Seattle Announces Gigabit Internet Service

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Seattle is joining the gigabit internet service club. Damn, I'm jealous, we need some of that super fast internet action where the rest of us live.

Mayor Mike McGinn announced that the City of Seattle has reached an agreement with broadband developer Gigabit Squared to develop and operate an ultra high-speed fiber-to-the-home/fiber-to-the-business broadband network. The plan will begin with a demonstration fiber project in twelve Seattle neighborhoods and includes wireless methods to deploy services more quickly to other areas in the city.
 
SO CLOSE! Just a few more miles and they'll be at my house. I hope this is a success so I can get this soon.
 
cool! just graduated from UW 2 years ago and moved to HI where internet is painfully slow (damn whales keep eating our tubes or something) but i'm still very excited for this! seattle is a great place to start because the university and seattle are both fairly small, high-density areas with a big focus on technology. if they can get this in, then i bet valve, microsoft, and other tech companies on the east side will pitch in to subsidize getting fiber across lake washington, and maybe boeing will help spread it north, etc. could be the start of a pretty big future for fiber in the seattle area. :)
 
Almost a reason to live in Seattle.

You'll regret it. The cost of living is stupid high.

And yeah...I wish they'd bring it a little further outside the Seattle metro area...meh @ it being so close, but still so far.
 
I'd settle for around 10Mb if it were reliable. I'm stuck with Comcast or Century Link.
 
You'll regret it. The cost of living is stupid high.

And yeah...I wish they'd bring it a little further outside the Seattle metro area...meh @ it being so close, but still so far.

I live in Vancouver BC. Seattle is cheaper.
 
One of the companies is rolling out in San Francisco too, however they're moving very slow so that they don't over extend their finances, the problem is the cost of rolling it out basically depends upon how many houses you pass not how many houses you actually hook up, so if you hook up 20 houses on a block or 2 houses a majority of the cost is the same for those two (minus modem costs of course).
 
Gawd damnit we need this shit in the D.C. area!!!!! Someone get on dat shiznit!
 
I live in the Capitol Hill area of Seattle, and this is freaking amazing. And actually Seattle isn't that expensive for a major metropolitan area. Have lived in Manhattan and Boston, it's much easier to find decent and affordable places in Seattle.
 
Here in Tacoma we have "click network" when the municipal power company built out their smart meter fiber they put a thousand times more fiber than they needed under the streets. They provide bandwidth to 3 different retailers who compete to be my ISP. It is 75 Ohm to the house, but the DSLAM is right on my block. Works pretty damn well.
 
cool! just graduated from UW 2 years ago and moved to HI where internet is painfully slow (damn whales keep eating our tubes or something) but i'm still very excited for this! seattle is a great place to start because the university and seattle are both fairly small, high-density areas with a big focus on technology. if they can get this in, then i bet valve, microsoft, and other tech companies on the east side will pitch in to subsidize getting fiber across lake washington, and maybe boeing will help spread it north, etc. could be the start of a pretty big future for fiber in the seattle area. :)

Fiber on the other side of the lake? You mean like the fios that's been in Redmond and Kirkland fir years?

Do people forget that fios tried to expand in the area particularly in Seattle but couldn't go anywhere due to Comcast having contracts with the city where they wanted to put fiber a few years ago?
 
Fiber on the other side of the lake? You mean like the fios that's been in Redmond and Kirkland fir years?

Do people forget that fios tried to expand in the area particularly in Seattle but couldn't go anywhere due to Comcast having contracts with the city where they wanted to put fiber a few years ago?

nope, just didnt know. i lived in the u-district and only made it over that way a couple times a year. how much longer are these contracts good for? i actually really liked my business class comcast service i got for my house with 8 roommates, but more choices are always a good thing.
 
Seattle...cheaper? Yuck, why is Vancouver so costly?

YPJKx.gif
 
I live in Vancouver BC. Seattle is cheaper.

'tis true. Vancouver is really expensive. I can deal with Seattle-Eastside prices, but it's by no means cheap. Vancouver would probably have me working 2 jobs.
 
Seattle...cheaper? Yuck, why is Vancouver so costly?

Desirable place. Supply and demand. And what another poster alluded to, foreign money buying houses and jacking the prices up. Add in fuel costs ($5US/gal is our norm) and theres the costs.
 
Its time that this nation stops subsidizing those that spend their time pocketing our tax money and providing the least amount of information infrastructure possible while instituting controls to discourage our usage of the increasingly expensive service for which we're double-dipped.

Along with a lot of other public works projects, it would be an excellent stimulus to the economy to to create a REAL "information superhighway" by rolling out fiber-to-the-perimeter nationwide (as well as nationalizing control of mobile/wireless hardware, but that's another discussion), as a public utility, owned by We The People. Instead of flushing our money down the toilet to Verizon, ATT and Comcast in all manners of subsidies, exclusivity agreements, and allowing them to retain exclusive control of the lines in the ground/on the pole (to expand only to where they feel is really profitable), lets do something beneficial.

The rollout alone would be a huge public works project and stimulate the economy that way, but it would also reinvigorate our economy in many ways in the long term. ISPs could spring up anywhere someone wanted to lease access to the public hardware to do so; no more "Sorry, Verizon owns the fiber, Comcast owns the cable. Unless we wanted to run our own, there would be no way we could provide the speeds you want, lack of caps, and privacy policies that make sense" The cost of data transmission intensive projects would bottom out, meaning that the entire nation could potentially be Bay Area or Seattle "tech zones". With much of the nation having gigabit/sec service, the amount of media applications now viable would explode.

Depending on the minutia of implementation, this step in Seattle looks like it could be a step in the right direction. We have an economy badly in need of stimulus and opportunities like this are the perfect way to do so while benefiting the public good, rather than enriching a few corrupt entities at the cost of everyone else. Lets roll out public-owned fiber nationwide!
 
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