Archive for February, 2010

Recent Press

Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010

While some people have been working on the Google Fiber Proposal for the city of Ann Arbor, my research was cited locally at the annarbor.com site.

I’m hoping that something good comes of this, and not just for the areas that are served by ATT and Comcast, but the outlying parts of the county as well.

Google, A2Newtech, House of Reps and VC-types?

Monday, February 15th, 2010

While I did expect some feedback as a result of my post regarding wiring Washtenaw County with fiber, I did not quite expect such a broad set of people to be reading the text.

Google announced they want to do a pilot-project whereby they run fiber-to-the-home of up to ~500k people. This similarly aligns with my desire to connect the local community with a carrier-neutral FTTH deployment. I’ve submitted some basic data to the Google RFI, and hope that a more formal proposal comes together for the area.

Tomorrow Night (16 Feb 2010) there is the A2Geeks Meetup. I hope that there will be some interesting discussion there regarding the Google proposal, and how we as a community can leverage this to demonstrate what can be done.

The readers of my post about wiring the county included people at the US House of Reps and some people looking at funding FTTH deployments. This does make for some interesting possibilities. If you’re at either of these two and want to discuss the data and model that I put together, don’t hesitate to contact me via E-Mail or Phone (google will reveal good contact info).

Looking forward to seeing some people in the local tech community tomorrow.

Building municipial fiber

Saturday, February 6th, 2010

There are a number of different ways one can pay for building the infrastructure that we care about. The most well known model is the Municipal one. Here you have your water and sewer delivered to you at some point (usually when your home is built) and you pay utilization fees for access.

I’ve started to look at applying the same model to building fiber to every home in Washtenaw County. Let me start with my basic premises, so you have a reference of how I’m thinking before I am destroyed in any comments.
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