ISurfTooMuch
join:2007-04-23
Tuscaloosa, AL
| reply to johndoe303
Re: Congrats.
Well, it sounds like you already have the seeds of an organization. What you need to do next is expand beyond the borders of your neighborhood. Create a flier to advertise an initial meeting to discuss the issue, then hit the streets and place it on as many doorsteps as you can reach. Then see how many people show up. At the meeting, you need to have information to give to the folks there about what you want to propose, be it muni FTTH, wi-fi, whatever. Then, after you've discussed things in the open forum, tell whoever is there that you want to form an advocacy group, and anyone who is interested in taking part should stay at the meeting. Some people will certainly get up and leave at that point, but you want enough people to stay to help put together an effective organization. At that point, you can start to get yourselves organized. After that, you continue to have meetings and grow your organization until you're ready to approach your local government with a proposal.
Once you have your organization in place and working, one thing that you need to do is talk to cities that are doing this right now. Ask them about any community advocacy groups in their area and how you might reach them. Also ask the project administrators if they'd be willing to share their experiences with you. I expect many will. The goal here is to show your local government officials that this idea can work and to have solid evidence to back it up.
Finally, be prepared to look at all the uses for such a network, not just consumer uses. For example, the city could use it to create an extremely fast network for their various departments without needing to lease expensive T-1 or T-3 lines from the telco. They might also use it to cut their phone costs, since all offices could be connected via fiber, and they'd only need one group of outgoing lines for outbound calls, which would be cheaper than each department having its own outgoing lines. If you have a local college in town, then the fiber network could be tied into its campus network to offer a very fast connection, so the college could offer one or more television or radio channels to the community. This would be great for local distance ed students. You could use the network to allow people to monitor elderly family members who live alone. Get creative and think about all the things such a network can do besides offering cable TV, Internet, and phone service.
Good luck! |
