral Facilities Creates Big Savings in Steamboat Springs

On July 6th and 7th, much of Steamboat Springs, Colorado, lost phone and Internet when a fiber line was cut, creating a public safety hazard. In order to aviod future massive outages and improve connectivity, Steamboat Springs has decided to develop a Carrier Neutral Location or CNL, much like a similar initiative in nearby Cortez.

In July a CenturyLink fiber optic line was accidentally cut by construction crews, disrupting the 911 emergency system for about 3 hours. No calls were missed, but it is a terrifying reminder of how small towns are dependent on incumbent providers like CenturyLink for basic services.

The community, located in the northwest corner of the state and home to about 12,000 people, is known as a popular ski destination in the winter months. Locations like Steamboat Springs have a natural beauty in the rugged terrain, but incumbent providers tend to see a poor return-on-investment rather than beauty.

The July incident was not the first. In October 2011, an 8-hour outage caused a potential $1 million loss to the economy. If the outage had taken place during peak tourist season, the estimated cost would have been $1 million per hour. In order to ensure their public safety and ability to attract economic development, leaders in Steamboat Springs have decided to end the possibility of massive outage caused by a single cut by investing in a place where multiple carriers can connect.

A CNL is a space owned and maintained by a neutral party where broadband providers can connect to each other to provide redundancy. Sometimes referred to as "meet-me rooms," CNLs are especially useful for middle- and last-mile providers to connect. The facility drives down the cost of bandwidth for community anchor institutions and service providers because they do not require a separate facility for connections and fees are typically reasonable. The CNL in Steamboat Springs went online on June 1st, 2014.

Modest Investment Yields Results in Steamboat Springs - Community Broadband Bits Episode 163

When Steamboat Springs resolved to improve Internet access for key community anchor institutions and businesses, they decided to make an economical investment in a carrier neutral facility to allow multiple ISPs to invest and compete with each other. In episode 163 of the Community Broadband Bits Podcast, Tim Miles explains what that means and how they did it. Tim is the Technology Director at Steamboat Springs and South Routt School Districts in Colorado. 

He tells us about the poor connectivity the community had from CenturyLink and how they opened a bottleneck to encourage more investment. In part because of how Colorado limits local authority to build networks, they formed the Northwest Colorado Broadband Cooperative with the local Chamber of Commerce. They are already seeing benefits in the form of lower prices for anchor institutions and reduced outages - Tim describes just how painful those outages had been when there was no local Internet choice. 

This show is 20 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.

Transcript below.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.

Thanks to bkfm-b-side for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Raise Your Hands."

DubLINK Network Supports Economic Development, Health Care, and Supercomputing

Award-winning supercomputing apps, medical research, economic development, and quantum computing advances. What do they all have in common? They all depend on the DubLINK network running underneath Dublin, Ohio, a suburb on the Northwest edge of Columbus. The city of 43,000 people has 125 miles of fiber optics in the ground, both within its own boundaries and in the form of fiber purchased by the city within metro and regional networks. 

DubLINK began in 1999 as a public private partnership with the Fishel company to build an institutional network. In the wake of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, Dublin worried that a recent massive investment of $70 million in streetscaping would be undone as competing providers dug up newly paved streets to install fiber optics. To avoid this, the City signed a franchise agreement with Fishel to install a multi-conduit system, with the city receiving some conduit for its own use.  

Using 1.25” conduits installed in the city’s existing sewer system, the network runs for 25 miles underneath Dublin’s business district and connects six city buildings, who use their own lit fiber for data and voice services, eliminating expense leased line fees. This has allowed the city to save approximately $400,000 per year for the last 12 years in connectivity and information technology expenses.

In 2004, Dublin spent $3.5 million to purchase 96 strands running 100 additional miles through Columbus FiberNet, bringing the total length of the DubLink network to its current 125 miles. FiberNet is a duct system that runs throughout a significant portion of central Ohio, including Columbus and its surrounding suburbs.

Rockport Builds Maine’s First Municipal Network

Rockport, a coastal town of just 3,300, became a statewide leader last month by launching Maine’s first municipal broadband network. Offering symmetrical gigabit speeds to businesses and residents, Rockport’s network is a carrier-neutral dark fiber system, with local private provider GWI offering retail services. 

The reach of the network is limited, as it consists of only 1.2 miles of fiber. While only about 70 homes and businesses currently have the option to purchase a connection, GWI offers symmetrical gigabit per second internet access for just $69 per month and the city has left the option open to expand the network in the future.

As noted in a Bloomberg View article on the network, it massively outpaces the only broadband competitor in Rockport, Time Warner Cable. Time Warner also offers a $70 service package, but its download speeds are 20 times slower and its upload speeds 200 times slower.  

The network was the product of a partnership between the town board, GWI, the University of Maine system, and Maine Media Workshops + College. Maine Media is a nonprofit college with 1,500 students learning photography, videography, and other digital media skills, and has a large economic footprint in such a small town.

Students’ coursework requires the storing and sharing of massive files, something that was previously difficult or impossible to accomplish given limited network capacity. Town officials are hoping that the new network will not only allow students to learn more easily, but enable them and others to establish small businesses in town.    

U.S. Senator Angus King, a vocal champion of broadband access, was among the officials on hand last week for the official unveiling ceremony. Speaking to the need for greater internet access, Senator King stated:

“In my opinion it’s exactly like water, it’s exactly like electricity, it is a public utility that is necessary in order for our economy and our country to flourish…We want to work where we live, rather than live where we work."

Muni Fiber as Real Estate - Community Broadband Bits Episode 111

Hunter Newby is back for his second appearance on Community Broadband Bits to discuss his thoughts on carrier neutral approaches to spur our economy with more investment in better networks. We just talked with Hunter in episode 104 on carrier neutral approaches to middle mile networks. 

Now we discuss these types of approaches within communities - how to spur more competition without the owner of the infrastructure actually offering services directly. This has been a challenge historically, but we continue to see signs that this approach can be viable in the future. Hunter Newby is the CEO and founder of Allied Fiber

This show is 20 minutes long and can be played on this page or via Apple Podcasts or the tool of your choice using this feed.

Transcript below.

We want your feedback and suggestions for the show-please e-mail us or leave a comment below.

Listen to other episodes here or view all episodes in our index. See other podcasts from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance here.

Thanks to Waylon Thornton for the music, licensed using Creative Commons. The song is "Bronco Romp."