said by ieolus:Who cares? My current city and future town are both part of this initiative, so I'm excited.
I followed the links and got to the affordable Nutmeg Network which the proposal says is available. Eventually I got to rates. Multiplying my current internet use, by the affordable state Nutmeg Network charge, I get a bit under $6 million dollars a month.
This is the affordable network Connecticut has built to help towns, cities, schools, libraries, and universities.
Can you afford a multi million dollar bill per month for affordable gigabit service? Can anyone preparing a proposal consider using the Nutmeg Network to create affordable service? The following is from the proposal
The statewide open-access Nutmeg Network, detailed below, is available at reasonable rates, and the private Internet service providers serving the RE may also make some of their network infrastructures available where spare capacity exists.
It's about $12 and change per megabyte plus $500 or so per month in fixed fees for access, local governments get half off! Now that IS affordable!
Your speed will be fast!
The Nutmeg Network connects approximately 968 Community Anchor Institutions (CAI), including approximately 510 public safety entities, 26 tower sites, 231 K-12 schools, 146 libraries, 44 Higher Education institutions and 6 Public Television stations (CPTV). The Nutmeg Networks extensive statewide and open-access fiber network provides ultra-high speed broadband Internet access of up to 1GB to sites on 10GB rings, and overall backbone capacity of10 and 20GB today, 400 GB capacity.
The proposal leaves how to wire the state up to any proposer. It points out state telephone pole, conduit and rights of way are mostly owned by private companies.
While ownership of the thousands of utility poles currently installed and maintained across the state varies, for the most part the RE do not own such structures (see attached addenda from each of the RE detailing specific assets owned). Generally, the nearly 900,000 utility poles across Connecticut are each owned by an electric and telephone company under joint ownership agreements, being namely Northeast Utilities, United Illuminating, Frontier Communications, and Verizon depending on respective service territories. Usage of these poles may thus require further negotiation with the individual utilities.
If a multi million dollar per user bill, and no way to deliver service sounds like something a company can bid on, maybe Connecticut will get high speed service. The proposal does want free service for the poor, somehow we must subsidize those without millions of spare dollars a month.
Karl, read the stuff in the proposal, this is a joke. They don't expect any bids, this is an idea hunt with nothing to offer.