On 7/14/2013 3:37 PM, Warren Bailey wrote:
I would imagine this cheap rural fiber showed up after the RUS stimulus? A former employer (GCI, in Anchorage Alaska) received quite a bit of money in the form of a grant/loan for a rural fiber network (I think they may have received the largest of all grants). Would be interesting to know how much of this was as a result of dot gov funding.
It's decidedly not yet "rural" but starting to expand beyond simple urban. It is our Electric provider utility, and much of the build out was tied to "Smart Grid" power meter integration. I'm not familiar with the politics, but there were some battles over funding and justification. They are competing with (at least) Comcast/XFinity, AT&T/Uverse, and Charter in the local market. Their initial buildout pre-dated "stimulus funding". We were involved in an earlier effort for "Metro Ethernet" but that didn't work out so well. The more recent GPON is the ongoing success story. Jeff